Since January, the Trump administration has issued multiple attacks on the ESA, charging that tough regulations impede development and stand in the way of “energy domination.” Executive orders issued this year tell federal agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that could speed approvals of fossil fuel projects, effectively sidelining the environmental reviews.

Burgum and other conservatives argue that the law is broken, with strict rules that do little to facilitate recovery. But scientists and legal experts say the ESA’s central problem isn’t regulations. Rather, it’s chronic underfunding and, on occasion, political fickleness.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

Even as critics decried ESA failures, experts emphasized that the law has staved off mass extinctions. Since 1973, 26 species on the list have gone extinct under federal management. By comparison, at least 47 others are estimated to have vanished while still awaiting a listing.

“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” Wilcove said. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”

Arguably, the ESA’s biggest success story is the bald eagle. Widespread use of the pesticide DDT and development-driven habitat loss had, by the 1960s, left only a few hundred pairs of nesting eagles in the lower 48 states. Numbers started to climb after DDT was banned and the species received ESA protections in 1978. In 2007, the bird was delisted, with the Fish and Wildlife Service reporting that close to 10,000 pairs were thriving across the U.S.

Species such as the American alligator and the Steller sea lion also have made impressive comebacks.

The ESA’s protections cover both public and private land, a fact that has long fueled conflict. More than two-thirds of listed species depend on private lands for survival, and roughly 10 percent exist only on private property.

“If you have an endangered species on your property, your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have found these rules create “perverse incentives.” One investigation into the red-cockaded woodpecker, for instance, found that timber was actually harvested early in stands where the bird lived—likely to prevent habitat restrictions from federal authorities.

To remedy this, Congress has tried introducing incentives such as tax breaks, conservation easements that compensate landowners for protecting habitats, and more. Such programs have waned in recent years, conservationists warn.

The Endangered Species Act once had bipartisan support, but has become one of the most litigated environmental laws in U.S. history. There have been several efforts to weaken it, only to see them reversed when administrations changed.

Today, experts say that a confluence of aggressive rollbacks under the Trump administration and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court could mean a permanently weakened ESA. In the meantime, habitat loss and climate change continue to push species toward crisis.

Andrew Mergen, who worked for three decades litigating ESA cases as part of the Natural Resources Defense Council and as a lawyer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, now teaches at Harvard Law School. He suggests the real issue is funding, not deregulation. “The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

Politics aside, there are signs of success in recent weeks. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it had deemed the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, recovered enough to be removed from the endangered list. Burgum said it was “proof” the ESA has left “Hotel California” behind.

But conservationists point out that it took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration and costly reintroduction efforts to recover the species. Many of those initiatives were launched long before Trump took office.

“The optimistic part,” Wilcove said, “is that we know how to save species when we invest in them. The question is whether we’ll make that commitment.”