Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has taken multiple actions to roll back the ESA, with a stated belief that heavy regulation restricts development and blocks “energy domination.” Two executive orders this year have instructed agencies to reconsider ESA regulations that could pave the way for fossil fuel projects by short-circuiting required environmental reviews.

Burgum and other conservatives on the committee have described the law as broken, and say its strict rules do little to help species recover. Scientists and conservation lawyers, however, say the problem is not the ESA itself but a history of chronic underfunding and a lack of political will.

“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.”

The ESA has not, however, been a lost cause. Experts say the law has helped keep the U.S. from mass extinctions. Since the ESA was passed in 1973, just 26 species on the federal list have gone extinct. At least 47 species are believed to have disappeared since they were petitioned for listing, and likely while still waiting for a decision.

“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. In the 1960s, the use of the pesticide DDT and the loss of old-growth forests left just a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. After the federal government banned DDT and the bird was listed under the ESA in 1978, numbers began to climb. The bald eagle was removed from the endangered list in 2007, with nearly 10,000 pairs nationwide.

Other species have recovered with targeted protections, such as the American alligator and the Steller sea lion.

The ESA’s reach on both public and private land has long been a flashpoint for conservation battles. Just over two-thirds of listed species require private lands, and around 10 percent live there exclusively.

“If it’s on your land, your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor of environmental law at the William & Mary Law School. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have even suggested perverse incentives under these rules, such as one on the red-cockaded woodpecker that found timber was harvested early on land where the woodpecker was known to live, to avoid federal habitat restrictions down the line.

Over time, Congress has established incentive programs for landowners, such as tax breaks and conservation easements, which pay landowners to protect habitats. But these programs have decreased in recent years.

The Endangered Species Act, once a rare instance of bipartisan conservation legislation, has been the subject of frequent court battles over the years, with proposals to weaken it arising under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

In many cases, however, changes were rolled back when administrations changed hands. But some experts fear the combination of the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory push and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will permanently reduce the ESA’s authority, with climate change and habitat loss adding to extinction risks.

Andrew Mergen, a professor at Harvard Law School who previously spent two decades litigating ESA cases for government agencies, said the solution to limited recovery is more resources, not deregulation.

“The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to actually help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

Despite the political fights, signs of success have been emerging. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that a freshwater fish known as the Roanoke logperch had recovered enough to be delisted. Burgum touted it as “proof” the ESA was no longer a “Hotel California.”

But conservationists point out that the three-decade recovery of the fish required dam removals, wetland restoration, and expensive reintroduction efforts—initiatives that were in motion 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.”