Congress will vote to expand ‘God Squad’ reach and gut endangered species protections – on Earth Day

Republicans are once again taking aim at America’s endangered species – and it’s happening on Earth Day. Last month Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration’s “God Squad” – the nickname given to the seven-member Cabinet-level Endangerd Species Committee – attempted to remove endangered species restrictions in the Gulf of Mexico. Now members of Congress are set to vote on a GOP-led bill that could broaden the abilities of the squad and strip crucial Endangered Species Act protections for wildlife. The vote is slated for Wednesday, prompting an urgent call from close to 300 environmental groups for members of the House to vote “no.”If the bill is passed, thousands of threatened and endangered species could be in harm’s way, groups said. The vote comes as the Trump administration continues to push to expand its drilling capabilities across public lands.“At a time when we should be redoubling our commitment to protect biodiversity and stop extinction, this bill would instead make many of the ESA’s most important protections virtually meaningless and set the precedent of using politics, rather than science, for conservation decision-making,” the groups wrote in a letter shared with The Independent. Republicans are voting on amendments to the 1973 Endangered Species Act this week, following similar efforts that have spanned decades. Environmental groups say any changes could harm species protected by the act, like America's beloved bald eagle (Getty Images)The bill was introduced by Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, who says that the 1973 ESA needs to be amended “for the sake of both the environment and the economy,” returning power to private landowners while protecting endangered species.Republicans have been hoping to make these changes for nearly two decades, with efforts to change the ESA dating back to the 2010s.“My bill, the ESA Amendments Act of 2025, will implement necessary measures to take the power away from litigious environmental activist groups who openly profit off weaponizing species management and instead give more responsibilities to state, local and tribal governments who often times have a much better understanding of the species, their needs and their habitats,” the Republican – who is the only licensed forester in Congress – said in a March statement.However, the groups said that the states did not have “sufficient resources of legal mechanisms” to take the reins in conserving species listed as endangered. “It would place significant new administrative burdens on already overburdened agencies. It would turn the current process for listing and recovering threatened and endangered species into a far lengthier process that precludes judicial review of key decisions,” the groups asserted.A request for comment from Westerman was not immediately returned to The Independent.One of Westerman’s points is that only 3 percent of species listed as endangered or threatened have been recovered since the ESA was implemented by Republican President Richard Nixon."The Endangered Species Act has consistently failed to achieve its intended goals,” Westerman said. Arkansas GOP Rep. Bruce Westerman is behind a new bill to amend the Endangered Species Act. Westerman claims that the legislation has ‘failed’ (Getty)It’s true that the bipartisan-backed ESA has only partly fulfilled its promise, according to American ecologists, but this may be a “poor measure” of the ESA’s success, Cornell University researchers wrote in 2005. That’s because “few species have been protected under the ESA long enough to reach full recovery,” the researchers said. The prevention of hundreds of extinctions may not determine whether the ESA is meeting its mark, but research since then has shown species living in protected areas for two or more years were more than doubly as likely to have an improving population in the late 1990s, the ecologists said in 2016. “The proportion of species improving increased, and the proportion declining decreased, with increasing time listed throughout the 1990s, irrespective of critical habitat and recovery plans,” the scientists wrote. Since the ESA was passed in 1973, it has prevented the extinction of more than 99 percent of listed species, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.Those species include the beloved California condors, bald eagles and Hawaiian monk seals, the National Wildlife Federation points out. They also include critically endangered Rice’s whales, but environmentalists said the gentle giants were effectively slated for extinction thanks to the God Squad’s action to waive protections from the Gulf of Mexico. That action has been challenged in court. “The Endangered Species Act works because it is rooted in science and because it recognizes a simple truth: once a species is gone, it is gone forever,” Susan Holmes, executive director for the Endangered Species Coalition, said in a statement. “We should not allow politicians to dismantle protections that have saved bald eagles, gray whales, peregrine falcons and so many other species from disappearing forever.”