President Trump’s Day-One Actions Will Decimate Wildlife Habitat

Polar bear on broken sea ice
Photo by Ken Canning

Washington, DC—On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed multiple executive orders designed to advance policies that are disastrous to wildlife and their habitats. The orders expand oil and gas drilling, mining, and logging; undermine bedrock environmental laws; and withdraw the United States from an important international climate agreement. If fully implemented, the orders will exacerbate the climate crisis and erode critical protections for America’s public lands and waters.

Invoking the National Emergencies Act, Trump declared the first-ever national energy emergency to facilitate leasing, production, transportation, and refinement of energy resources on federal lands. The order directs multiple agencies, including those responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act (ESA), to operate under emergency provisions, which often allow for truncating important consultations and other processes designed to limit environmental harm.

The ESA’s emergency rules, once invoked, require the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to do nothing more than issue nonbinding recommendations to other federal agencies on ways to mitigate harm to species and habitats from agency projects. Formal consultation with the agency on the project’s impact on threatened and endangered species is deferred until the emergency is deemed to be under control—by which time the harm has already occurred. To facilitate the order’s goals, the emergency declaration also requires four meetings per year of the Endangered Species Act Committee, which has met only six times previously in the ESA’s entire 50-year history. The committee—often referred to as the “God Squad”—may, under certain circumstances, exempt a federal agency’s action from the prohibitions of the ESA, giving it the authority to potentially doom a species to extinction.

Another Trump order reverses the previous administration’s commitment to conserve 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030. This order also reverses bans on offshore oil and gas drilling in public waters off the Alaska, Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts. A separate order reopens oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s extremely fragile and ecologically vital Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and repeals protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, potentially ushering in industrial-scale logging of irreplaceable old-growth forest that provides habitat for hundreds of species.

Trump also issued an order directing the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to limit global temperature increases by cutting fossil fuel emissions that was adopted by 195 nations in 2015. This action mirrors a similar directive issued by Trump in 2017, making the United States the only nation to withdraw from the agreement.

Another order seeks to strip civil service and due process protections from tens of thousands of federal employees, which could effectively dismantle much of the workforce needed to address climate change and protect endangered species.

Climate change harms wild animals and their habitat in a variety of ways. Heat waves are occurring more often, lasting longer, and becoming more intense. In the southwestern United States, annual precipitation has decreased and droughts have become more severe, driving catastrophic wildfires. In other parts of the country, extreme rainfall events and floods have become more common. Sea levels have risen as glaciers and ice sheets have melted. The oceans have warmed and the intensity of tropical storms has increased. These and myriad other changes have transformed the planet and devastated human communities, wildlife populations, and ecosystems with increasing frequency.

Importantly, many of these orders require additional actions from Congress or federal agencies to achieve the stated objectives, which provide opportunities for the public to oppose those actions.

“As a result of human activity, biodiversity is declining at a staggering rate, with an average 73% decline in wildlife populations since 1970,” said Johanna Hamburger, director and senior attorney of AWI’s Terrestrial Wildlife Program. “Expanding fossil fuel production and reneging on climate commitments ignore the grave consequences of climate change that are compounding these declines. The Animal Welfare Institute is poised to fight to protect the wild animals that call our public lands and waters home.”

Media Contact Information

Marjorie Fishman, Animal Welfare Institute
[email protected], (202) 446-2128

The Animal Welfare Institute (awionline.org) is a nonprofit charitable organization founded in 1951 and dedicated to alleviating animal suffering caused by people. We seek to improve the welfare of animals everywhere: in agriculture, in commerce, in our homes and communities, in research, and in the wild. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and LinkedIn for updates and other important animal protection news.