Trump officials have repeatedly attacked the ESA in recent months, arguing that the law’s strictures impede development and prevent “energy domination.” This year, the administration has also signed executive orders telling agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that would facilitate fossil fuel projects, sidestepping environmental reviews.

Advocates of ESA reform like Burgum have long argued that the law’s rigid regulations do little to actually foster recovery. Scientists and legal experts say the problem is not the ESA, but rather decades of inconsistent political support and chronic underfunding.

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

The ESA does not have a great track record when it comes to species recovery. Of the more than 2,000 listed species, only about a quarter of animals and 42 percent of plants are on track to fully recover in time—and just 10 species have been delisted for recovery in the last three years.

But conservation experts say the law has a much better record of outright prevention. Under federal protection, 26 listed species have gone extinct since 1973. By contrast, at least 47 species are thought to have gone extinct while still on the list to get protection.

“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.”

One of the most celebrated success stories of the ESA is the bald eagle, the country’s national symbol. In the 1960s, the use of the pesticide DDT and widespread habitat destruction had reduced the iconic bird to only a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states.

Numbers began to climb once DDT was banned and the bird was listed on the ESA in 1978. By 2007, the bald eagle had been delisted, with nearly 10,000 pairs across the country.

The American alligator and Steller sea lions have also rebounded, while wolf populations in the West and Rocky Mountains have returned, though conflicts with ranchers remain.

The ESA has protections for both public and private lands, which has been a perennial flashpoint for contention. More than two-thirds of listed species need private land to recover, while about 10 percent are found only on private lands.

“If you own a piece of property and find an endangered species on it, your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” Jonathan Adler, professor of environmental law at the University of William & Mary, told The Daily Beast. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have even found these rules create “perverse incentives” to prevent cooperation. One such analysis, published in Nature Communications, looked at red-cockaded woodpeckers in the Southeast and found that logging was done earlier in woodlots that hosted the species to avoid federal habitat protections.

Congress has tried to soften the law by offering incentives to landowners. The ESA has provisions for tax breaks and conservation easements, which give property owners compensation for stewardship. But these programs have significantly declined over the past decade, to the consternation of many conservationists.

The ESA used to be a bipartisan priority in Congress, but now it’s one of the most litigated environmental laws in the country. Over the years, several administrations have tried to weaken it, only to have the changes rolled back when leadership changed.

Legal experts worry that this time could be different. “This administration has done more aggressive rollback of protections in such a short period of time,” Adler said. “And it’s hard to see how you reverse that if you have a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”

The ESA could also face challenges from the effects of climate change and habitat loss, which have accelerated the decline of some species to endangered levels in recent years.

Andrew Mergen, a former Endangered Species Act attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice who is now with the environmental and administrative law program at Harvard Law School, said the issue isn’t deregulation—it’s resources.

“The law has proven that it can prevent extinctions,” Mergen said. “The real challenge is will we commit the money and political capital to help species recover, or are we going to dismantle the protections that we have right now that are keeping species from going extinct.”

Amid the latest political battles over the ESA, some recent news has been a testament to what’s possible. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the Roanoke logperch, an endangered freshwater fish native to Virginia, had made enough of a recovery that it could be taken off the endangered list.

The state’s Republican governor, Burgum, lauded the fish as “proof” that the ESA had left the transition into recovery “Hotel California.” Conservationists, however, note the recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, and, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars in reintroduction efforts—all launched well before Trump’s term.

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