Trump Administration Weakens Endangered Species Protections
For decades, the federal Endangered Species Act prohibited not only directly killing endangered wildlife, but also destroying habitat essential to species’ survival. It also required federal agencies to ensure that projects they funded, permitted, or approved did not destroy or adversely modify designated critical habitat.
The Trump administration has now eliminated the longstanding regulatory definition of “harm” that included significant habitat destruction. This could allow development, logging, mining, and drilling to destroy places endangered species need to survive, so long as the animals are not directly killed or injured.
California cannot easily fill this gap. The California Endangered Species Act prohibits killing or capturing listed animals, but unlike the longstanding federal rule, it has no equivalent protection against habitat destruction itself. California must instead rely on a patchwork of CEQA review, state permitting, and other resource laws. Federal protection has therefore been an essential backstop for California species and habitats. Removing it places our most imperiled birds and other wildlife at even greater risk.
Vote No on Proposition 45 This November
At the very moment the Trump administration is dismantling federal protections for nature, including protections against habitat destruction under the Endangered Species Act, California should be strengthening its environmental safeguards, not weakening them.
Yet Proposition 45, sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce, would make development faster and cheaper by curtailing review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Its attack on CEQA goes far beyond housing. It would reduce transparency and weaken the public’s ability to influence highways, data centers, dams, reservoirs, energy facilities, and sprawling development in undeveloped areas.
Prop 45 would rush reviews, limit consideration of less damaging alternatives, restrict public participation, and make harmful approvals harder to challenge. Developers could reap the profits while communities and taxpayers absorb the costs: polluted air and water, depleted water supplies, increased traffic and wildfire risk, and the destruction of wetlands, streams, open space, and wildlife habitat. Birds and other wildlife would lose the places they need to nest, feed, migrate, and survive.
With federal wildlife protections already being stripped away, California cannot afford to weaken its own environmental safeguards. Vote No on Proposition 45 this November.