In January, the Trump administration issued an executive order calling for the scaling back of Endangered Species Act regulations, which it deems too restrictive on development and a hindrance to the president’s goal of “energy domination.” The order and two follow-ups this year call for federal agencies to revisit ESA rules in a way that could expedite fossil fuel development, sidestepping the environmental reviews that are usually required.

Burgum and other conservatives argue that the law’s strict regulations have had little impact on species’ recovery. Scientists and environmental law experts say that’s not a failure of the ESA, but the result of decades of insufficient funding and wavering political will.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” David Wilcove, an ecology professor at Princeton University, told me. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

Experts point out that, despite these criticisms, the ESA has been largely successful at the primary goal of preventing extinctions. Since 1973, only 26 species on the federal list have gone extinct; at least 47 more are believed to have disappeared from the wild while awaiting listing, according to one analysis.

“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.”

Take the case of the bald eagle. In the 1960s, the raptor’s population had dwindled to a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states because of habitat loss and the widespread use of the pesticide DDT. When DDT was banned and the species was given ESA protections in 1978, eagle populations slowly began to rebound. In 2007, the bird was officially delisted; the last count showed there were nearly 10,000 pairs in the U.S.

American alligators and Steller sea lions are other species that have come back from the brink, thanks to the specific protections they received.

But the ESA has put protections in place for both public and private property. That has long been a source of tension with property owners, said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary.

“Your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” he told me. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Research has suggested that these types of rules have “perverse incentives” for landowners, too. One study looked at red-cockaded woodpeckers, for instance, and found that timber was harvested early in areas where the woodpecker lived—presumably to avoid federal habitat protection restrictions.

Congress has introduced various incentives over the years, like tax breaks or conservation easements that pay landowners to protect habitats. But these have been on the decline in recent years, Adler said, and many conservationists worry that private lands will suffer as a result.

The ESA once had bipartisan support, but it’s become one of the most litigated environmental statutes in U.S. history, with efforts to weaken it coming and going with different administrations. While Democrats in Congress have tried to further protect the ESA, the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback, experts said, could have lasting consequences for the law’s reach. At the same time, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court is in place to decide the fate of certain future challenges.

“The unfortunate part is, we may be re-weaponizing the ESA by our own actions, with a Supreme Court that could greatly curtail the effectiveness of the law in a way that we can’t predict right now,” Mergen said.

Harvard Law School’s Andrew Mergen, who spent 17 years as an attorney litigating ESA cases at the Interior Department, agreed that the law’s true problem is a lack of resources, not regulations.

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

Conservationists point to recent news about the Roanoke logperch as evidence that the ESA still works. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the freshwater fish had been deemed recovered and would be removed from the endangered list. Burgum announced it as “proof” that the ESA was no longer like “Hotel California.”

But conservationists I spoke with noted the recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, and costly reintroduction efforts that began long before the Trump administration.

“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.”