California Sues over Trump Administration’s Attempt to Weaken Endangered Species Act

A sweeping rewrite of federal Endangered Species Act rules takes effect Monday, September 14 — and it lands squarely on Santa Barbara County's backcountry, rivers, and coastlines, where some of California's most iconic imperiled wildlife makes its home.

The new rule, pushed by the Trump administration's Department of the Interior, rescinds the long-standing regulatory definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). For decades, that definition held that destroying or modifying a species' habitat counted as harming the animal itself. Under the revision, habitat destruction would no longer be prohibited under the ESA — as long as the activity doesn't directly kill an animal, the Santa Barbara Independent reported.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is not waiting to see the consequences play out. On September 9, Bonta announced he is co-leading a coalition of 21 attorneys general in filing two lawsuits challenging the habitat rule and other ESA revisions, arguing they violate the Act itself as well as federal administrative and environmental laws.

What the Lawsuits Allege

According to Bonta, the administration's changes do three things: drastically reduce protections for the habitat of listed fish and wildlife species; set up an unlawful process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations; and curtail the ESA's protections for newly listed threatened animal and plant species.

"The Trump administration has continuously sought to put our ecosystems in danger, which is why we continue to take them to court," Bonta said in a statement. "For over half a century, the ESA has stood as a bipartisan example of what it means to protect an irreplaceable part of our planet, but these new rules attempt to destroy longstanding and integral regulatory protections and open the door to further species decline and possible extinctions."

The Department of the Interior first announced in July that it would rescind the harm definition. The rule change, published in the federal register and set to take effect September 14, now faces a multistate legal challenge — though it's unclear whether a court will pause its implementation before the effective date.

Why It Matters Here

Santa Barbara County sits at the heart of some of the ESA's most celebrated — and hardest-fought — recovery stories. Environmentalists warn the rule change could affect local federally listed species including the southern California steelhead trout, the California condor, and the red-legged frog.

The California condor, whose image accompanied the Independent's coverage, remains a federally listed endangered species with habitat in the Los Padres National Forest, which sprawls across the county's interior. The condor's slow crawl back from the brink of extinction in the 1980s has depended heavily on protecting the remote backcountry terrain the birds rely on — habitat protections that the new rule could weaken, advocates say.

Southern California steelhead, the anadromous form of the coastal rainbow trout, depend on the county's rivers and creeks — waterways like those feeding the Santa Ynez watershed — for spawning. Because so much steelhead recovery work involves preserving and restoring instream habitat and flows, a rule that removes habitat modification from the definition of prohibited "harm" strikes directly at the legal tool conservationists have used for decades.

The California red-legged frog, the largest native frog in the western United States and a listed threatened species, similarly survives in scattered pockets of pond and riparian habitat across the region.

"The administration is arguing that you can protect endangered animals without protecting the places they need to survive," seven former directors of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA — Democrats and Republicans alike — wrote in a September 10 letter calling on the administration to reverse course. "Fifty years of science — and common sense — say otherwise."

A Bipartisan Law Under Pressure

The ESA, signed into law in 1973, has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the country's most durable environmental statutes, shielding species from take — a term that includes killing, harassing, or harming listed animals. The regulatory interpretation that habitat destruction constitutes "harm" has been a cornerstone of that framework since the 1980s and survived a landmark Supreme Court challenge, the 1995 Babbitt v. Sweet Home decision.

That makes the current rollback especially significant: it doesn't require Congress to amend the law, but instead uses administrative rulemaking to narrow what the statute is understood to prohibit. Critics, including the former agency heads, argue that approach severs the ESA from its scientific foundation.

The resistance to the rules has come from multiple quarters. Beyond the 21-state coalition, former leaders of the very agencies that administer the ESA — the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA — have publicly urged the administration to reverse the harm-definition change, noting in their letter that protecting animals while allowing the destruction of the places they live defies both five decades of science and common sense.

What Comes Next

For Santa Barbara residents, the immediate practical question is what happens while the lawsuits work through the courts. Environmental groups and state officials have warned that once the rule takes effect September 14, land-use decisions affecting habitat — development, water diversions, resource extraction on federal and private land — could proceed with less federal scrutiny, at least until a court intervenes.

The litigation, filed in federal court by the multistate coalition, will likely turn on whether the administration followed required administrative procedures and whether its interpretation of the ESA's prohibition on "take" is legally permissible. Similar state-federal legal battles during the first Trump administration over ESA rollbacks resulted in the rules being vacated or reversed under the Biden administration, suggesting a years-long legal fight may be ahead.

In the meantime, local conservation attention is expected to focus on the Los Padres backcountry and the county's watersheds — the places where, under the new rules, the line between harming a species and merely destroying its home has been deliberately blurred.

This story draws on reporting by the [Santa Barbara Independent](https://www.independent.com/2026/09/12/california-sues-over-trump-administrations-attempt-to-weaken-endangered-species-act/).