The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), on behalf of a coalition of 45 conservation organizations across the Southeast, submits detailed comments opposing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s and National Marine Fisheries Service’s November 2025 proposed rollbacks to Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulations, arguing that they would revive discredited 2019 Trump-era rules, undermine decades of science-based conservation practice, and conflict with the ESA’s text, purpose, and case law. SELC contends that the proposals would weaken protections for threatened species by eliminating the blanket 4(d) rule, improperly inject economic considerations into listing and protection decisions, narrow the scope of Section 7 consultations, disregard climate change and baseline jeopardy, and severely restrict critical habitat designations—changes that are arbitrary, legally unjustified (including under Loper Bright), and likely to exacerbate extinction risk, especially in the highly biodiverse and rapidly developing Southeast. SELC urges the Services to withdraw the proposed rules, warning that, taken together with other recent environmental rollbacks, they would significantly erode the ESA’s core mandate to conserve species and the ecosystems upon which they depend.
Read the full letter here.