MISSOULA, Mont.— The Center for Biological Diversity filed an intervention today on behalf of imperiled wildlife in a lawsuit seeking to strip protections from species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The suit was brought by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and a property rights group called the Property and Environment Research Center.

“This cynical court challenge has nothing to do with conservation and everything to do with stripping protections from vulnerable wildlife,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center. “We’re going to do our utmost to ensure threatened species like Florida scrub jays and marbled murrelets don’t lose the safeguards that keep them alive.”

The Endangered Species Act does not automatically provide protections to animals and plants designated as threatened but instead calls for the development of species-specific rules. In 1975 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what’s been called a “blanket rule” that automatically provided threatened species with the same protections afforded to those designated as endangered unless the agency develops a species-specific rule.

The Trump administration rescinded the blanket rule in 2019, leaving threatened species in the lurch, but the Biden administration restored it in 2024. The groups challenging this reinstatement likely hope to spur the second Trump administration to again rescind the rule.

Nearly 100 threatened species currently rely on the blanket rule for protection. When the Trump administration previously rescinded the rule it claimed these species would retain protection but that may not be the case now.

While there was no blanket rule under the Biden administration the Service did issue species-specific rules but in some cases it offered far less protection. Building the individual rules further burdened an agency already struggling to keep up with its duties to protect at-risk plants and animals. Given the staff and funding cuts being pushed by the Trump administration, it’s likely that species who get listed as threatened won’t receive protections if the blanket rule is again nixed.

“Scientists around the world agree we’re in an extinction crisis and at risk of losing more than a million species in the coming decades, yet the Trump administration is hellbent on stripping wildlife of critical protections,” said Greenwald. “In this case, the administration has help from groups whose actions could have a devastating effect on wildlife species across America.”