Trump Ends Automatic Protection For Threatened Species, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Animals On The Brink Of Extinction Were Being Treated As Though They Were On The Brink Of Extinction

WASHINGTON. In a move hailed by administration officials as a long-overdue correction, the Interior Department on Friday finalized a rule ending automatic federal protections for species classified as threatened, resolving what the agency described as a persistent confusion in which animals sliding toward extinction were being treated as though they were sliding toward extinction.

Under the rescinded "blanket rule," any species newly listed as threatened had automatically received the same shield from being killed, trapped, harmed, or harassed that endangered species enjoy. Beginning Friday, that protection was withdrawn, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will now craft a separate, individualized rule for each threatened species, a process officials acknowledged could take years, during which the animal will remain free to be hunted, bulldozed, or otherwise removed from the landscape at industry's discretion.

"For too long, a creature merely on the path to disappearing forever was handed the exact same rights as a creature that had nearly disappeared forever," said a senior Interior official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the policy candidly. "We are simply restoring the distinction. A threatened species is threatened. An endangered species is endangered. And a species that is neither, because we waited long enough, is no longer our problem."

A second provision finalized the same day requires officials, for the first time, to weigh the economic cost of protecting a species' habitat before deciding whether that habitat is critical to the species' survival, a calculation that permits the projected profits of a proposed mine or oil field to be entered as evidence against the continued existence of, among others, the monarch butterfly and the alligator snapping turtle.

The President, who signed a similar rollback during his first term only to watch it reversed under his predecessor, praised the action as a victory for common sense. "Nobody loves the animals more than me, everybody knows this," Trump told reporters. "But these were threatened animals, not endangered animals. There's a very big difference. One of them you can now do whatever you want with, and that's a beautiful thing for the miners."

Wildlife biologists noted that the practical effect of stripping protection from a threatened species is to speed its promotion to endangered, at which point, officials confirmed, it will once again qualify for the very protections it had just lost, assuming a sufficient number of it remains to protect.

At press time, the Fish and Wildlife Service had begun the individualized rulemaking process for its first newly unprotected species, a bird that agency staff estimated would be endangered by the time the paperwork was complete.