OAKLAND, Calif.— A federal court has overturned four key provisions of regulations that weakened the Endangered Species Act, issued by the Trump administration in 2019 and retained under the Biden administration.

“I’m thrilled the court rejected these efforts to gut endangered species protections and eviscerate a law Americans love,” said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re in an extinction crisis that demands urgent action to prevent thousands of animal and plant species from disappearing forever. Trump is hellbent on serving corporations at the expense of endangered wildlife, but thankfully the law protects these critters and the places they live. Now Trump must obey it.”

A 2024 lawsuit challenged Trump’s attempt to weaken the Act. On Monday the court ruled in plaintiffs’ favor on four claims.

The court overturned a definition of “adverse modification” that requires federal actions to affect species’ critical habitat “as a whole” before real habitat protections are put in place. This provision allowed smaller projects, like clearcutting spotted owl habitat, to move forward, resulting in a death by a thousand cuts to species.

The second provision invalidated by the court required federal agencies to only minimize effects of actions that are reasonably certain to occur — for instance, allowing consideration of a highway project to move forward without minimizing all of the development that would result.

The third overturned provision would have forced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to accept mitigation measures by federal agencies at face value regardless of whether there were specific plans to carry out the mitigation. This required the service to count even the emptiest of promises.

The fourth provision would have allowed the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA fisheries to ignore ongoing harm to species above and beyond what was allowed, without requesting agencies to mitigate these additional harms.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians, all represented by Earthjustice.

“Extinction is forever, and today’s ruling strikes down regulations that deprived vulnerable species of a last chance at survival,” said Ben Levitan, Earthjustice senior attorney. “This ruling sends a strong signal to the Trump administration that its pending plans to further weaken the rules will violate the law.”

“For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has been one of the most successful conservation laws we have,” said Joanna Zhang, endangered species advocate with WildEarth Guardians. “This victory gives vulnerable species and the ecosystems we all rely on a chance to recover in the face of the climate crisis and relentless pressure from extractive industries.”

“Today’s ruling reversed changes aimed at gutting some of the Endangered Species Act's most important protections for the habitats of species facing extinction,” said Sierra Club senior attorney Karimah Schoenhut. “Thankfully, the court rejected this unlawful attempt to allow the piecemeal destruction of critical habitat and to undermine the Act’s protections against jeopardizing protected species.”