MIDLAND, Texas— The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a request in federal court to oppose a plan by the Trump administration and the state of Texas to strip dunes sagebrush lizards of their federal Endangered Species Act protections.
“We’re urging the court to reject this obvious attempt by Trump to undermine the Endangered Species Act just to promote oil and gas extraction,” said Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center. “This is the third time in a year that the Trump administration has begged the courts to abandon the lifesaving and science-based protections that dunes sagebrush lizards desperately need.”
In May 2024 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered after four decades of delay. On June 3, the Service and Texas proposed to settle the state’s challenge to the decision. Rather than defend its own work the Service is now asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to strip the listing from the books.
This action reflects a pattern in which the Trump administration settles rather than defends cases challenging final rules that provide critical protections for species like the lesser prairie chicken and a group of central Texas mussel species.
The Center previously sought to intervene in this case in March 2025 but was denied on the grounds that the government would defend the listing and provide adequate representation. That has proven to be false.
“There appears to be a disturbing pattern of the Fish and Wildlife Service ignoring its mission to save struggling wildlife like dunes sagebrush lizards and lesser prairie chickens for the convenience of Texas politicians and big oil and gas polluters,” said Rylander. “We’ll keep fighting to protect rare and imperiled species wherever they live.”
Background
Originally identified as a candidate for Endangered Species Act protections in 1982, dunes sagebrush lizards waited more than 40 years for federal protections. The Center petitioned to place the lizard on the endangered species list in 2002. Prompted by the Center’s follow-up litigation, the Service proposed to protect the lizard in 2010.
However, the agency denied the lizards protection after the Texas Comptroller’s Office developed a non-binding conservation agreement that purported to safeguard some of their habitat. When the state rescinded that plan in 2018, the Center again petitioned for protection but it took another lawsuit in 2022 to prompt a final rulemaking.
The lizards live in a tiny area of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico that includes part of the Permian Basin, which over the last decade has been one of world’s fastest-growing oil and gas fields. The 2.5-inch-long species has the second smallest range of any lizard in North America, inhabiting a rare ecosystem where they hunt insects and spiders in wind-blown dunes. They burrow into the sand beneath low-lying shinnery oak shrubs for protection from extreme temperatures.
More than 95% of the original shinnery oak dunes ecosystem has been destroyed by oil and gas extraction and other development, as well as herbicide spraying to support livestock grazing. Much of the lizards’ remaining habitat is fragmented, preventing them from finding mates beyond those already living close by.
The lizards are further imperiled by burgeoning sand mining operations in the area — a secondary impact of the oil and gas industry, which uses the sand for fracking.
