WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Trump administration today for failing to provide public records regarding its evisceration of the Endangered Species Act.

“The Trump administration is trying to roll back decades of protections for imperiled wildlife under an illegal cloak of secrecy,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The incompetence and cruelty underlying these changes could permanently harm animals and plants already on the brink of extinction. Americans have a right to know how their government is implementing these horrible, unprecedented policies.”

The Center is seeking information about how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Interior Department are handling the “incidental take” of endangered and threatened species in light of the Service’s recent directive that rescinds the regulatory definition of “harm” and strips wildlife of critical protections. The Center has also requested an official copy of a Service memorandum that adopts a radical interpretation of the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on “take,” dramatically scaling back the Act’s enforcement.

The agencies have not yet provided the information — including memos, emails and other correspondence — in response to the Center’s Aug. 27 Freedom of Information Act request.

The Endangered Species Act prohibits the "take" of protected species, which means to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” an animal. Historically, the Service has recognized that the law prohibits both “takes” intentionally directed against a protected species and “takes” that are accidental and incidental to other activities.

In September, according to media reports, Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, issued a memo that rewrites the Act’s “take” prohibition, arguing that only intentional killing or injuring an endangered animal would be considered a violation. “A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” the Nesvik memo says.

However, the memo has not been made public by the Interior Department or the Service, despite a legal requirement to publish new agency policies in the Federal Register.

For decades, the Service has issued incidental take statements and permits that allow the incidental harming or killing of endangered animals during activities such as oil and gas drilling. Those authorizations come with important safeguards to minimize harm to the species from those activities. This new interpretation would eliminate these protections and could allow harmful activities to proceed without any protections for endangered species.

The memo goes substantially beyond a July Trump administration rule rescinding the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act, which claimed the Act does not apply to habitat destruction or degradation. If allowed to stand, the policy has the potential to destroy the places that many endangered species live, bringing them closer to extinction.

The Center and partner groups are challenging the Trump administration over Nesvik’s directive, as part of an earlier lawsuit challenging the July rule rescinding the definition of harm.

Today’s lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.