Trump Moving to Gut a Core Endangered Species Protection

An internal memo reinterprets the law so that only the intentional killing of animals, not collateral harm, is illegal.

A North Atlantic right whale breaking the surface and spouting. The sea is calm and the sky is clear.

A North Atlantic right whale off Cape Cod, Mass., in 2023. Only about 380 remain on the planet. APress photo

By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2026

In what would be a seismic shift, the Trump administration is quietly moving to strip a core protection of the Endangered Species Act, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

Under a new interpretation of the law’s language outlined in the memo, the accidental killing or injury of an animal would no longer be considered illegal; only actions specifically intending to target an animal would.

The change would be transformative because, in the United States, the killing of endangered animals almost always happens incidentally, in the course of economic activity. Until now, industries and individuals could be held accountable for those foreseeable deaths and, as a result, they have been incentivized to avoid them.

At the center of the change is what it means to “take” an endangered animal, something that has long been prohibited under the act.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” states the memo, which was dated Sept. 14 and was distributed to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field offices. “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Currently, enforcement of the Endangered Species Act relies on a permitting system that seeks to balance protecting imperiled animals with allowing business to operate.

For example, if developers wanted to build houses on a tract of land that is home to endangered salamanders, they would have to apply for a permit. In exchange for implementing some measures to protect the salamanders, and perhaps paying for salamander conservation elsewhere, the Fish and Wildlife Service would issue what’s known as an incidental take permit, absolving them of killing a certain number of salamanders.

The memo, signed by Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, appears to upend that entire system.

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Schism among participants at the G20 energy parley in Houston

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Trump’s EPA continues its environmental rollbacks

The US Environmental Protection Agency is expected to formally rescind carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.
Stacks from a coal-fired power station in Kentucky, US. Photographer: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
Stacks from a coal-fired power station in Kentucky, US. Photographer: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
By Zahra Hirji, Ari Natter, and Jennifer A Dlouhy, Bloomberg.com

The Trump administration’s latest major climate rollback is expected to come on the sidelines of a Group of 20 energy ministers’ meeting in Houston, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t yet public. Earlier this year, the EPA rescinded similar climate standards for vehicles and the 2009 endangerment finding, a landmark ruling which held that greenhouse gases threaten human health.

Under Trump, the EPA first proposed rolling back the power-plant climate rules last summer. This week, the agency is finalizing a piece of the initial proposal — scrapping Biden-era mandates requiring existing and future US fossil fuel-fired power plants to deploy specific emissions-reduction technologies, including carbon capture and storage, to sharply cut their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades, according to the people.

Agency officials also plan to propose a separate rule repealing the federal finding that greenhouse gases from power plants specifically pose a threat, effectively a separate endangerment finding for power plants under the Clean Air Act.

Power plants are the US’s largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions. If the US power sector were a country by itself, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to a New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity analysis of 2022 emissions data.

The EPA didn’t respond to requests for comment outside business hours on Sunday.

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Norcross sees his lithium-ion battery bill passing if Democrats take back Congress

Camden residents hold signs reading STOP the BURN and HOLD EMR ACCOUNTABLE

Some Camden residents at the City Council meeting on April 8, 2025

By Sophia Schmidt, WHYY News, September 11, 2026

U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross is pushing a bill he says could help stop the recurring fires at a scrap metal recycling company in Camden.

Norcross, a Democrat who represents the city in Congress, introduced a bill last fall that would incentivize the detection and recycling of highly flammable lithium-ion batteries.

EMR, a multinational scrap metal recycling company with its U.S. headquarters and several industrial sites in Camden, has blamed the batteries as the primary driver of fires at its junkyards.

“It certainly has become something that really doesn’t leave my mind, ever,” EMR USA CEO Joe Balzano said at a press conference promoting Norcross’ bill Thursday at EMR’s metal shredding facility in the Waterfront South neighborhood.

The company’s five facilities in Camden have been the site of 14 major fires since 2020, according to a lawsuit filed by the state against the company earlier this year. Some of these fires have sent dangerous pollution into Waterfront South, where the majority of residents are Black or Hispanic. Residents have evacuated their homes during the fires and been left with lingering psychological distress and concerns about their health.

Lithium-ion batteries are present in consumer products such as smartphones and electric bikes. They are banned at EMR’s junkyards, but the company says they are often delivered anyway and are difficult to detect.

The tax credit would partially reimburse recycling companies for the cost of battery detectors and would tax battery manufacturers. It would also create a lithium battery recycling grant program that would give funds to facilities that collect and recycle the batteries.

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Trump blocks $25 M in funding for national parks

The Interior Department did not approve more than 130 partnership agreements covering activities such as tending to sled dogs and preventing damage to burial mounds.

Joshua Tree National Park in 2019. (Jae C. Hong/AP)


By The Washington Post,  September 11, 2026

The Trump administration has blocked more than 130 projects in national parks across the country worth at least $25 million, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post — funding that had already been secured for some of the most visited parks for work such as fire preparedness in California, prehistoric mound protection in Iowa and sled dog care in Alaska.

The Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, said in a statement it “disapproved” a raft of planned agreements with groups it said work against administration priorities. The agreements were rejected last month and would have allowed the parks, including Yellowstone, Yosemite and Zion, to pay outside partners for various projects in the next fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, the documents show.
Similar to issuing government contracts, the Park Service often partners with outside organizations when specialized expertise or work is needed, allowing it to do work without hiring additional full-time federal employees. The blocked funding instead puts additional pressure on a national park system that has struggled with losing roughly a quarter of its staff since President Donald Trump took office last year and launched efforts to shrink the government.


The changes appear to most affect Joshua Tree National Park, which had at least 10 planned partnership agreements blocked. That park’s partnership agreements would have hired at least 16 people, helped recover areas in the park burned in wildfires, and removed rodents that carry hantavirus from historic buildings, among other activities listed in the documents.

“If this work is not completed, the park will be unable to fight wildfire. Fires will be larger, and fire suppression will be more expensive,” the documents read, describing the impact if a fire preparedness project at Joshua Tree does not gain funding.

Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady confirmed that the department “disapproved a number of partnership agreements with groups actively working against the best interests of the American people and the priorities of this administration.”

“This decisive action is ensuring that these taxpayer dollars are being used in alignment with the administration’s objectives to make life more affordable for Americans, unleash domestic energy production and expand access to our public lands,” Spady added.

She did not give further details on the agreements or partner organizations affected.

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Trump’s EPA strips away guidance used by companies to measure their carbon footprints

By Zahra Hirji, Bloomberg Green Daily

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly removed multiple online resources for companies on how to measure the carbon footprint of their supply chains, called Scope 3 emissions.

As the Trump administration aggressively rolls back rules and mandates to reduce pollution, it is also taking down climate change-related data, tools, and other information from federal websites that experts say businesses, researchers, and others have long relied on to better understand current and future environmental risks.

“Instead of holding polluters accountable, the EPA under Trump has been focused on reversing and deleting efforts aimed at tackling greenhouse gas emissions,” Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told Bloomberg News. He said he’s introduced a bill that would require the agency to publish even more guidance than it had previously for companies to track their climate pollution.

When asked about the website removals, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran said: “Corporate Climate Leadership is not a statutory obligation.”

Since Trump took office, the agency web page titled “Scope 3 Inventory Guidance” has been taken down, and so have multiple other online references to Scope 3 emissions, according to a Bloomberg News review of the current site and archived versions, including the official government snapshot from January 19, 2025, predating President Donald Trump’s second term. A 2021 EPA webinar titled “Working with Suppliers to Reduce Scope 3 Emissions” was also removed from a landing page for climate risk-related webinars and events.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, May 18, 2026. PFAS, synthetic compounds designed to resist heat, water, and stains used widely in food packaging, cookware, cosmetics, clothing, carpeting, coatings, and firefighting foam, appeared on the EPA’s draft CCL 5 and returns on CCL 6. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

 

This fits into a government-wide push to abandon the mandatory collection of corporate climate information. Last fall, the EPA proposed ending its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which collects annual emissions from major industrial polluters such as coal plants, oil refiners, and chemical plants. In June, the US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed to rescind a rule requiring public companies to report both greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks.

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