At least 20 of this year’s orders take aim at the ESA, including several that argue overly strict regulations hamper development and prevent “energy domination.” This month, the administration signed orders instructing agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that could fast-track fossil fuel projects and eliminate environmental reviews.

Burgum and other conservatives have also tried to paint the law as ineffective, arguing that its rigid rules do little to encourage recovery. But ecologists and legal scholars say that’s not the problem with the ESA: Rather, the law is too frequently underfunded and suffers from political whiplash.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, an ecology professor at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

Critics of the ESA often point to the small number of species that have been fully delisted as evidence of the law’s shortcomings. In fact, experts say, the ESA has prevented far more extinctions than it’s produced full recoveries.

Since 1973, just 26 listed species have been declared extinct under federal supervision. By contrast, at least 47 species have likely gone extinct after waiting years or even decades for a listing, according to an analysis of federal data by the ESA watchdog group Center for Biological Diversity.

“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” Wilcove said. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”

The most famous example of ESA success is the bald eagle. After habitat loss and DDT pollution left the bird with only a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in the 1960s, its status improved after the pesticide was banned and the bird was listed as threatened in 1978. By 2007, the bald eagle had been taken off the list, with nearly 10,000 nesting pairs nationwide.

Success stories like the American alligator and the Steller sea lion also show that the ESA can boost recovery, when protections are targeted and given time.

One major challenge is that the ESA’s protections apply to both public and private land. Conservatives and landowners have long bristled at this rule, which they argue tramples property rights. (The ESA provides a “safe harbor” against regulation if landowners work with the government to protect a listed species on their land.)

“We’re essentially saying your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted for that,” explained Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary. “That’s not exactly a situation that’s going to make a lot of people want to cooperate with the government.”

In some cases, research suggests these rules actually create “perverse incentives” that cause landowners to fight species protections. For example, one study of red-cockaded woodpeckers in the Southeastern United States found timber was more likely to be harvested early in areas where the bird was present—likely in order to preempt federal habitat rules.

Congress has tried to address these concerns by offering incentives like tax breaks, conservation easements that pay landowners for protecting habitats, and safe harbor agreements that exempt landowners from additional regulation if a species appears. Many of these programs have atrophied in recent years, however, leaving conservationists concerned about the ESA’s future.

Once a rare example of bipartisan agreement, the Endangered Species Act has now become one of the most litigated environmental laws in U.S. history. Efforts to weaken or change the ESA have popped up under both Democratic and Republican administrations, only to be undone when the White House changed parties.

But today, experts worry, the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of ESA protections combined with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court could permanently shrink the law’s authority. Meanwhile, climate change and habitat loss from development continue to raise the stakes: The current extinction crisis is accelerating at a rate unseen in human history, with half of Earth’s species expected to be at risk of extinction within decades.

Harvard Law School’s Andrew Mergen, who worked in a Justice Department division that litigated ESA cases for more than 30 years, has argued the law itself isn’t the problem. In fact, he says, the ESA should probably be made even stronger in order to address the extinction crisis. Instead, the focus should be on resources.

“The law has prevented extinctions,” Mergen said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

The fight over the ESA has been fought largely in political and legal arenas, but some recent news offers a reminder of what’s possible. In July, for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Roanoke logperch, a small freshwater fish, had recovered enough to be taken off the endangered list. Burgum lauded the news as “proof” that the ESA had outgrown its “Hotel California” status.

The recovery, however, took more than 30 years of dam removals, wetland restoration, and costly reintroduction efforts—a conservation effort that started long before Trump was elected.

“The optimistic part,” Wilcove said, “is that we know how to save species when we invest in them. The question is whether we’ll make that commitment.”