Inside the Right-Wing Campaign to End Protections for Endangered Species
Leonard Leo, best known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, is fueling an assault on efforts to preserve the environment and the planet. His dark money network has also been funding campaigns to dismantle the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — 50 years after it was established to protect plant and animal species at risk of extinction.
Since its passing, the ESA has been credited for saving 99 percent of its listed wildlife including bald eagles, peregrine falcons, grizzly bears, humpback whales, and numerous other species crucial to the U.S. and global ecosystem.
Despite the ESA’s success rate, Leo’s primary dark money hubs — the Concord Fund and the 85 Fund — funneled more than $2 million between 2020 to 2022 toward multiple climate denial groups that have targeted the ESA, arguing the protective act places unfair burdens on businesses, particularly in the logging, mining, and fossil fuel industries.
Of these groups, Americans for Limited Government (ALG), received $1.8 million from the Concord Fund. ALG has published countless articles slamming the scientific evidence educating the public on the causes of climate change.
In 2018, ALG sent a letter to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), advocating for nine pieces of legislation that would gut the ESA. The bills were framed as an attempt to “modernize” the federal act, and the letter claimed the ESA had been “weaponized” by “radicals to shut down mines that are critical for national security minerals, and to halt energy exploration.” The group argued the ESA has made America “dependent on foreign nations for energy and critical minerals, putting the nation in danger and citizens out of work.”
Among the legislative proposals were The Less Imprecision in Species Treatment Act (LIST Act), which would make it easier to delist a species from the ESA, and the Endangered Species Transparency and Reasonableness Act, which would undermine the ESA’s methodical science by deeming state, tribal, or county data “best available science” regardless of its quality.
Two days after the letter was sent, Gosar echoed ALG’s words in a press release. He praised the package of “smart, targeted, thoughtful modernization amendments” to the ESA, and called on lawmakers to consider “the longstanding and fixable failures of the ESA to conserve species and balance interests appropriately.”
While seven of the nine proposed bills failed in earlier congresses, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) reintroduced the LIST Act in January, 2023, and Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) reintroduced the Endangered Species Transparency and Reasonableness Act later that month.
Tony Carrk, Executive Director of investigative Accountable.US, a progressive nonprofit research group, says that his team has observed Leo and his network attempt to “take over the courts, but also expand his reach in this far right, extreme conservative agenda that is intended to put more power in the hands of big corporations.”
“I think this is just this whole philosophy that puts profit about everything else, and that seems to be driving anything that has to do with regulating the oil and gas industry — from protecting our public lands, from protecting the endangered species,” Carrk continues. “It furthers this extreme agenda that puts profit over everything else.”
In 2022, Leo’s 85 Fund donated $150,000 to the Heritage Foundation — the conservative Washington think tank that is leading Project 2025, which is meant to function as Republicans’ policy road map if they win back the White House this year.
The Project 2025 agenda calls for “meaningful reform of the Endangered Species Act,” and for the administration to rescind Biden’s ESA rules in favor of those pushed by the Trump administration. The agenda says Congress should “take action to restore its original purpose and end its use to seize private property, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states over their wildlife populations.”
Barring such action, the Project 2025 plan includes calls for the next administration to delist the grizzly bear in parts of the Northwest; delist the gray wolf in most of the country; and end protections for the greater sage-grouse, a bird whose habitat is threatened by oil and gas development.
Leo’s 85 Fund also gave $200,000 in 2022 to the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a right-wing outfit that touts itself as “nonpartisan” while slamming ESA regulations seen as an impediment to fossil fuel companies.
In 2023, the group published a nearly 50-page report to mark the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, calling it “one of the nations most well-known and far-reaching environmental laws.” Throughout the document, PERC lamented that the legislation does “little to reward states or landowners who recover species or restore habitat” and argued that by “imposing regulatory burdens wherever rare species or their habitats are found, it turns species into liabilities.”
PERC is a member of the the State Policy Network (SPN), a national organization that watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute has said is at “the center of a 50-state network of think tank affiliates that is at the forefront of disinformation campaigns against wind and solar power, and is funded by right-wing donors and fossil fuel interests.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone, PERC insisted that it “emphatically wants to see more endangered species fully recover and thrive while ensuring that our nation’s landmark conservation law effectively achieves its own goals” and said that an “incentive-based approach” has “been embraced by respected conservation leaders and members of both parties.”
When discussing legislative opposition to the ESA, Robert Dewey, Defenders of Wildlife’s vice president of government relations, emphasizes how the law was grounded in science, not politics. “At its core, the Endangered Species Act not only protects plants and animals, but it also protects people,” he explains. “We need the parts of ecosystems to remain intact if they’re going to serve the ecological functions that people depend on — air quality, water quality, food production.”
“When Congress established [the ESA] in 1973, it recognized the perils of politicizing decisions about species by having Congress do that,” Dewey continues. “In its wisdom at the time, Congress decided to have a law that was guided by science and gave agencies the discretion to make these decisions, because there’s always going to be local opposition or concern. You just need to weigh that against what is essential for the saving from extinction of a particular species.”
This article was updated on June 27, 6:30 p.m. E.T. to include a statement from the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC).
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