WASHINGTON, D.C. — Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy today condemned President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Department of the Interior to determine whether gray wolves should be removed from the protections of the Endangered Species Act while simultaneously directing the agency to move forward with delisting them.
“The order is transparently disingenuous on its face,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “It purports to direct the Department of the Interior to conduct an objective, science-based determination about whether wolves warrant continued protection under the Endangered Species Act, but then prejudges the outcome by directing the agency to begin the process to delist them. That’s not how science-based wildlife conservation is supposed to work.”
“This is an obvious and desperate pre-midterm political ploy designed to energize a shrinking anti-wolf constituency,” said Animal Wellness Action general counsel Scott Edwards. “Wildlife conservation decisions should be guided by science and the law—not election-year politics.”
Gray wolves play a critical ecological role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. As apex predators, they help regulate overabundant deer and elk populations, reducing overbrowsing of forests and stream corridors, promoting biodiversity, and limiting the spread of wildlife diseases, including chronic wasting disease, by preferentially removing sick and weakened animals from the landscape.
The organizations noted that the Trump administration’s 2020 nationwide gray wolf delisting rule was vacated by a federal court after the court concluded that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to adequately justify the decision under the Endangered Species Act. The court found significant shortcomings in the agency’s analysis of wolf recovery and the species’ status across its historic range.
“We are confident that any new attempt to strip wolves of federal protections without the scientific evidence required by law will meet the same fate in federal court,” The Center for a Humane Economy senior Attorney Kate Schultz said. “But there is real harm that occurs before the courts can act. Once federal protections are lifted, wolves become vulnerable to aggressive hunting and trapping that cannot be undone after the fact.”
That is precisely what occurred following the 2020 delisting. Wisconsin rapidly authorized a wolf hunt that devolved into a slaughter, with hunters and trappers killing wolves at a pace so intense that the state’s quota was exceeded in just a matter of two days. Animal Wellness Action and The Center for a Humane Economy successfully halted further wolf killing in state court to while the broader legal challenge to the federal delisting proceeded. Ultimately, the federal courts restored Endangered Species Act protections after finding the delisting rule legally deficient.
Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy also emphasized that the Trump administration is hardly alone in attempting to weaken federal protections for wolves. Over the past two decades, multiple administrations have sought to reduce Endangered Species Act protections through administrative rules and other actions. Time and again, federal courts have vacated those efforts because they failed to satisfy the scientific and legal requirements of the Endangered Species Act.
“The lesson from years of litigation is unmistakable,” Pacelle said. “Federal courts have repeatedly recognized that wolf recovery remains incomplete across significant portions of the species’ historic range and that the Endangered Species Act requires decisions grounded in the best available science—not political expediency.”
This executive order is only the latest in a long series of actions by this administration that have weakened longstanding wildlife conservation safeguards. Since taking office, the administration has authorized controversial predator management practices on federal lands, including bear baiting in Alaska; moved to rescind the Roadless Rule, potentially opening nearly 59 million acres of previously protected national forests to new road construction, logging, mining, and development; rewrote the Endangered Species Act by narrowing the longstanding definition of “harm” so that extensive habitat destruction would no longer qualify as unlawful harm to imperiled species; and advanced a broad deregulatory agenda that places America’s wildlife and wild lands at greater risk. Taken together, these actions reveal a consistent pattern: substituting ideology and special-interest politics for science, weakening the nation’s most important conservation laws, and placing short-term commercial interests ahead of the long-term health of America’s wildlife, public lands, and ecosystems.
Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy pledged to work with conservation organizations, wildlife scientists, tribal governments, and state partners to challenge any unlawful effort to remove federal protections for wolves.
“Wolves are one of North America’s most important keystone species,” Pacelle said. “They shape healthier ecosystems, strengthen the resilience of wild landscapes, and even help limit diseases such as chronic wasting disease by culling sick animals. The Endangered Species Act demands science-based decision-making, and we fully expect the courts will once again insist that the law be followed.”