Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has made repeated attacks on the ESA, which it says forces costly and strict regulations that stand in the way of development and “energy domination.” This year, it issued executive orders that tell federal agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that could allow fossil fuel projects to skip the detailed environmental reviews they’d normally face.

Critics like Burgum and other conservatives frame the law as broken, with cumbersome regulations that don’t work to aid recovery. But scientists and legal experts say that the real problem is longstanding underfunding and inconsistent political support.

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

When people lament the ESA’s poor recovery rate, experts say that it’s important to note the law has been very effective in preventing extinctions. Since 1973, only 26 species on the list have gone extinct under federal management. At least 47 more species have been documented as having gone extinct while still awaiting a decision on a listing petition.

“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 ESA’s biggest success story is the bald eagle. In the 1960s, widespread habitat loss and a chemical called DDT that caused eagles to lay brittle eggs had reduced the species to only a few hundred breeding pairs in the lower 48 states. Once the chemical was banned and the eagle got ESA protections in 1978, their numbers rebounded, and the bird was delisted in 2007. The nationwide population is now at nearly 10,000 pairs.

American alligators, Steller sea lions, and peregrine falcons are other prominent success stories.

One reason recovery can be so hard is that the ESA’s protections cover both public and private property. Private land is a particular source of controversy. More than two-thirds of listed species rely on private land for survival, and one in 10 is found only there.

“When you list a species, your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor of environmental law at William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies also suggest these rules can create “perverse incentives.” A review of timber harvesting near the habitat of red-cockaded woodpeckers found that in areas where the bird was found, timber was cut more aggressively early on, possibly to prevent more strict federal habitat restrictions.

In an effort to make the ESA more appealing to private landowners, Congress has added incentives over the years, like tax breaks and conservation easements that provide financial compensation for landowners who protect species. Still, the funding for such programs has shrunk in recent years, and many in the conservation community are worried.

The Endangered Species Act used to be bipartisan, but it has become the most litigated environmental law in U.S. history. Presidents have tried to scale it back before, but every time the new administration rolled back the changes.

Legal experts say that this time might be different, given the Trump administration’s ambitious efforts to reverse protections and the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

At the same time, climate change and habitat destruction mean that more and more species are reaching crisis levels of endangerment.

“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.”

Amid all of the political fights over the ESA, there are some hopeful signs. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, is sufficiently recovered to be removed from the endangered list. Burgum declared it “proof” the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

Conservationists point out that recovery took more than 30 years of removing dams, restoring wetlands, and reintroducing the fish at a cost of more than $25 million in efforts that started before Trump was even 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.”