“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
It’s the ominous slogan for “Hotel California,” an iconic fictional lodging dreamed up by the Eagles in 1976. One of the rock band’s lead singers, Don Henley, said in an interview that the song and place “can have a million interpretations.”
For US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, what comes to mind is a key part of one of the country’s most central conservation laws.
“The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave,” Burgum wrote in an April post on X. He’s referring to the roster of more than 1,600 species of imperiled plants and animals that receive protections from the federal government under the Endangered Species Act to prevent their extinctions. “In fact, 97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there. This is because the status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation.”
US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum speaks during a press conference on Aug. 11, 2025. Credit: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images
Since January, the Endangered Species Act has been a frequent target of the Trump administration, which claims that the law’s strict regulations inhibit development and “energy domination.” Several recent executive orders direct the federal government to change ESA regulations in a way that could enable businesses—fossil fuel firms in particular—to bypass the typical environmental reviews associated with project approval.
More broadly, though, Burgum and other conservative politicians are implying the law is ineffective at achieving its main goal: recovering biodiversity. But a number of biologists, environmental groups and legal experts say that recovery delays for endangered species are not a result of the law itself.
Instead, they point to systemically low conservation funding and long-standing political flip-flopping as wildlife faces mounting threats from climate change and widespread habitat loss.
“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them under the Endangered Species Act,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and public affairs at Princeton University, “and in doing that, we are more or less ensuring that it’s going to be very difficult to recover them and get them off the list.”