Trump’s ‘Radical’ Species Permitting Merger Carries Legal Risks

The legal basis for the Trump administration’s proposed merger of endangered species permitting under a single office is unclear and could require Congress to amend the law, natural resources lawyers say.

And environmental groups say they worry the proposed consolidation of Endangered Species Act permitting will degrade the federal government’s ability to enforce the law and prevent the extinction of plants and animals.

“I can’t think of any other specific examples of where multiple agencies having overlapping jurisdiction have been merged into one agency,” said Larry Liebesman, a former Justice Department attorney who is a senior adviser for environmental permitting firm Dawson & Associates. “It’s a fairly radical approach.”

The White House’s fiscal 2027 budget request calls for endangered species permitting at the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to be consolidated into a single office at the Interior Department, which would issue permits for developers to harass or kill, known as “take,” imperiled marine and land wildlife.

Interior’s budget justification calls for all Commerce Department ESA programs to be consolidated under FWS, with a proposed new allocation of $178 million for marine species. The proposal calls for a $6 million cut to spending on listing species under the ESA and even deeper cuts to endangered species conservation and consultation programs.

“With this proposal, FWS would take over the workload of listing, delisting, and consulting on projects impacting endangered species and have sufficient funding to maintain marine mammal stock assessments,” the justification says.

The Trump administration has taken numerous steps over the last year to lift endangered species protections, including recently convening the Endangered Species Committee to exempt Gulf of Mexico oil operations from the ESA. That decision would possibly jeopardize the Rice’s whale, which NMFS found in 2025 could be driven to extinction by offshore oil drilling. The administration is also expected to soon finalize a rule that would allow an imperiled species’ habitat to be destroyed without it being considered harmful to the species.

The Endangered Species Act and a 1970 federal government reorganization plan require the Commerce secretary to oversee endangered and threatened marine species and the Interior Department’s US Fish and Wildlife Service to oversee species on land.

Consolidating marine and onshore ESA permitting into the Interior Department is necessary because permitting by separate agencies has “created unnecessary red tape, increased costs, delayed approvals, and produced inconsistent outcomes for permittees,” the budget request says.

But the law is explicit about the Secretary of Commerce having the authority to administer the ESA for species in its jurisdiction, said Rebecca Hays Barho, partner at Nossaman LLP in Austin.

“The proposed budget does not provide the legal mechanism by which NMFS’ duties could be re-assigned to USFWS, and it’s unclear whether this could be done absent action by Congress,” she said.

The Interior Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.

‘Radical’ Move

A merger could result in more efficient permitting, but it would likely be an unprecedented move, Liebesman said.

The merger would likely lead to weakened ESA enforcement, said Gary Rule, a former NMFS fisheries biologist in Oregon who worked on ESA permitting and took a voluntary early retirement offer last year.

“I suspect they’d probably delist a bunch of species, change of bunch of regulations, and simplify things quite a bit,” he said.

The merger was first proposed last year, and it was followed by numerous voluntary retirements and employee firings by the Trump administration, gutting NMFS offices responsible for ESA permitting, Rule said.

“Twenty to 30% of folks took it because it looked like they were going to eliminate that part of the agency and a lot of us would just be laid off,” he said.

The Center for Biological Diversity is looking into whether the proposed merger has a sound legal basis, said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center, which has filed suit against the Endangered Species Committee.

“I think this administration just in so many regards have shown they don’t care about the rule of law,” he said. “They’re not really concerned about Congressional authority.”

The proposed budget now heads to Congress. Lawmakers ignored most of the Interior Department budget cuts the Trump administration proposed for fiscal 2026, which included transferring some national parks to local governments or private entities.