Three federal rules changed how the Endangered Species Act works this summer. All three are in effect now. Very little of the writing most people read about wildlife has caught up with any of them.
Here is the stranger part. Try to find out how many species the Act currently protects. The Fish and Wildlife Service report page that holds the answer serves a “Loading…” placeholder and never finishes. The older summary page it replaced returns an error.
So the law moved and the scoreboard went dark in the same year. That explains a lot about why published writing on endangered species is either out of date or uncited.
What follows is the regulatory record with document numbers, the two federal species counts that disagree with each other, and the short list of individual actions that have measured effects attached.
Who runs the Endangered Species Act, and how a species gets listed
Two agencies share the job. The Fish and Wildlife Service, inside the Interior Department, handles terrestrial and freshwater species. The National Marine Fisheries Service, part of NOAA inside the Commerce Department, handles marine and anadromous species, meaning fish like salmon that move between salt and fresh water. The Service page explaining this, updated 21 September 2026, says both agencies administer the Act, which was enacted on 28 December 1973 and sits in the US Code at 16 U.S.C. 1531 to 1544.
The split confuses people, and the agencies do not always help. NOAA Fisheries’ own page on listing species, last updated 27 June 2023, walks through the whole process in the first person and never mentions the Fish and Wildlife Service at all.
Almost anything is eligible. The Fish and Wildlife Service states that all species of plants and animals except pest insects can be listed.
The process has a door the public can open. Any interested person may file a written petition. The agency then has 90 days, to the extent practicable, to decide whether it presents substantial information that listing may be warranted. A positive finding triggers a status review of the species’ biology, abundance, trends and threats. Within twelve months the agency must find listing warranted, not warranted, or warranted but precluded by higher priority work. That last category is not a parking space. It requires a fresh determination every year until the agency proposes a rule or finds listing unwarranted.
Five factors drive the decision: habitat damage or destruction, overuse for commercial, recreational, scientific or educational purposes, disease or predation, inadequate existing protections, and other natural or manmade factors.
Three final rules took effect between August and September
Each of these is a final rule, published in the Federal Register, with a document number you can look up yourself. None is a proposal, a memo or a plan.
The regulatory definition of “harm” was rescinded
Federal Register document 2026-14195, “Rescinding the Definition of ‘Harm’ Under the Endangered Species Act,” was published on 14 July 2026 and took effect on 14 September 2026. It is a joint rule from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Its summary says the rescission removes the regulatory definition of “harm” from Title 50 of the Code of Federal Regulations, parts 17 and 222.
The distinction matters. What came out is a definition the agencies wrote into their own regulations, not statutory text written by Congress. It is the definition that counted significant modification of habitat as a way of harming a listed animal, the reading the Supreme Court upheld in Babbitt v. Sweet Home.
You can check this without trusting anyone’s summary. On 20 October 2026 the current text of 50 CFR 17.3, the definitions section for endangered and threatened wildlife and plants, no longer lists “Harm” among its defined terms. “Harass” is still there. The amendment citation at the foot of the section reads 91 FR 43317, 14 July 2026.
The “blanket rule” option was removed
Federal Register document 2026-14633 was published on 21 July 2026 and took effect on 20 August 2026. It is a Fish and Wildlife Service rule amending 50 CFR part 17, under docket FWS-HQ-ES-2025-0029.
The blanket rule was a shortcut. Section 4(d) lets the Service write protective regulations for threatened species, a legal tier below endangered. Rather than writing one for each newly listed threatened species, the Service could extend most endangered-level prohibitions automatically. That option is gone. Protection for a newly listed threatened species now arrives only through a species-specific 4(d) rule, which is its own separate rulemaking.
The Service says the change “will result in no immediate changes to protections for currently listed threatened species.” The same rule reports that roughly 48 percent of threatened wildlife species and 6 percent of threatened plant species are already protected by species-specific 4(d) rules, and that between its 2019 and 2024 rules the Service listed or reclassified 46 threatened species, 35 animals and 11 plants.
There is a real trade-off in that mechanism, and both halves are worth stating. A species-specific rule can be tailored to what a particular species needs, and it goes through public comment, so people affected get a say. It also requires a separate rulemaking for every species, and threatened plants currently sit at 6 percent coverage.
Critical habitat exclusions were codified
Federal Register document 2026-14629 was published on 21 July 2026 and took effect on 20 August 2026, also amending 50 CFR part 17. Section 4(b)(2) requires the Service to consider the economic impact, the national security impact and any other relevant impact of designating an area as critical habitat, and authorizes excluding an area when the benefits of excluding outweigh the benefits of designating. The new rule writes down when and how the Service performs that weighing, which the Service says is meant to add transparency and certainty.
Two proposals that are still only proposals
On 21 November 2025 the agencies published two more proposed rules, with comments closing 22 December 2025. Document 2025-20549 would revise section 4 procedures for listing, reclassifying and delisting species and for designating critical habitat, at 50 CFR part 424. Document 2025-20551 would revise the section 7 interagency cooperation regulations, which govern how federal agencies work together on actions affecting listed species, at 50 CFR part 402.
Neither appears to have been finalized. On 20 October 2026 the electronic Code of Federal Regulations showed the most recent amendment to both part 402 and part 424 as 6 May 2024. Nothing in either part has changed since. Both remain proposals, a different legal status from the three rules above, and should not be described in the same breath.
The three final rules are also being challenged in court. The sources behind this article report the specific suits through a single secondary tracker, so no case numbers appear here. The point stands without them: a rule in effect today can still be stayed or set aside, and the law here is live rather than settled. Treat any confident statement about current Endangered Species Act protections, including this one, as having a shelf life.
Nobody can give you a current count of listed species
Two federal sources give two numbers, and they count different things.
The Congressional Research Service report The Endangered Species Act: Overview and Implementation, R46677, dated 4 March 2021, states that as of October 2020, 2,363 species were listed, 71 percent of them in the United States. That covers both agencies.
The Fish and Wildlife Service document ESA Basics: 50 Years of Conserving Endangered Species, dated February 2023, states that the Service alone has listed 2,375 species worldwide, of which 1,678 occur in the United States. It also says 55 species have been delisted because they recovered, 37 within the previous ten years.
These are not really in conflict. One counts all listing agencies, the other counts one. One counts worldwide listings, the other separates out the US total. They are two different numbers of two different vintages, and neither is current. Report both and resist the urge to average them.
Why is a current number so hard to get? The live data sits in the Service’s Environmental Conservation Online System, whose summary reports are built to render in a browser. Fetch the species-listings-by-taxonomic-group report without one and the page contains navigation, a header and an image labelled “Loading…”. No table. The old “Box Score” address, for years the standard citation for a running tally, returns an error.
The agency’s narrative pages fill the gap with adjectives. Its endangered species program page says that over 50 years the Act has prevented the probable extinction of hundreds of species and contributed to the recovery of many others. No count. No percentage. No date on the claim.
That explains a pattern you will notice once you look for it. When a blog or a press release gives you a precise current number of listed species, check whether it carries a citation. Most do not, because there is no easy one to give.
Thirty percent by 2030, and why the US is not in it
The international framework people mean by “30×30” is the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in December 2022 at the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Convention Secretariat describes it as containing 4 goals for 2050 and 23 targets for 2030. Target 3 is formally titled “Conserve 30% of Land, Waters and Seas,” and its text directs that by 2030 at least 30 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas be conserved.
None of it reaches the United States directly. Congressional Research Service product IN12073, dated 9 January 2023, records the United States as the only UN member state that has never ratified the Convention, which was signed and sent to the Senate in 1993. That leaves the country outside the room where those targets are negotiated and outside the votes that adopt them.
A separate domestic goal existed and is no longer in force. Executive Order 14008, signed 27 January 2021, contained the directive to conserve at least 30 percent of US lands and waters by 2030. Executive Order 14154, signed 20 January 2025 and published 29 January 2025 at 90 FR 8353, revokes it at Section 4(a)(iii) along with eleven other orders, and a thirteenth at Section 5(a). Executive Order 14148, signed the same day, revoked it as well. NOAA’s America the Beautiful frequently asked questions page is still live and still describes the 30 percent goal in the present tense, with no notice of the revocation. It also concedes something worth holding onto: the executive order never defined the level of conservation that would count. Any US progress percentage published between 2021 and 2025 rested on a denominator nobody had defined.
“Threatened” means two different things
The International Union for Conservation of Nature publishes the Red List, a global assessment that carries no legal force anywhere. Version 2026-1, accessed on 20 October 2026, reports more than 49,500 species threatened with extinction out of 175,909 assessed, which the site puts at 28 percent of assessed species.
In the Red List’s own system, set out in IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria: Version 3.1, second edition, 2012, “threatened” covers exactly three categories: Critically Endangered, meaning an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild, Endangered, a very high risk, and Vulnerable, a high risk. Near Threatened is not one of them. Data Deficient means there is not enough information, and the document says plainly that it is not a category of threat.
The headline numbers carry a caveat that rarely survives into coverage. On its Summary Statistics page, IUCN notes that “extinction risk has been evaluated for less than 5% of the world’s described species”, and says that is why it cannot give a precise estimate of how many species are threatened. That same page names only eight categories, leaving out Not Evaluated, and gives no overall totals in its text, while the front page leads with them. Two pages for one version do not present the same picture, which is worth knowing rather than resolving.
Under the Endangered Species Act, “threatened” is something else entirely: a legal status one tier below endangered, with its own regulations. The two systems use the same word for different things. “This plant is threatened” tells you almost nothing until you know which list is talking.
What the federal numbers support
The Fish and Wildlife Service publishes a table of top threats to birds in the US, ordered by median estimated annual mortality and marked “As of 2017.” It is the most useful page in this subject for separating real action from gesture.
Cats sit at the top: 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds a year, median 2.4 billion, citing Loss and colleagues, 2013. Building glass comes next at 365 to 988 million, median 599 million. Vehicles follow at 89 to 340 million. Communication towers are listed at 6.6 million. Land-based wind turbines come in at a median of 234,012.
Read that last number against the first. The median estimate for cats is roughly ten thousand times the median for land-based wind turbines. Public argument about birds and energy is not proportioned to the agency’s own published figures.
The Service is candid about the limits. True estimates of mortality are difficult to determine, the table covers only human-caused sources, and habitat loss is likely the greatest threat of all but very difficult to assess directly, which is why it sits in the table with no numbers at all.
Four individual actions here come with published effect sizes. Almost everything else comes with none.
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Keep your cat indoors, and understand what that does and does not fix. Loss, Will and Marra, in Nature Communications in 2013, estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.9 to 20.7 billion mammals a year in the United States, and report that un-owned cats rather than owned pets cause the majority of that mortality. Your cat is a real contribution. It is a bounded one.
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Treat the outside of your windows, not the inside. The Service’s best-practices document on bird collisions, published January 2016 and updated February 2021, reports that 56 percent of collision mortality happens at low-rise buildings of four to eleven stories, 44 percent at urban and rural residences, and under 1 percent at high-rises. Houses, not skyscrapers. It says applying a product to the outer surface of the glass is always most effective, and gives dimensions: vertical stripes at least a quarter inch wide spaced no more than 4 inches apart, horizontal stripes at least a quarter inch wide spaced no more than 2 inches apart, dots at least 0.2 inches across. Making your own pattern runs under 15 cents per square foot. The Service also says more research is needed on the most effective dimensions, so treat these as best current guidance, not a settled answer.
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If you plant for birds, aim above 70 percent native plant biomass. Narango, Tallamy and Marra, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, found that residential yards dominated by nonnative plants hold fewer arthropods, pushing Carolina chickadees onto less preferred prey and reducing the young they produce. Reproduction was unsustainable compared with yards above 70 percent native plant biomass, and the authors describe nonnative-dominated properties as population sinks for insectivorous birds. The threshold is the actionable part. “Plant some natives” is not.
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If you hunt, lead-free ammunition is a documented wildlife issue and a voluntary one. The Service says a lead fragment no bigger than a grain of rice can sicken or kill an animal the size of a bald eagle, because fragments stay in remains that scavengers eat. Its response is an incentive program, not a rule: 26 national wildlife refuges across 19 states, up to $50 per box of rifle ammunition and $25 per box of shotgun or muzzleloader ammunition, two boxes per hunter. Anyone telling you federal law restricts lead ammunition here is wrong.
For scale behind all four: Rosenberg and colleagues, in Science in 2019, reported a net loss approaching 3 billion birds across North America, about 29 percent of 1970 abundance, over 48 years of monitoring.
When to hand something to a professional
A bird that hits your window and stays stunned, or is visibly injured, is a job for a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Your state wildlife agency can tell you who is licensed near you. Do not try to feed or treat it.
A dead or obviously sick eagle, or several dead birds in one place, should be reported to your state wildlife agency rather than moved. Clusters can mean poisoning or disease, and someone needs to see them where they fell.
If you own land where a listed species might occur and you are planning to clear, drain or build, the “harm” rescission changed a regulatory definition, not the statute, and the rules are in litigation. Talk to your Fish and Wildlife Service field office or a consulting biologist before the equipment arrives, not after.
Three document numbers worth keeping
The most useful habit in this subject is asking whether a claim comes with a document number.
Every final rule has one. For the three described here they are 2026-14195 for the rescinded “harm” definition, 2026-14633 for the removed blanket rule, and 2026-14629 for critical habitat exclusions. Each is retrievable at federalregister.gov, and each states its own publication date, effective date, agencies and affected parts of the Code of Federal Regulations, with no intermediary deciding what it means.
The habit works in reverse. A current count of listed species, a percentage of US land conserved, a claim about what the Act now covers: if no citation is attached, the likeliest reason is that the underlying page would not load for whoever wrote it either.
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Sources
- Federal Register (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service). “Rescinding the Definition of “Harm” Under the Endangered Species Act (final rule, document 2026-14195).” federalregister.gov
- Federal Register (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Regulations Pertaining to Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants (final rule, document 2026-14633).” federalregister.gov
- Federal Register (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Regulations for Designating Critical Habitat (final rule, document 2026-14629).” federalregister.gov
- Federal Register (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service). “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Interagency Cooperation Regulations (proposed rule, document 2025-20551).” federalregister.gov
- Federal Register (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service). “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Listing Endangered and Threatened Species and Designating Critical Habitat (proposed rule, document 2025-20549).” federalregister.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (National Archives). “50 CFR 17.3, Definitions.” ecfr.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (National Archives). “50 CFR Part 402, Interagency Cooperation, Endangered Species Act of 1973, as Amended.” ecfr.gov
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “About the Endangered Species Act.” fws.gov
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Listing and Classification: What We Do.” fws.gov
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “ESA Basics: 50 Years of Conserving Endangered Species (February 2023).” fws.gov
- Congressional Research Service (via EveryCRSReport). “The Endangered Species Act: Overview and Implementation, R46677, 4 March 2021.” everycrsreport.com
- Congressional Research Service (via EveryCRSReport). “Convention on Biological Diversity: Recent Decisions Affecting U.S. Engineering Biology, IN12073, 9 January 2023.” everycrsreport.com
- NOAA Fisheries. “Listing Species Under the Endangered Species Act.” fisheries.noaa.gov
- Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and its 23 Targets.” cbd.int
- Federal Register (Executive Office of the President). “Executive Order 14154, Unleashing American Energy, 90 FR 8353.” federalregister.gov
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “America the Beautiful: Frequently Asked Questions.”
- International Union for Conservation of Nature. “The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, version 2026-1.” iucnredlist.org
- International Union for Conservation of Nature. “IUCN Red List Summary Statistics (version 2026-1).” iucnredlist.org
- International Union for Conservation of Nature. “IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria: Version 3.1, second edition (2012).” portals.iucn.org
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Threats to Birds.” fws.gov
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Reducing Bird Collisions with Buildings and Building Glass: Best Practices (January 2016, updated February 2021).” fws.gov
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Lead-Free Ammunition Incentive Program.” fws.gov
- PubMed. “Loss SR, Will T, Marra PP. “The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States.” Nature Communications, 2013. PMID 23360987. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2380.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Narango DL, Tallamy DW, Marra PP. “Nonnative plants reduce population growth of an insectivorous bird.” PNAS, 2018. PMID 30348792. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1809259115.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Rosenberg KV, et al. “Decline of the North American avifauna.” Science, 2019. PMID 31604313. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw1313.” doi.org