Not the target.
A new federal directive says killing an endangered animal is only illegal if you meant to kill that animal. Fell the tree full of protected bats to clear a logging site, drown the salmon run behind a new dam, run the ship through the whales — none of it counts, so long as the creatures weren’t the point.
The directive, what it says, and the law it contradicts are graded FACT — it’s a written order from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and it runs against a 1995 Supreme Court ruling. That it will gut the Endangered Species Act and speed extinctions is the experts’ forecast, graded PROBABLY TRUE and now headed for the courts.
What this page argues
On September 14, 2026, Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik sent his staff a directive that rewrites how the Endangered Species Act is enforced. To be an illegal “take” of a protected species, he wrote, an act must be intentionally directed at a particular animal and have a direct, immediate effect on it. In his words: “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.” A ship that strikes a whale hasn’t taken it “because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale.” Under decades of prior practice, the government held people responsible for foreseeably killing protected wildlife — grizzly bears, manatees, spotted owls — even by accident. The directive, first reported by The New York Times, ends that.
The problem is that Congress and the Supreme Court already answered this question the other way. The Act makes it unlawful to “take” a listed species, and defines “take” to include “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect.” In Babbitt v. Sweet Home (1995), a 6–3 Supreme Court upheld the government’s longstanding reading that “harm” includes significant habitat destruction that actually kills or injures wildlife — and specifically rejected the argument that “take” is limited to acts aimed at particular animals. The Nesvik directive adopts the position of Justice Scalia’s dissent in that case, and pairs with a July 2026 rule that had already rescinded the regulatory definition of “harm.”
The practical effect is sweeping. Experts say it would let timber companies log Pacific Northwest forests knowing they will kill imperiled birds nesting in the trees, and let developers build dams knowing they will kill salmon — along with mining, water diversions, and other activities that predictably kill endangered wildlife without singling out individual animals. Dan Ashe, who ran the Fish and Wildlife Service under Obama, called it “a huge loophole” that “completely relieves people of any responsibility for their actions, even consequences that can be easily predicted.” Even an industry-side lawyer noted that, going forward, essentially only hunters, trappers, and anglers — people acting directly against animals — would still need a permit.
The administration says it is returning the law to its “original intent,” citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision curbing agencies’ power to interpret statutes, and stresses that intentional shooting, trapping, and hunting of protected species remain illegal. That defense is real and we carry it. But the documented core is not in dispute: a single director’s memo has, overnight, narrowed one of the country’s bedrock conservation laws to the vanishing point of intentional targeting — and whether that survives contact with Babbitt and the courts is the open question now being litigated.
We are not claiming the Endangered Species Act has been repealed, or that it is now legal to shoot a condor or trap a grizzly on purpose — intentional killing of listed species remains prohibited, and the administration says so. What changed is the treatment of incidental killing: the foreseeable but unintended deaths caused by logging, dams, mining, and development.
We are not asserting the directive is definitively illegal — that is a strong argument (it conflicts with Babbitt), but a court has to rule, and the administration has a colorable post-2024 statutory-interpretation defense. And we are not claiming any single species is doomed; the extinction warnings are experts’ forecasts of where this leads, graded accordingly.
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Not the target.
A new federal directive says killing an endangered animal is only illegal if you meant to kill that animal. Fell the tree full of protected bats, drown the salmon run behind a dam, run the ship through the whales — none of it counts, so long as the creatures weren't the point.
The memo, the law it breaks, the pairing, the scope, and the fallout.
A Sept. 14, 2026 directive redefines an illegal 'take' as one that intentionally targets a particular animal.
FACTFish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik's directive instructs staff to treat conduct as unlawful 'take' only when it meets four elements: an affirmative act; an act intentionally directed at an animal; a direct and immediate effect; and a particular animal, not populations, future occupants, or unoccupied habitat. Nesvik wrote that 'felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them,' and that a vessel striking a whale has not taken it 'because the vessel's course was not set against the whale.' It reverses decades of practice under which the Service held people liable for foreseeably (even accidentally) harming protected species such as grizzly bears, manatees, and spotted owls. First reported by The New York Times.
Congress and the Supreme Court already rejected the 'intentional targeting only' reading.
FACTThe Endangered Species Act makes it unlawful to 'take' a listed species, and Section 3(19) defines 'take' as 'to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect' — verbs that plainly reach beyond deliberate targeting. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon (1995), the Supreme Court held 6–3 that the government's definition of 'harm' to include 'significant habitat modification or degradation that actually kills or injures wildlife' was reasonable and lawful — and the majority expressly rejected the contention that 'take' is limited to conduct intentionally directed against particular animals. The Nesvik directive adopts precisely the view of Justice Scalia's dissent, which lost.
It follows a July 2026 rule that scrapped the definition of 'harm' — and rests on 'original intent' plus the end of Chevron deference.
FACTIn July 2026 the Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a rule rescinding the longstanding regulatory definition of 'harm,' which had expressly covered habitat modification that kills or injures wildlife; the Sept. 14 directive tells staff how to apply that rule and goes further, imposing the intentional-targeting requirement on 'take' generally. The administration frames this as returning the Act to its 'original intent,' citing the Supreme Court's 2024 Loper Bright decision limiting agencies' authority to interpret statutes, and the agency's July release invoked 'American energy independence' and 'regulatory predictability.' The Interior Department stresses that 'take' still prohibits 'harassing, pursuing, hunting, shooting, wounding, killing, trapping, capturing or collecting' protected wildlife — a point we carry.
In practice, it exempts logging, dams, mining, and development from liability for the wildlife they predictably kill.
FACTExperts and practitioners describe the same effect. Timber companies could log Pacific Northwest forests even knowing it would kill imperiled birds nesting in the trees; developers could build a dam knowing it would kill salmon; the same logic covers mining, water diversions, and ship strikes on whales. Sandi Snodgrass, an industry-side attorney at Holland and Hart whose clients include developers, energy companies, and utilities, said that under the new interpretation the only people still needing an incidental-take permit would be those acting directly against animals — hunters, trappers, anglers, and perhaps pesticide users — though she noted some companies may still seek permits to guard against future administrations or citizen lawsuits.
Experts say it guts the Act and will speed extinctions — and it's headed to court.
PROBABLY TRUEThe consequence and the legal fate are contested, so they're graded as a well-supported forecast, not a settled fact. Dan Ashe, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service under Obama and now heads the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, said the change 'cuts against the entire history of the Endangered Species Act' and 'creates a huge loophole' that 'completely relieves people of any responsibility for their actions, even consequences that can be easily predicted.' The Center for Biological Diversity's Noah Greenwald called it 'basically a free-for-all' that 'would put polluters and other industry before the natural world'; the group's Brett Hartl called it 'cruel and profoundly unlawful.' States and conservation groups have filed numerous lawsuits over the administration's Endangered Species Act rollbacks; because the directive squarely conflicts with Babbitt, its survival in court is genuinely uncertain. The Act is credited with saving the bald eagle, American alligator, and California condor from extinction.
The government’s defense, and why the record cuts against it.
The administration’s case: Congress wrote “take” using hunting verbs — harass, pursue, hunt, shoot, trap — which imply acts aimed at animals, not the side effects of building things. After the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision ending automatic deference to agencies, the argument goes, courts should read the statute’s “best” meaning, and the “best” meaning is narrower than the sweeping habitat rule the agencies had built. Intentional harm to protected species is still illegal; this just stops treating an accident as a crime.
Why the record cuts against it: the Supreme Court already considered and rejected this reading in 1995. “Harm” is one of the statute’s listed verbs, and the Babbitt majority held it naturally covers habitat destruction that actually kills wildlife — refusing to shrink “take” to deliberate targeting. Adopting Scalia’s losing dissent by internal memo does not overrule the majority; it invites the courts to say so. And the agency’s own stated goals — “energy independence,” “regulatory predictability” — describe an industry convenience, not a neutral reading of congressional intent.
The honest bridge: the 2024 end of Chevron deference is real, and it genuinely reopened questions once thought settled — so this is not a frivolous legal position, and a sympathetic court could narrow Babbitt’s reach. That is exactly why the outcome is graded as contested rather than decided. What is not contested is the content of the directive and what it permits in the meantime: while the lawsuits run, the foreseeable killing of endangered wildlife by industry is being treated as legal.
“Future generations” isn’t a slogan. Here’s the chain.
It’s not enough to assert that losing wildlife harms the future. The science draws a specific line: fewer species → degraded natural systems → the loss of things people rely on to eat, drink, and stay healthy. These are the general stakes of biodiversity loss — not a claim that this one directive causes all of them, but the reason the enforcement it ends was protecting more than a mascot.
Biodiversity is collapsing, fast, and human activity is the cause.
FACTThe 2019 IPBES Global Assessment — the most comprehensive of its kind, compiled by 145 experts from 50 countries reviewing ~15,000 sources — found that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history. The average abundance of native species in most land habitats has fallen by at least 20% since 1900; more than 40% of amphibians, about a third of reef-forming corals, and more than a third of marine mammals are threatened. WWF's Living Planet Report 2024 found monitored wildlife populations fell an average of 73% between 1970 and 2020. IPBES ranks the top driver of this loss as changes in land and sea use — exactly the activities (logging, dams, development) the new directive frees from liability.
Those species run the systems that feed, water, and shelter people.
FACTBiodiversity isn't decoration; it's infrastructure. IPBES found that three-quarters of the land environment and about 66% of the ocean have been significantly altered by human action, and warned that this is 'eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.' More than 75% of the world's food crop types depend to some degree on animal pollination, and IPBES put $235–577 billion in annual global crop output at risk from pollinator loss. Wetlands filter water and buffer floods; forests hold soil and regulate water; reefs and mangroves shield coasts from storms. The World Economic Forum estimated that more than half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services. Remove the species that maintain these systems and the services degrade with them.
When a keystone species collapses, people die — and it has been measured.
FACTThe clearest proof that species loss reaches human communities comes from India. In the 1990s the veterinary painkiller diclofenac, given to cattle, poisoned the vultures that scavenged carcasses, driving them to near-total 'functional extinction.' Rotting carcasses piled up, feral dog and rat populations exploded, and pathogens spread through soil and water. In a peer-reviewed 2024 study in the American Economic Review, economists Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan found the vulture collapse increased human mortality by more than 4% in affected districts — an estimated additional half a million human deaths over five years — through the resulting sanitation shock. One unglamorous scavenger, removed, cost half a million lives. That is what 'a loss for future generations' looks like when you put a number on it.
A public inheritance, converted into an industry discount.
This belongs in The Corporate State because of who is relieved of a cost and who absorbs it. The Endangered Species Act made the survival of a grizzly or a salmon run a constraint on what a timber or energy company could do — a rule that treated wildlife as a shared inheritance rather than a line item. The directive flips that: the company keeps the profit, and the loss — an animal that can never be replaced — is pushed onto everyone, and onto everyone not yet born. The agency’s own words name the beneficiary: “energy independence” and “regulatory predictability” for the industries doing the killing.
It sits beside The Climate Question — the same pattern of stripping environmental limits to lower costs for extractive industry — and What the Cuts Let Through, which tracks the harms that follow when enforcement is quietly switched off. Extinction is the one policy outcome with no appeal and no reversal: the bald eagle, the alligator, and the condor were pulled back from its edge by exactly the enforcement this memo ends. That is the sense in which this is a theft from the future — the people who will inherit a poorer world had no vote in the memo that impoverished it.
Questions worth taking seriously
Can a president change a law like this without Congress?
Isn't it fair not to jail someone for an accident?
Why grade the 'it will cause extinctions' claim only PROBABLY TRUE?
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
One memo, one statute, one Supreme Court case.
Every claim on this page grades to one of FACT · PROBABLY TRUE · SOME SMOKE · PURE SPECULATION · FALSE / MISLEADING. The directive and its contents, the statutory definition of “take,” the Babbitt holding, the July 2026 rule, and the administration’s stated rationale are graded FACT. The forecast that it guts the Act and speeds extinctions, and the claim that it is unlawful, are graded PROBABLY TRUE and carried as contested pending the courts.
- Associated Press (Matthew Brown) — “Killing endangered wildlife is legal if they aren’t the target” (Sept 17, 2026), via The Denver Post
- Center for Biological Diversity — the Nesvik memo’s four-element test, the quotes, and the Babbitt conflict (Sept 17, 2026)
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — “Trump Administration Finalizes Endangered Species Act Regulation Reform” (July 2026), the agency’s own account
- Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon, 515 U.S. 687 (1995) — the 6–3 ruling the directive contradicts
- IPBES — 2019 Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (~1 million species threatened; pollination and food-security stakes)
- WWF — Living Planet Report 2024 (average 73% decline in monitored wildlife populations, 1970–2020)
- Frank & Sudarshan — “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India,” American Economic Review (2024)
Full method: Methodology. Home hub: The Corporate State.
Last updated September 18, 2026. The September 14, 2026 Fish and Wildlife Service directive, its four-element narrowing of “take,” Director Nesvik’s quoted examples, the statutory definition of “take,” the 1995 Babbitt v. Sweet Home holding it contradicts, the July 2026 rule rescinding the definition of “harm,” and the administration’s “original intent” / 2024 Loper Bright rationale are graded FACT. The experts’ forecast that the change guts the Endangered Species Act and will speed extinctions, and the claim that it is unlawful, are graded PROBABLY TRUE and carried as contested, with lawsuits pending. We do not claim the Act is repealed or that intentional killing of listed species is now legal. If a detail is wrong or a link 404s, tell us and we’ll fix it publicly.