California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed two federal lawsuits on Wednesday challenging a set of Trump administration rules that weaken Endangered Species Act protections, arguing the rollbacks could push already struggling species closer to extinction. The suits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, target regulations issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the two agencies responsible for enforcing the decades-old law. Bonta is not fighting alone; a coalition of 21 attorneys general is standing behind the effort.
Bonta announced the litigation in a post on X. The lawsuits, detailed in a release from the California Department of Justice, name Washington, Oregon, New York, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Maryland, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia as co-plaintiffs, according to the Oregon Department of Justice.
What the Three Rules Actually Change
The California Department of Justice release lays out the specifics: the challenged rules reduce habitat protections for listed species, create a new process to exclude areas from critical habitat designations, and curtail automatic protections that would otherwise apply to newly listed threatened species. The coalition's complaint argues these changes violate three separate federal statutes — the Endangered Species Act itself, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act, the same release states.
Two of the three rollbacks aren't new. The state's filing notes they reinstate regulations first adopted during Donald Trump's first term, which a federal judge in Northern California vacated in July 2022 before the Biden administration restored stronger protections, as reported by CBS Sacramento. It's a pattern that has repeated across administrations: rules get rolled back, courts step in, and then the next administration reverses course again.
Pacific Coast Species Already Under Pressure
The stakes carry particular weight for West Coast wildlife. Since the Endangered Species Act's enactment under President Richard Nixon in 1973, its protections have prevented 99% of listed species from going extinct and helped recover animals like the California condor, bald eagle, grizzly bear, and grey whale, according to the Washington Office of the Attorney General. Regional species whose recovery plans depend on those same federal safeguards include Pacific salmon, sea otters, and the Southern Resident killer whale — a population that has fallen from 98 whales in 1995 to just 74 in 2026, per the same office.
This isn't the first time the Northern District of California has pushed back on similar rollbacks. In April, the same court struck down four separate Trump administration ESA regulations under Section 7, invalidating a heightened “reasonably certain to occur” standard that agencies had used to evaluate project impacts, according to the Animal Law Podcast.
Part of a Broader Pattern This Month
The lawsuits land just days after President Trump issued a related executive order directing a 90-day Interior Department review of Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves and Mexican wolves. That order came the same week Hoodline reported a gray wolf sighting west of I-5 in Lake County — the first documented in modern history for that area.
Whether the Northern District of California will grant an injunction pausing the rules while litigation plays out remains an open question, as does how quickly federal agencies will respond in court. For now, Bonta's office says the coalition intends to keep fighting the changes through the same federal court that has previously weighed in on ESA disputes.
