The Endangered Species Act is supposed to protect species in nature from becoming extinct, but it’s tended to threaten the extinction of American businesses when used by a blunt force instrument in the hands of the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
A favorite game of federal regulators has long been to claim that various developments or business explorations threaten any number of “endangered” species. And there are a lot of those. More than 700 species are listed as “endangered,” which gives bureaucrats lots of options when coming up with excuses for harassing business.