Executives order this year the Trump administration has asked agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that may speed fossil fuel projects by weakening or circumventing environmental reviews.

The conservation law, designed to protect species in peril of extinction, has also come under attack this year for being too slow and ineffective at ensuring recovery.

North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, recently used the “Hotel California” analogy to describe what he believes is the ESA’s inability to free listed species from what he called its “death row.”

The Endangered Species Act “should be a hotel of transition,” Burgum told HuffPost. “Not permanent residence.”

Conservatives and industry groups have been similarly vocal in recent weeks, with Burgum the latest to make headlines with the provocative comparison.

President Donald Trump’s administration is also determined to pare back the ESA, including through a proposed rule that would for the first time allow regulators to consider economic impacts when deciding whether to list a species.

It has long been a political hot potato. But the survival of the country’s most critical conservation law is now under assault from multiple angles.

Scientists and legal experts interviewed by HuffPost agreed that the ESA is powerful and works, despite the law’s current troubled standing. They noted that the Act has been unable to stop thousands of species from disappearing altogether.

The problem, experts said, is the government has consistently failed to provide enough funding, staff, and other resources to implement the ESA’s potentially transformational vision. Years of inadequate support for the law has also been exacerbated by policy flip-flops from one presidential administration to the next.

“The biggest problem with the ESA is that we’ve let the best be the enemy of the good,” said Jake Li, a staff attorney at Earthjustice. “You have this thing where we put the handcuffs on, but we don’t give anyone the handcuff key.”

As the Trump administration ramps up efforts to curtail the ESA, it’s easy to lose sight of the larger context of the law’s history.

Critics have long targeted the ESA, which began in 1973 during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Trump’s Interior Department is not the first to use the law as a political football.

Congress debated how to make the law stronger instead of weaker, ramping up pressure to list imperiled species and ensuring timely recovery. In 1990, lawmakers established recovery goals and deadlines. Those key provisions were only temporarily halted when the George W. Bush administration instituted a three-year “recovery moratorium” ― which was overturned by a federal court.

“The ESA has a record of preventing extinctions, but because of a lot of political games it hasn’t gotten the funding it needs to do more in terms of recovery,” Li said.

Federal officials have taken only 26 species off the endangered list since 1973 after determining they had fully recovered, according to Fish and Wildlife Service data. But at least 47 others are believed to have gone extinct after being placed on the list or while awaiting a decision.

“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” said David Wilcove, a Princeton University ecology professor. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”

Species “continue to get added to the list long after there’s any hope of recovery,” he added. “In effect we’re playing Russian roulette with species. We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them. That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

A signature example of the ESA at work is the story of the bald eagle.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT decimated eagle populations across the U.S., with only a few hundred pairs of nesting pairs in the lower 48 states.

DDT was eventually banned, and the bird got the added protection of ESA listing in 1978. With legal safeguards, numbers started to increase.

By 2007, the bald eagle was removed from the list, as nearly 10,000 pairs of the national symbol nested in the contiguous states.

Other notable success stories include the American alligator, the humpback whale, and the Steller sea lion.

Wildlife in the U.S. aren’t always safe on federal lands like national parks. The ESA’s reach extends to species on private property.

If an animal is found to live on private ground, regulators must consult with the landowner before they can use the land for activities that might harm the species.

“The ESA says your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted. That discourages landowners from cooperating,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary Law School.

The solution, many researchers say, is to increase conservation on private lands with incentives such as tax breaks and conservation easements. Easements, for example, are contracts that compensate a landowner for habitat protection.

For years, Congress has tried to address that potential disconnect with conservation programs that offer financial help.

Programs such as Safe Harbor and others have helped the government work with private landowners. But they’ve been in steady decline for years, leaving many conservationists concerned.

For decades, the ESA had bipartisan support, but since the 1980s, it has become one of the most litigated environmental laws.

George H.W. Bush, for example, signed a rule exempting Florida Cracker cattle from being listed, but his son reversed it.

Bill Clinton made the ESA permanent in 1993, but only after temporarily exempting certain ranchers. During the Obama administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed back against listings and regulations until he was stopped by the courts.

Trump now appears set on not just reversing regulations but eliminating them entirely.

“The real fear,” said Jake Li, “is that the Trump administration’s proposal could upend this balance.”

The country is seeing a strong conservative majority in the Supreme Court and lower courts, combined with one of the most aggressive rollback of protections in the ESA’s history.

Conservationists are also deeply concerned about changes to the ESA just as species are facing greater threats from climate change and habitat loss. “A quarter of all species are at risk of extinction in a business as usual climate future,” Harvard Law School’s Andrew Mergen told HuffPost.

The Trump administration’s proposals add more pressure, conservationists say, and they are less optimistic than Wilcove and others that government will “put up enough money” for the ESA to work as intended.

“It’s not that we’re not seeing species recover,” Mergen said. “We know how to do it. The real challenge is committing enough political will and funding to recovery. Not dismantling the protections that keep species alive.”