Wednesday, January 28, 2026
■ Today's Top News
"Trump’s authoritarianism, grift, and pro-oligarchy agenda is making our country less healthy, free, and just."
By Brad Reed
A third No Kings nationwide protest has been scheduled, US organizers announced on Wednesday.
The official No Kings Coalition website revealed that the next day of protest will take place on Saturday, March 28, with a flagship rally set to take place in Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The coalition said that the third edition of the No Kings protest is being planned in response to the Trump administration’s “escalation in Minnesota,” where federal immigration enforcement agents have so far killed two local residents: Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three children, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse.
“The Trump regime is doubling down on fear and force to intimidate communities and silence dissent,” said Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, a key organizer of No Kings events. “What we are seeing in Minnesota is a tragic example of that, with immigrant families and Black and brown communities being terrorized. From Alex Pretti to Renee Good to the tens of thousands showing up in subzero weather, we are also seeing a massive movement of brave people standing up for their neighbors and against this regime.”
But while the main event for No Kings 3 will be held in Minnesota, organizers emphasized that the effects of the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities are being felt across the country.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said that teachers all over the US are seeing their classrooms dwindle in size as students are increasingly fearful of being picked up by federal agents if they leave their homes.
“What we are seeing instead is a stunning lack of humanity,” Pringle said. “Absences are rising, mental health needs are spiking, and trauma is being injected into classrooms nationwide—harming students of every background and immigration status.”
Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, co-presidents of Public Citizen, said that President Donald Trump’s actions on immigration were just one part of a broader authoritarian agenda that must be resisted.
“Trump’s authoritarianism, grift, and pro-oligarchy agenda is making our country less healthy, free, and just,” they said. “As [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents invade cities and towns, targeting and harassing Brown, Black, and Asian people because of the color of their skin, brutalizing immigrants, arresting small children, pepper spraying protesters, killing people in detention and on the street, Americans everywhere must peacefully pour into the streets and loudly and say we refuse to live in a kingdom ruled by a wannabe dictator.”
Bishop William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach, said that demonstrators at the event shouldn’t just be thinking about how to resist the Trump administration, but how to build a better nation after he inevitably leaves office.
“Americans from every walk of life have come together and built a movement that says, ‘We will not bow,’” said Barber. “At this moment, we must say resistance is essential, but it’s not enough. We’re going to build power loving forward together to reconstruct an America where all of us can thrive.”
The No Kings 2 demonstrations, which took place on October 18 and drew an estimated 5 million protesters, were among the largest one-day demonstrations in US history.
Making the film taught Martin that "it is completely undeniable" that the US military "is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth."
By Olivia Rosane
It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?
The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defense contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.
The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released this year independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron. The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.
"When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told
Common Dreams.World’s Largest Polluter?
RIMPAC training exercises are shown in a still from Earth’s Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.
It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.
This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.
As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”
“You have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.
In one particularly candid interview, a major general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”
And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check,” he says.
Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.
They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.
“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams. “So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
'Human Detritus'
A helmet and dog tag are seen in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in a still from the film Earth’s Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.
“Once you get into the research, you realize every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it’s not just emissions, it’s the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.
The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.
Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.
“We’re fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
“No matter what you think you know, it’s worse. It’s actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.
One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles. “My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.
In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.
Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind.”
“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they’re churned up and spit out. They’re the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”
Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.
“This isn’t about service members,” she said. “This isn’t about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We’re fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.
“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.
A Movie and a Movement
People march against US militarism at COP26 in Glasgow, in a still from Earth’s Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realized “it could be 10 documentaries.”
She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”
But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalized me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore’s filmography.
Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire.”
“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this. If you care about cold water and good air, you can’t walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”
She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can’t get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can’t. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”
Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.
Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing “profound climate anxiety” following the birth of the pairs’ first child. She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.
Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it’s not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”
The sense of urgency has only increased with President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorize US cities.
Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarization of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.
“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it’s to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organizations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”
So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.
But education is not her only goal.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.
For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defense, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way. It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.
While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilization against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.
“There’s so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that’s our vision.”
“It’s like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fiber of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”
To attend a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy, see the schedule here. To host a screening of your own, email theempirefiles@gmail.com.
Members of the GOP-controlled election board "are abusing their power," a voting rights group said. "Perpetuating misinformation about elections can lead to threats against local election officials who refuse to cave to lies about the 2020 election."
By Stephen Prager
The FBI on Wednesday executed a search warrant at the warehouse that serves as the election hub for Fulton County, Georgia—a location central to President Donald Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories.
Bureau sources confirmed to CBS News that they had conducted a “court-authorized activity” in connection with an investigation related to the 2020 election. A spokesperson for the FBI field office in Atlanta said no additional details can be provided because “the investigation into this matter is ongoing.”
Fulton County Clerk Ché Alexander told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that a large number of agents were seen entering the warehouse and hauling out boxes of ballots.
“The FBI agents are here to get the 2020 ballots,” Alexander said. “They’re all here—trucks, everything.”
Former President Joe Biden narrowly won the state of Georgia en route to defeating Trump in 2020. But Trump has long alleged—through numerous disproven claims—that his loss was the result of widespread voter fraud.
Fulton County, which contains most of the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta, was at the center of the misleading allegations spread by Trump and allies, who claimed, among other things, that election workers had surreptitiously tallied tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots.
Despite these claims being thoroughly refuted by Republican election officials in the state, Trump infamously attempted to pressure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” for him, which would allow him to win the state in the Electoral College.
In 2023, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought racketeering charges against Trump and 18 of his associates over the scheme, which was described as part of a conspiracy to illegally overturn Georgia’s election result. However, that case never made it to trial after being bogged down by a scandal involving a relationship between Willis and the special prosecutor assigned to the case, which ultimately led to it being thrown out in November.
At a speech last week in Davos, Switzerland, Trump seemed to warn that retribution against those he claims to have been involved with election theft was coming. Speaking of what he said was a “rigged election,” Trump said: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That’s probably breaking news.”
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) had already sued Fulton County in December for access to its ballots and other records from the 2020 presidential vote, a lawsuit Democracy Docket said “came after far-right members of the state’s GOP-controlled election board asked the department for assistance in obtaining 2020 ballots and voting records.”
Prior to that, Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s “weaponization task force,” sent a letter to a Fulton County judge demanding to “immediately access” 148,000 absentee ballots being stored in a ballot warehouse, which he said were needed as part of an “election integrity” investigation being conducted by the DOJ.
In October, the New York Times reported that a top “election integrity” official in the Trump administration had urged the president to invoke a “national emergency” to allow for more federal control over election rules typically left to state and local governments.
“I would have been unsurprised if the Fulton County DA was targeted by the administration for investigation,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a political scientist at the Georgia State University College of Law. “But going directly after the Fulton County elections office is an entirely different and potentially startling development.”
The voting rights group All Voting Is Local said in a statement that “by first calling on the Trump administration’s Department of Justice to investigate Fulton again, and now supporting the lawsuit, the conspiracy theorists who now make up a majority of the State Election Board are abusing their power. Perpetuating misinformation about elections can lead to threats against local election officials who refuse to cave to lies about the 2020 election.”
This article has been updated with a new quote from All Voting Is Local.
"These private insurer-run plans are more expensive AND lead to worse outcomes for patients," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. "It’s time to rein in Medicare DisAdvantage and protect traditional Medicare."
By Jake Johnson
A report released earlier this month to little fanfare estimated that federal overpayments to privately run Medicare Advantage plans could total $76 billion this year—or potentially a staggering $1.2 trillion over the next decade if current trends persist.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent congressional agency that advises lawmakers on Medicare, calculates overpayments by comparing spending on Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to what the federal government would have spent if MA enrollees were on traditional fee-for-service Medicare.
In a report published earlier this month, MedPAC showed that overpayments to MA plans this year are projected to be around $76 billion. Roughly $22 billion of that total is due to coding practices by MA providers, which are notorious for making patients appear sicker than they are to receive larger payments from the federal government. MA plans are paid lump sums to cover expected future healthcare services for patients based on their risk scores.
Another factor driving overpayments to MA plans—which now cover 55% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries—is a phenomenon known as favorable selection. MA enrollees tend to be healthier on average than recipients of traditional Medicare, resulting in higher payments to Medicare Advantage plans than are necessary based on patients’ healthcare needs.
According to MedPAC, favorable selection will account for $57 billion of the expected overpayments to MA plans this year. The Trump administration gave Medicare Advantage plans a more than $25 billion boost in federal payments for 2026, even amid mounting bipartisan concerns about fraud in the program.
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (NCPSSM) said the MedPAC analysis “confirms that these private plans are bleeding taxpayers for billions of dollars more than traditional Medicare would cost for comparable enrollees.”
US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote in response to the MedPAC findings that “Medicare DisAdvantage will rip off American taxpayers to the tune of $76 billion in 2026.”
“These private insurer-run plans are more expensive AND lead to worse outcomes for patients,” Jayapal, a leading supporter of Medicare for All legislation in the House, wrote in a social media post. “It’s time to rein in Medicare DisAdvantage and protect traditional Medicare.”
The MedPAC analysis was released days after Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee published a report revealing how UnitedHealth Group, the largest provider of MA plans in the US, “has turned risk adjustment into a major profit-centered strategy,” reaping massive payments from the federal government through upcoding.
NCPSSM noted that “while UnitedHealth... has emerged as the worst offender, it’s abundantly clear that many MA insurers are engaged in these shady practices.”
“Look no further than insurers’ reliance on prior authorizations for procedures and treatments that normally would be automatically covered in traditional Medicare,” the group said. “This includes denying skilled nursing care that jeopardizes older patients who have nowhere else to turn.”
Tehran's admonition came after Trump said that a "massive armada" is heading to Iran—similar language he used before invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president.
By Brett Wilkins
As President Donald Trump escalated his renewed military aggression against Iran, Tehran warned Wednesday that any US attack would trigger unprecedented retaliation.
“Last time the US blundered into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it squandered over $7 trillion and lost more than 7,000 American lives,” Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations said on X Wednesday. “Iran stands ready for dialogue based on mutual respect and interests—BUT IF PUSHED, IT WILL DEFEND ITSELF AND RESPOND LIKE NEVER BEFORE!”
This, after Trump said on his Truth Social network that “a massive armada is headed to Iran” with “great power, enthusiasm, and purpose.”
Trump said nearly the same thing before invading Venezuela and kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this month.
“It is a larger fleet, headed by the great Aircraft Carrier Abraham Lincoln, than that sent to Venezuela,” Trump continued. “Like with Venezuela, it is, ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary. Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal—NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS—one that is good for all parties.”
“Time is running out, it is truly of the essence!” the president added. “As I told Iran once before, MAKE A DEAL! They didn’t, and there was ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again.”
Allies of both the United States and Iran added to mounting tensions.
Alluding to the recent street protests that were brutally crushed by the Iranian government at the cost of at least hundreds and possibly thousands of lives, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Wednesday: “A regime that can only hold onto power through sheer violence and terror against its own population; its days are numbered. It could be a matter of weeks, but this regime has no legitimacy to govern the country.”
Meanwhile, the Iran-aligned militia Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq said it is ready for “total war” if the US attacks. There are still thousands of US troops in Iraq nearly 23 years after the second American invasion of the country; Iranian forces have attacked US military assets in the Middle East following past American strikes on Iran or its officials.
After a joint phone call, the foreign ministers of Iran and its regional rival, Saudi Arabia, said any attack on Iran would have “dangerous consquences.”
Their call followed a Tuesday phone conversation between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“The threats and psychological operations of the Americans are aimed at disrupting the security of the region and will achieve nothing other than instability,” Pezeshkian told the crown prince, according to Iranian media.
Bin Salman told Pezeshkian that Saudi Arabia “will not allow the use of its airspace or territory in any military actions against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any attacks from any side, regardless of its destination,” a transcript of the call said.
Last June, Israel launched a large-scale attack on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, killing hundreds of people. Later that month, Trump ordered US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran retaliated with a massive but limited missile attack on Israel, killing around two dozen people and injuring hundreds more.
Responding to Trump’s renewed threats, Lebanese-British journalist Hala Jaber said on X Wednesday that “this is not diplomacy. It is coercion by force, publicly framed as negotiation. The language leaves little room for de-escalation.”
Sniping at Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear sites were destroyed by last year’s strikes, Palestinian-American writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer said, “I thought Trump told us his strikes last summer obliterated Iran’s nuclear program? Also, threatening to bomb a country unless it abandons pursuit of a nuclear deterrent is a pretty counter-productive line of argument.”
US investigative journalist and Drop Site News co-founder Jeremy Scahill took aim at Trump’s claim that US intervention in Iran is about protecting the lives of Iranian protesters—a dubious assertion given his administration’s deadly repression in Minneapolis—saying Wednesday that “at the end of the day... this is about US imperial aims. It’s about oil. It’s about gas. It’s about geopolitical war.’
“This is what it’s been about in terms of US policy toward Iran for decades,” Scahill said. “It was what it was about in 1953 when the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. It was what it was about when the US was supporting the brutal regime of the Shah of Iran, all the way up until the dying days of his regime. This has been what the US sanctions policy against Iran has been about.”
“And in June, when the US and Israel launched 12 days of heavy bombing of Iran in the name of degrading and destroying potential Iranian nuclear capacity, those bombings killed more than 1,000 people,” he continued. “And remember that Donald Trump used the veneer... of negotiations with Iran... to provide cover to do a surprise 12-day bombing of Iran.”
“Nothing the US is doing right now—and I mean absolutely nothing—is about supporting any Iranians,” Scahill added, “except those that the US and Israel believe will be pliable.”
"This study underscores the cruelty and shortsightedness of the Trump administration's slashing of funding and weakening of protections for endangered species," said an expert at the Center for Biological Diversity.
By Jessica Corbett
On the heels of publishing a study that shows 2,204 species across the United States should be considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration for failing to release public records about efforts to dismantle the ESA.
“Americans want to live in a country where animals and plants on the brink of extinction get the protections they need to survive. The Trump administration is hiding information about its efforts to gut these protections,” said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at the nonprofit, in a statement.
“Widespread public support for the Endangered Species Act makes the administration’s secrecy around these rules all the more insidious,” Shannon continued. “Trump hands out favors to his billionaire friends while ignoring the irreplaceable value of our nation’s endangered wildlife. This lawsuit seeks to bring that corruption out into the open.”
Filed in federal court in Washington, DC, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit could make the departments of Commerce and the Interior, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), turn over documents about potential revisions to the ESA proposed in response to orders from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“Thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them.”
The complaint warns that if the administration’s proposed rules are implemented, they “will dismantle essential protections by, amongst other things, inserting economic considerations into the listing process, curtailing critical habitat designations, prohibiting habitat protections for species threatened by climate change, weakening consultation mandates, and removing nearly all protections for newly designated threatened species.”
“On July 3, 2025, the center submitted FOIA requests to each defendant seeking records relating to the development of these proposed rules,” the filing details. “The requested records are vital to understanding the basis, rationale, and likely impacts of the agencies’ proposed rules. Such information is necessary for meaningful public participation in the rulemaking process.”
“Without timely disclosure, the center and its members cannot effectively understand or respond to the agencies’ proposed rules, thereby undermining FOIA’s core purpose of ensuring government transparency and accountability,” the complaint adds, noting that the center sent follow-up requests early last month.
The suit over Trump’s “extinction plan” records followed publication of a study in which four experts at the center argued for protecting thousands more species under the landmark 1973 law—which, the analysis notes, “currently protects 1,682 species as endangered or threatened.”
“According to the independent scientific organization NatureServe, however, there are more than 10,000 imperiled species in the United States that may need protection,” explains the study, published in PeerJ. “One barrier to protecting recognized imperiled species is a lack of threats information.”
The center’s experts reviewed all species recognized NatureServe as “critically imperiled” or “imperiled” and identified 2,204 species “where there is sufficient threat information to indicate ESA protection may be warranted.”
A majority of those species—1,320—are plants, followed by 309 insects, 115 terrestrial snails, 90 freshwater snails, 85 fish, 25 lichen and fungi, 23 reptiles and turtles, 21 amphibians, 14 birds, and various others.
Given that the FWS “has on average listed just 32 species per year since the law was passed,” the analysis warns, “at this rate, most species currently recognized as imperiled and facing threats will not receive consideration for protection within any meaningful timeframe.”
The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for protecting the Mount Pinos sooty grouse under the Endangered Species Act in June 2024. The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced in January 2026 that it is considering protections. (Photo by James Bland/Center for Biological Diversity)
Noah Greenwald, a study co-author and co-director of endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, stressed in a Tuesday statement that “thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them.”
“This study underscores the cruelty and shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s slashing of funding and weakening of protections for endangered species,” Greenwald declared. “That so many species need help highlights just how much we’re degrading the natural world at our own peril.”
“Humans need clean air and water and a stable climate, just like the many species in decline,” he added. “People are destroying the wild places where plants and animals live, and that habitat destruction remains the greatest threat to species’ survival both in the United States and around the world.”
Habitat destruction threatens 92% of the 2,204 species, according to the analysis. Other notable threats include invasive species (33%), small population size (26%), climate change (18%), altered disturbance regime (12%), disease and predation (8%), over-utilization (7%), and inadequacy of existing regulations (4%).
Last week, in response to petitions from the center and other groups, the FWS announced that 10 species across the country—including the Olympic marmot, gray cat’s eye plant, Alvord chub fish, Mount Pinos sooty grouse, and San Joaquin tiger beetle—warrant consideration for ESA protections.
“I’m relieved to see these 10 precious plants and animals move closer to the protection they so desperately need,” said Greenwald. “Unfortunately they’re joining a backlog of hundreds of species waiting for safeguards during an administration that didn’t protect a single species last year—the first time that’s happened since 1981. As the global extinction crisis deepens, imperiled wildlife need the Endangered Species Act’s strong protections now more than ever.”
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