New Delhi, July 19 -- WASHINGTON - The monarch butterfly has nearly vanished from the western United States, its population down more than 99 percent from counts recorded in the 1980s. On Thursday, the Trump administration made it considerably harder to bring it back.

In a pair of rules issued by the Interior Department, the administration dismantled two foundational pillars of how the federal government protects species sliding toward extinction. The first rule strips threatened species of the automatic legal shield they have held since 1975 under the Endangered Species Act. The second rewrites how federal agencies designate critical habitat, requiring extensive economic analysis before protecting an area and allowing officials to exclu...