In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.

From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.

This success — one of the greatest of any wildlife revival program — is now at risk.

Earlier this month, as part of the Trump administration’s purge of federal employees, Tina Jackson, the head of the FWS’s entire black-footed ferret recovery program, was fired. FWS also fired two other permanent staffers who were involved in keeping captive ferrets alive at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, the nation’s main breeding facility. Those cuts amount to more than a quarter of the center’s permanent, non-administrative staff, Jackson said. The center also has a vacant biologist position that Jackson said may not be filled. Additionally, FWS fired a staff biologist who was involved in black-footed ferret conservation in Wyoming.

The staff changes imperil the tenuous success of ferret recovery and the very existence of these animals, several experts including current and former Fish and Wildlife Service employees told Vox. Critical funding has been restricted, too: Two organizations that rely on federal money for ferret conservation on public and tribal lands told Vox that funds for this work were frozen.

Experts who have spent decades trying to save black-footed ferrets say these impacts threaten the broader prairie ecosystem. Efforts to conserve ferrets and their prey sustain this important American landscape, a home for insects that pollinate our crops, plants that store carbon in their long roots, and streams that provide us with fresh water.

“Right now, the recovery of the species is dependent on captive populations,” said Jackson, who started her role with the Fish and Wildlife Service last spring, after more than two decades with Colorado’s state wildlife agency. “Without people to take care of those captive populations, we will potentially lose the species. The hardest thing is to think about them blinking out on our watch.”

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