Trump Executive Orders Jeopardize Our Oceans

President Trump’s first executive order revoked 78 previous executive orders and presidential actions, including protections from offshore drilling that were put into place by Presidents Biden and Obama for more than 625 million acres of the Atlantic, Pacific, Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaskan seas. This move opens up huge swaths of our ocean to potential offshore oil and gas leasing. We expect to see new plans for offshore leasing from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum soon—and if it’s a repeat of leasing plans during the first Trump administration, we could see 47 lease sales in just five years on nearly every coast. 

President Trump’s rollback of offshore drilling protections prioritizes Big Oil profits over ocean health and coastal economies. Our ocean waters support a rich array of wildlife and vibrant coastal economies based on tourism, recreation, and fisheries. Offshore drilling and exploration bring increased vessel traffic, booming seismic noise, water pollution, and the ever-present threat of oil spills, all of which impact the clean beaches and healthy fish populations that support coastal industries. Oil and gas activities can hurt, kill, and harass ocean wildlife, like the iconic whales that live and migrate in the U.S. Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico waters. History has unfortunately taught us that oil and gas drilling in the ocean inherently risks catastrophe: The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster killed thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, and birds and caused millions of dollars in losses to the commercial fishing and tourism industries that Gulf states rely on. 

Trying to roll back offshore leasing protections is a familiar page in the Trump playbook—but it’s not clear that President Trump has the legal authority to do this. During his first term, President Trump tried to reverse similar protections put in place for parts of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans by President Obama. NRDC and other environmental groups successfully sued to stop him. On the first day of his new term, President Trump issued two more energy-related executive orders: “Unleashing American Energy” and “Declaring a National Energy Emergency.” 

“Unleashing American Energy” makes it the policy of the United States to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf. This executive order eliminated or restricted a number of federal policies designed to promote environmental protection and smart decision-making—like the social cost of carbon metric for assessing climate impacts and key National Environmental Policy Act regulations, among other policies—all aimed at making it easier for extractive industries. 

Similarly, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency” directs agencies to use any emergency authorities to facilitate domestic energy extraction and production, despite the fact that domestic energy production is at an all-time high. There is no energy emergency. We are in a climate emergency. 

This executive order targets the Endangered Species Act, seeking to undermine protections for our most vulnerable wildlife, just so CEOs can make an extra buck. Despite declaring that the United States is in an “energy emergency,” the executive order nonsensically omits wind and solar from the definition of energy resources, making no provisions to expand renewable energy sources that, when deployed responsibly, can power millions of American homes. 

While the full implications of these executive orders remain to be seen, they represent a dramatic shift toward rolling back environmental protections and making it easier for extractive industries to profit off of our public resources—and they will likely have dangerous consequences for the environment, our climate, and communities.

This plan sets out a schedule of proposed offshore lease sales through 2029. The current plan includes a record-low number of offshore oil and gas leases, all concentrated in the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department could revise or rescind and replace this plan to increase offshore oil and gas leasing in the Gulf and beyond. President Trump and the Republican party have been fixated on increasing offshore leasing for years, despite the fact that oil and gas companies are already sitting on more than 12 million acres of leases, most of which they aren’t using. New oil and gas leasing in our public waters is inconsistent with addressing the climate crisis and threatens to lock in greenhouse gas emissions and pollution for decades to come. 

Oil and gas companies consistently fail to decommission offshore infrastructure—by plugging oil wells, securing old pipelines, and removing old platforms—even though they are legally required to do so. 

As of June 2023, more than 2,700 wells and 500 platforms were past due for decommissioning in the Gulf of Mexico. Idle and abandoned infrastructure leak oil and methane, create safety hazards for vessel crews, and pose an ongoing risk of oil spills, which are made even worse by increasingly strong hurricanes that can collide with corroded structures. This rule will raise an estimated $6.9 billion from oil and gas companies, helping to protect taxpayers from footing the bill to clean up offshore wells and platforms that industry leaves behind once profits dry up. Rescinding this rule would leave taxpayers on the hook for cleaning up industry’s mess.

Weakening well control protections paves the way for another Deepwater Horizon. The well control rule was first put in place following the Deepwater Horizon disaster and was designed to prevent a recurrence of that catastrophe, which killed 11 workers and profoundly harmed the Gulf Coast, ocean wildlife, and the fishing and tourism industries. President Biden updated the rule to heighten safety and environmental protection requirements that were designed to prevent offshore oil and gas well blowouts. By weakening or reversing this rule, the Trump administration is putting public health and worker safety at risk for the sake of oil industry  profits.

By directing review and revision of “withdrawn public lands,” the secretarial order places a target on beloved landscapes and seascapes protected by the Antiquities Act, which authorizes the creation of national monuments, and other laws. This “review” could open up areas cherished by people across the country to oil and gas drilling, coal mining, uranium mining, and critical minerals mining—moves that could decimate these treasured places, contaminate critical water sources, and put Indigenous communities and others once again on the frontlines of toxic pollution.