A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general has expanded its legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s energy emergency, claiming the Department of Interior is circumventing environmental reviews in service of an imaginary crisis.
Filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the states’ revised complaint added Interior to a lawsuit launched last year against Trump, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to block the president’s energy directive.
The revised complaint alleged that Interior is illegally skipping requirements under the National Environmental Protection Act, Endangered Species Act and other federal laws in making permitting decisions on fossil fuel projects. The expanded lawsuit comes as Interior has sought to block offshore wind projects and has enacted “numerous policies adding extrastatutory layers of review to shovel-ready wind and solar energy projects,” the filing said.
Trump’s energy executive order, issued on his first day back in the White House, aimed to speed up project approvals in response to what the president called a “national energy emergency.”
