Ex-Biden Interior official fights offshore drilling ban in court

By Niina H. Farah | 01/23/2025 06:16 AM EST

Interior’s former deputy secretary is representing the American Petroleum Institute in a lawsuit against former President Joe Biden’s ban.

Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau testifies during a hearing.

Former Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau testifying in 2022 during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. Francis Chung/POLITICO

A high-ranking Biden administration Interior Department official is representing the fossil fuel industry in a legal challenge against the former president’s effort to shield millions of acres of U.S. waters from oil and gas development.

Tommy Beaudreau — who served as Interior deputy secretary under former President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2023 and as the first director of the department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management under former President Barack Obama — is one of the attorneys representing the American Petroleum Institute in a new lawsuit against the Biden administration for blocking oil and gas leasing in 625 million acres of federal waters.

He was at Interior when the department withdrew Bristol Bay and federal waters in the Arctic Ocean from future leasing, but he left well before Biden’s move this month to cordon off the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, part of the Pacific Coast and parts of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska.

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Beaudreau, now a partner at the law firm WilmerHale, declined to comment on his involvement in the litigation, and directed questions about the suit to API.

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