The Interior Department will skip the standard environmental analysis for its five-year offshore drilling plan, a break from the agency’s decadeslong practice.
The decision to forgo the review under the National Environmental Policy Act comes as the Trump administration pushes to increase fossil fuel production and roll back environmental regulations. Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management laid out a proposal last week to hold 34 oil and gas lease sales in federal waters between 2026 and 2031 — including in new areas off California, in the High Arctic and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
All prior five-year offshore drilling plans — dating back to 1980 — reference NEPA analyses. But in its proposal, BOEM called that NEPA analysis “discretionary,” citing two past rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that dismissed challenges to NEPA analyses of five-year plans.
Per the court’s rulings, BOEM wrote, approval of a five-year plan “does not constitute an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources, and that, in the context of BOEM’s multiple stage leasing program, the obligation to fully comply with NEPA does not mature until the lease sale stage.”
The agency said it is instead preparing an environmental analysis “outside of the NEPA framework.” The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which is the legal basis of the five-year leasing plans, requires that the agency balance national interests in energy supply and environmental protection.
Meeting that requirement likely means still analyzing threats to coastlines and species from drilling and oil spills, legal experts and environmental advocates said.
Travis Annatoyn, a former deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources at the Interior Department in the Biden administration, said Interior’s position was reasonable in light of recent court decisions, but said those decisions have not been tested “against a five-year program with no NEPA whatsoever.” Aside from ongoing legal questions over whether those reviews must include climate impacts, the OCSLA review of the five-year program requires a look at threatened species, risks of oil spills and affects to coastlines.
“The big question will be how deep is that analysis and how much does the agency defer until the lease sale stage,” said Annatoyn, who is now counsel at the Arnold & Porter law firm.
Steven Siros, a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block, said by email Saturday that while BOEM may have a legal basis for concluding the NEPA review at this stage was “discretionary,” it is less clear whether that decision could be made automatically.
“Some might argue that at a minimum, an environmental assessment is required to evaluate whether the plan does make any specific resource commitments that might require further NEPA review,” Siros said by email.
BOEM did not respond to a request for comment. But in its planning document, the agency said that its environmental analysis will consider potential environmental effects from lease sales, as well as effects that “could be experienced beyond BOEM program area boundaries, such as potential impacts on migratory animals.”
A Thursday press release from Interior also emphasizes that “each lease sale will undergo additional review, environmental analysis, and opportunities for public comment.”
Still, environmentalists are concerned.
“NEPA clearly applies and there is no exception for the five-year planning process,” said George Torgun, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. He noted that agencies at Interior have prepared programmatic environmental impact statements for every prior five-year leasing plan.
“It’s hard to see how Interior can possibly evaluate the relevant factors under OCSLA without a careful environmental review,” Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said by email. “But I’m not surprised to see this administration giving short shrift to its legal obligations to appease oil executives.”
Florida moratorium
The drilling plans include a new swath of the eastern Gulf, which President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of America. The proposal has already angered Florida Republicans, who joined Democrats in opposition. The state’s politicians have long opposed drilling in the area over fears that an oil spill could devastate the state’s tourism industry.
BOEM is proposing to open a new leasing area that abuts a “100-mile coastal buffer” along Florida’s shores. The leasing area — called “Gulf of America Program Area B“— would start 100 miles off Florida’s western coast, though it also excludes the region of ocean that is east of a north-south line beginning roughly where Tallahassee is in Florida’s panhandle.
That region overlaps with a swath of ocean where Trump prohibited drilling in 2020, saying at the time that drilling off Florida’s coast was “not going to happen” because “the people of Florida just don’t want it.”
That moratorium ends in 2032. The proposal lists two lease sales in the area for 2029, but BOEM emphasizes that the proposal “only facilitates further information gathering and analysis of these areas, and it is not a final decision to offer these areas for lease.”
“The President and the Secretary will have the opportunity to use the information gathered and analyses developed during this process to exercise their discretion under … the OCS Lands Act and make more informed decisions on what areas should be made available for leasing,” the proposal said.
Five-year leasing plans often change before they’re finalized, with administrations sometimes winnowing down lease sales in response to feedback from the public and state governments.
To allow drilling before 2032, Trump’s prior withdrawal under OCSLA would have to be altered, said Andrew Hartsig, the Ocean Conservancy’s Arctic program senior director, in an email.
That could stir up legal wrangling.
During Trump’s first term, he attempted to undo an Obama-era withdrawal of waters in the Arctic Ocean from offshore drilling. Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska ruled in 2019 that the law did not allow that; a president could withdraw areas from leasing, but not undo a prior withdrawal.
Former President Joe Biden later reversed Trump’s efforts to open up the Arctic Ocean to drilling. But the legal fight has been resurrected as Trump again seeks to expand drilling in the Arctic; conservation groups sued over the issue earlier this year.
Competing efforts to withdraw or open areas to new drilling “squares up this issue of whether [a withdrawal] is truly a one-way ratchet or not,” said Jason Hill, a partner with the Holland & Knight law firm in Houston who served at Interior during Trump’s first term.
