A federal judge has declined to act on an emergency request from an environmental group to stop the Trump administration from exploring an exemption to the Endangered Species Act for oil and gas drilling, setting the stage for an unusual government meeting to be held next week.
The rarely convened Endangered Species Committee is set to meet Tuesday to discuss an exemption under the Endangered Species Act related to fossil fuel drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of America.
During a Friday hearing, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declined to grant an emergency effort by the Center for Biological Diversity to put a stop to the meeting through a lawsuit filed last week.
Contreras, an Obama appointee, raised concerns about his jurisdiction to act under the federal law that protects endangered species.
The Endangered Species Committee has only met a handful of times since it was created in the late 1970s. It was designed to provide an escape hatch from the Endangered Species Act that could allow critical infrastructure projects that jeopardize vulnerable plants and animals to be built if granted an exemption.
That power to potentially condemn a species to extinction led the committee to be nicknamed the “God Squad.” The committee’s six permanent federal members are the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments, administrators of EPA and NOAA, the secretary of the Army, and the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.
The Trump administration’s decision to gather the committee made up of high-ranking officials and chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was announced briefly earlier this month in a Federal Register notice, prompting outcry from environmentalists that the effort to call up the committee had failed to follow procedures required under the law.
“We truly are in uncharted waters, this is so far out of the ordinary,” said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, in an recent interview. Prior exemption requests have been accompanied by formal public hearings and public reports, as is laid out in the law.
In response to the CBD lawsuit, government attorneys said in a Thursday court filing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had notified Burgum on March 13 that it was “necessary for reasons of national security to exempt from the ESA’s requirements all Gulf of America oil and gas exploration and development activities.”
A government lawyer said at Friday’s hearing that more information about Hegseth’s rationale will be provided at the Tuesday meeting.
“It’s disappointing that the court didn’t immediately stop Hegseth’s reckless power grab, but this is just the first battle in a longer fight to protect the Gulf’s endangered whales and turtles,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the CBD, in a Friday statement.
Hartl noted that the group also plans to protest the committee meeting in Washington on Tuesday, which will be at Interior’s headquarters and open to the public via a video stream.
The never-before-invoked national security exemption could impact a range of animals in the Gulf.
A number of species face risks from oil and gas activity in the Gulf, including sea turtles, sperm whales and the Rice’s whale, a recently identified species that only inhabits the Gulf and has as few as 51 individuals remaining in its population.
About a fifth of the Rice’s whales’ population are estimated to have been killed in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and a recent environmental analysis concluded that oil and gas operations in the region had the potential to extinguish the species.
But that research has not halted oil and gas operations in the Gulf, which is the source of almost all offshore production in federal waters. Instead, the analysis recommended further research and additional monitoring precautions.
Trump declared a national “energy emergency” when he came into office and ordered the committee to meet “not less than quarterly,” but Interior has so far missed those deadlines.
