A federal court has ordered the Interior Department to take a second look at a congressionally mandated offshore oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, rejecting the Trump administration’s claims that environmental groups no longer had a legal case against the sale.
Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia directed Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to reconsider its authorization of Lease Sale 259, but stopped short of tossing it out.
“The potential delays and costs of even partial vacatur here counsel against it,” said Mehta, an Obama appointee, in a memorandum opinion issued Thursday.
The court’s decision comes more than three years after BOEM completed the offshore lease sale in March 2023 as part of oil and gas development mandated under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
