Environmentalists are doubling down on their challenge to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s assessments of threatened and endangered species in the industrialized Gulf of Mexico, parts of which the Trump administration has relabeled the Gulf of America.
Citing the dangers posed by offshore oil and gas drilling, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity on Monday augmented an earlier lawsuit that challenged a 2018 FWS assessment. The revised lawsuit contends that a 2025 update by the agency likewise failed to meet Endangered Species Act standards.
“Federal officials have forgotten the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, because they’ve missed obvious threats to some of the Gulf’s most vulnerable critters,” Kristen Monsell, the environmental group’s oceans legal director, said in a statement.
Monsell added that the service’s 2025 updated assessment “falls far short of what the law and science demand,” and she called on the FWS to “redo these assessments with a much larger dose of reality and much less deference to oil and gas interests.”
