The Trump administration will summon the “God Squad” that can remove certain protections from an imperiled plant or animal later this month in what could be a highly unusual bid to exempt some Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas projects from Endangered Species Act requirements.
Citing “oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities,” the Interior Department has called members of the rarely convened Endangered Species Committee to a March 31 meeting. The meeting’s full import, though, remains unclear, as Interior did not specify in its Federal Register notice what species or oil and gas project would be under consideration.
Interior released its plans for the meeting Friday night. Later that night, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also quietly disclosed that it approved a $5 billion deepwater oil drilling project in the Gulf that uses high-pressure techniques that environmentalists fear will put vulnerable species at risk.
That flurry of activity came as the Trump administration responds to rising gas prices at the pump as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran disrupts the global oil market. In another move Friday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an order to help restart a pipeline off the coast of California that has been kept offline by the state for more than a decade.
When asked for comment, Interior did not elaborate Monday on its oil and gas moves.
As its “God Squad” nickname suggests, the Endangered Species Committee’s authority to exempt projects from ESA requirements can be a matter of life or death for animals listed as threatened or endangered.
The meeting comes 14 months after President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency” and ordered the Endangered Species Committee to meet “not less than quarterly.” Interior missed its quarterly deadlines, and the upcoming meeting is the first of its kind in many years.
Under the law, the Endangered Species Committee meets to decide on an ESA exemption only after a public process, including an administrative hearing. No such proceedings have been publicly announced.
“There is no basis for convening the committee, and there is no basis for granting an exemption,” said Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor at the University of Vermont Law School. “It’s one thing to say the law doesn’t matter. Is it also our energy policy that extinction doesn’t matter?”
Parenteau has seen the process in action, having been present at each of the four prior occasions when the Endangered Species Committee was convened. Like other environmental lawyers, he’s skeptical of the Interior Department’s move.
The idea that the Interior secretary could “whistle up the committee whenever he felt like it is complete and utter nonsense,” Parenteau said.
The American Petroleum Institute in a statement supported the move. “The directive from Secretary Burgum underscores that balancing conservation and energy production requires a more streamlined, coordinated federal approach,” said Holly Hopkins, the API vice president of upstream policy. “This action is an important step toward ensuring a workable path forward for safe, responsible offshore development while minimizing impacts on endangered species.”
NOAA Fisheries has designated more than two dozen species in the Gulf as either threatened or endangered, from sea turtles like the Kemp’s ridley turtle to the Rice’s whale, which the agency has described as “one of the rarest whales in the world.” Federal officials estimate there are only around 51 of the whales in the Gulf, while efforts to protect them could constrain oil and gas.
The God Squad
The 1973 Endangered Species Act strictly prohibits harm to listed species. In 1978, prompted by the difficulties that a small fish called the snail darter caused for a Tennessee dam project, Congress authorized formation of an Endangered Species Committee that could loosen ESA protections based on economic impacts.
Essentially, the committee can issue an exemption allowing a project to go forward even if it will harm a protected species.
The committee’s six permanent federal members are the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments, the secretary of the Army, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the EPA administrator and the NOAA administrator.
In the 40–plus years since Congress authorized the Endangered Species Committee, it has only completed action in three cases, involving dams in Tennessee and Wyoming and timber sales in Oregon jeopardized by the threatened northern spotted owl. In the case of the snail darter, the committee declined to waive protections for the fish, although the dam was later built and the fish survived — it was removed from the ESA list in 2022.
Three other cases were started but resolved early, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Exemptions from ESA requirements can be sought by a federal agency, a governor, or a permit or license applicant. And then there is the public process before the committee itself meets.
The requests receive an initial Interior Department review that can last up to 20 days.
Following this review, Interior then has 140 days to convene a formal hearing conducted by an administrative law judge. The hearing can include witness testimony and interveners, according to the CRS summary. The hearing is followed by a report that’s submitted to the Endangered Species Committee, which then has 30 days to resolve the case.
The committee can take economic impacts into account as it determines whether the benefits of an exemption “clearly outweigh” the alternative and whether the project is of “regional or national significance.”
The ESA requires Endangered Species Committee meetings to be conducted in public. The March 31 meeting will be virtual.
“Condemning whales to extinction behind the safety of a web live stream is pathetic, and we will be there at the Department of Interior in person to protest this illegal action,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.
Gulf drilling project gets approval
The announcement about the ESA committee came just hours before Interior approved a major venture in the Gulf, which Trump has renamed the Gulf of America.
Called Kaskida, the project is multinational oil major BP’s second deepwater project since the company’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which spewed 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.
The venture could unlock 10 billion barrels of oil buried deep below the surface, and BP expects a new floating platform will eventually produce up to 80,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
BP spokesperson Paul Takahashi said Saturday that the company is “fully confident in our development plan and our ability to deliver Kaskida safely, responsibly and in compliance with U.S. regulations and industry standards.”
Environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers have warned that a blowout at Kaskida, which would operate in water thousands of feet deep, could cause an oil spill more severe that Deepwater Horizon, which was the worst in U.S. history.
“It’s deeply disturbing that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a proposal littered with legal and regulatory flaws, especially given BP’s history in the Gulf,” said Brettny Hardy, senior attorney for Earthjustice’s oceans program, in a statement.
Rice’s whale
Environmentalists have also sparred with federal regulators in recent years over the risks oil and gas operations in the Gulf pose to the endangered Rice’s whale.
During the Biden administration, federal officials sought to ban future lease sales in the whale’s habitat and restrict boat speeds in those areas. Those efforts were quashed by a federal judge and then an appeals court.
In 2024, a federal court in Maryland ordered the Biden administration to redo an analysis of the effects oil and gas operations could have on the whales, which officials completed after the Trump administration took office in May 2025. That analysis concluded oil and gas activity could drive the whale species to extinction without further precautions.
Biden administration officials had also advised operators in 2023 to implement precautions — like reducing boat speeds — to protect the Rice’s whale. The Trump administration rolled those back in February.
