We’re Suing the Trump Administration Over Its Unlawful Gulf of Mexico Oil Sale

What happened: Gulf and environmental groups sued the Trump administration today over its decision to hold an offshore oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico – with no environmental review.

Why it matters:  The Interior Department plans to hold an 80-million-acre oil sale in the Gulf of Mexico on Dec. 10 despite violations of the law and threats to coastal communities and endangered wildlife. In finalizing the sale, the agency announced that it would no longer comply with one of our nation’s bedrock environmental laws — the National Environmental Policy Act — prior to conducting this.

This is blatantly illegal. We’ve successfully challenged President Trump’s past offshore oil lease sales that broke the law at the expense of coastal communities, and we’re ready to win again.

An illegal handout to fossil fuel companies

• More Gulf sales to come: The sale is one of 29 planned oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico to be held through 2040, mandated under the Republican Party’s summer reconciliation bill — or the so called One Big Beautiful Bill.
• Ignoring the law: The Trump administration announced it would bypass legal requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, such as completing an environmental review disclosing potential harms to the public before proceeding with this or future offshore oil sales.
• Our lawsuit: Earthjustice brought the lawsuit on behalf of Friends of the Earth and Healthy Gulf. The Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Sierra Club are also parties and co-counseling in the suit.

The country doesn’t need more oil.

• The U.S. is already producing more oil than at any time in history. Most of this is exported overseas, contrary to the administration’s false claims of an “energy emergency.”
• The oil industry has stockpiled thousands of unused leases. Even without the Trump administration’s planned sales, oil companies currently hold more than 2,000 active leases, spanning over 12 million acres of offshore territory in the Gulf. Yet over 80% of those leases have yet to start producing oil and gas.
• The Trump administration also plans to dramatically expand offshore oil drilling across the United States, according to leaked news reports. The expansion would include places where offshore drilling hasn’t happened in decades or ever before, including the California coast.

Threats to coastal communities and ecosystems

• Offshore drilling brings the risk of devastating oil spills, which threaten human health, jeopardize entire ecosystems, and can upend local economies that rely on clean oceans for everything from fishing to tourism and recreation. In most spills, less than 10% of oil is ever recovered, according to one study – the rest remains, polluting the ocean.
• We saw the devastating impact of oil spills in the Gulf with BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, which remains the worst oil spill in U.S. history. It killed 11 people, eliminated thousands of jobs in the Gulf region, and cost billions of dollars to clean up. It also decimated over a million birds, fish, dolphins, and other marine wildlife.
• Oil is traumatic for marine wildlife. Wildlife exposed to oil can experience hypothermia, heart damage, enlarged livers, immune and reproductive dysfunction, and a generally painful death. Oil drilling has decimated the newly discovered Rice’s whale, which lost a fifth of its population as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Barely 50 individual whales remain.
• In the places where offshore drilling already happens, communities are burdened with significant amounts of hazardous air pollution that have led to the highest rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses in the country.

We won’t let Trump break the law for oil dollars

• We’re arguing in court that the December oil sale upends decades of precedent that offshore lease sales are subject to legally required environmental review and public comment process.
• “If you’re going to auction off 80 million acres of our public waters to the oil industry, the least you can do is not break the law in a plethora of ways as you do it,” said Earthjustice senior attorney George Torgun. “These are the very environmental laws that Congress passed decades ago in response to the destructive consequences of offshore oil drilling.”