By Kennedy Maize
The oil market has trumped President Trump’s repeated mantra that the key to national energy policy is “drill, baby, drill.” The Interior Department’s latest offering of drilling rights in oil-rich Alaska has failed, joining other flawed off-shore sales and failed on-shore coal sales in the Rocky Mountain west.
DOI’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on February 2 began accepting bids for the sale of oil leases on 1.05 million acres on Alaska’s Cook Inlet, long viewed as a potentially rich resource area. In a January 30 news release, BOEM issued the final notice of the sale, the first of six oil lease sales required in the administration’s 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (Public Law 119-21). The sale offered “216 blocks toward the northern part of Cook Inlet Planning Area for leasing.”
Interior was to open the bids on March 3. On March 4, BOEM announced flatly, “No bids were received.” At the same time as the federal auction was failing, the Anchorage Daily News reported that “an Alaska oil and gas lease sale in the near-shore state waters of the Inlet generated just one small bid for a single tract.” 
The New York Times reported, “Matthew Giacona, the acting director of the bureau, did not address why the auction was a flop.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum named Giacona, a former lobbyist for the National Ocean Industries Association, as acting BOEM head a year ago. The job does not require Senate confirmation and his title still includes “acting.”
Giacona’s appointment has generated considerable controversy , which may be why he’s not been officially named as the BOEM director. In June, the investigative reporting web site Public Domain charged that Giacona, not long after his nomination, was discussing policy issues at BOEM with industry officials, including Carrie Domnitch, a Chevron lobbyist.
In October, key Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources, led by ranking Democrat Jared Huffman of California, with the ranking Democrats on the committee’s subcommittees — Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, Val Hoyle of Oregon, Maxine Dexter of Oregon, and Yassamin Ansari of Arizona — challenged Giacona’s suitability to run BOEM. In a letter to DOI’s acting inspector general, they called for an ethics investigation of the nominee.
The Democrats wrote that “Giacona lobbied on consequential offshore oil and gas issues before BOEM, including the Gulf of Mexico Endangered Species Act Biological Opinion (BiOp), protections for the endangered Rice’s whale, and Lease Sale 262. Shortly after arriving at BOEM, he appears to have engaged on the same subject-matter areas within BOEM leadership.”
Trump’s Interior Department has had a trying experience attempting to lease its vast mineral resources, primarily coal and oil and gas reserves. The administration directed harsh criticism at the Biden administration for not pursuing mineral leasing during its tenure, although the first Trump go-round also had a weak record.
In October, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management failed on three attempts to lease new coal reserves in Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. Interior avoided offering details of its failures, citing only that the bid did not meet the terms of the law governing federal mineral sales.
The Utah offering only got one bidder and DOI did not reveal the price of the offer. The Montana sale of coal in the state’s portion of the coal-rich Powder River Basin also attracted only one bidder, the Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC), which offered to pay the feds less than a tenth of a penny per ton (and pennies are now illegal tender). Interior rejected the bid and promptly cancelled a scheduled sale in Wyoming.
While Alaska politicians have pushed for oil and gas leasing, onshore and offshore, during the first Trump administration and the Biden term, the industry has shown little interest. A 2022 Cook Inlet sale, which Congress required in Biden’s iconic Inflation Reduction Act, was a flop. The auction drew only one bid, from the incumbent producer.
Just days before Trump’s inauguration, a long-stymied auction for the right to drill for oil on Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), held by the Biden administration and ordered by 2017 tax legislation Congress passed at Trump’s urging, drew no bidders. Oil leasing on ANWR had been a hot-button issue dating back some 40 years. It turned into a dud as the oil industry struck geological and financial gushers in the lower 48 states thanks to directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
Under the terms of Trump’s sole legislative accomplishment in 2025, Interior must hold at least six oil and gas lease sales in Cook Inlet, one each year from 2026 to 2028, and again from 2030 to 2032. The next is timed for 2027. The results of those sales in a presidential election year, 2028, and two with a new regime in Washington, will likely reflect more about the status of world and U.S. oil markets, and less about the advice to “drill, baby, drill.”
