By Kennedy Maize
In his first day in office, Jan. 20, among other actions President Trump issued an 11-page executive order that repealed over 70 Biden administration executive orders and presidential memoranda. Many related to Trump hot-button issues such as DEI, Covid restrictions, gender identity, and climate change.
Among them was one designed to aid his campaign mantra of “drill, baby, drill” to produce more domestic oil and gas. Of course, that ignores the fact that the U.S. has become the world’s leading producer of oil and gas, a fact that Trump has never acknowledged.
The Trump omnibus order included an item designed to boost offshore production of oil and gas, repealing Biden’s March 2023 (and again on Jan. 5, 2025) order withdrawing according to the Trump manifesto, “Certain Areas off the United States Arctic Coast of the Outer Continental Shelf from Oil or Gas Leasing.”
That seems in line with Trump campaign rhetoric. Then there was Trump’s first term approach to federal offshore O&G leasing. It was an incoherent, politically-driven, on-again, off-again policy.
The environmental watchdog group Oil & Gas Watch recently said, “Biden’s order applied to federal waters in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Alaska and the eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico, though Biden allowed oil and gas production to continue in the western and central Gulf.”
It appears that Trump has forgotten that his may be politically poisonous among some of his staunch supporters. Offshore oil and gas production on federal territory is highly unpopular in coastal states off the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska. That’s mostly Trump country.
Let’s start with Florida, where Trump won in 2024 with 56% of the vote (he barely won Florida in 2016 with a 49% plurality). In the Sunshine State, offshore oil and gas drilling is decidedly unpopular. In Florida in January 2018, then Republican Gov. Rick Scott responded to Politico after a question about federal legislation to ban drilling off Florida’s coast. He said, “I haven’t seen that proposal, but I’ve been clear: I oppose offshore drilling. I completely oppose offshore drilling.”
Scott’s comment came after the Trump administration had proposed an oil and gas lease sale for offshore Florida and elsewhere in a 2017 Executive Order, discarding an Obama administration broad ban of offshore oil and gas leases. Trump followed that up in Jan. 2018 with a proposed aggressive five-year Interior Department offshore oil and gas leasing program that would extend from 2019 to 2024. The Trump administration never followed up with the proposal after it faced opposition from Gulf coastal states, including Florida and Louisiana, as well as California and Alaska.
Scott is now a U.S. Senator. His current views on producing oil and gas offshore of Florida, where tourism is a major industry and opposition runs deep, are so far unprobed. When then Gov. Scott opposed Trump’s leasing plan, he was joined by then Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State and then Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ran against Trump’s renomination last year, said before the 2024 campaign began that he opposes offshore drilling.
Florida voters in November 2019 approved an amendment to the state constitution banning offshore oil and gas drilling in state waters (they have no jurisdiction over federal waters) by 69%.
In 2020 during his failed first reelection campaign, Trump did a 180 degree turn and issued an order to his Interior Secretary to prohibit drilling off both Florida’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts and off the Atlantic coasts of George and South Carolina for 10 years (July 1, 2022-June 20, 2032). He said at the announcement in his now home state of Florida, “This protects your beautiful gulf and your beautiful ocean, and it will for a long time to come.”
Then there is Alaska, another red state where Trump got 55% of the vote (53% in 2016) and where enormous reserves oil and gas are likely, both onshore and offshore. While onshore production has been successful and transformed the Alaskan economy over many years, federal offshore leasing has been a bust for more than four decades. All of Alaska’s oil production comes from onshore sites and state waters. No federal offshore lease holders are producing.
Trump included Alaska in his April 2017 order for a new five-year leasing plan, including reversing the Obama administration ban on offshore Alaska leasing. In 2019, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason of the District of Alaska overruled the Trump executive order. She ruled that the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act gives the president the only the authority to withdraw lands from Interior Department leasing, but not the authority to revoke a prior withdrawal. Only Congress can do that, she concluded. That means that Trump’s 2017 executive order “is unlawful, as it exceeded the President’s authority.”
Gleason added, “The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress.” Her ruling could prove an obstacle to Trump’s January executive order as opponents are likely to sue to overturn it.
Whether Trump will lose interest in what could be both a political and legal barrier to the waterborne “drill, baby, drill” slogan may come to pass. His attention span often proves transitory.
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