Lawsuit Challenges December 10th Offshore Oil Sale by Trump Administration

on November 30, 2025

The Trump administration has released a plan for offshore oil and gas leasing that would open up almost all Alaska marine waters to development, along with the entire Pacific coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Alaska portion of the plan proposes 21 lease sales through 2031, five of them in Cook Inlet, two in the Beaufort Sea, two in the Chukchi Sea and the others in other marine areas. Those include a lease sale in a newly designated “High Arctic” area that lies beyond the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone and where U.S. territorial rights are not yet clear.

The only federal Alaska offshore area without a proposed lease sale is the North Aleutian Basin, where oil leasing is under an indefinite ban to protect salmon-rich Bristol Bay.

The new plan was released Nov. 20. It also proposes six oil lease sales off the U.S. West Coast and seven in the Gulf of Mexico, and is similar to an offshore leasing plan proposed by the Trump administration in 2017.

Per a statement, the Department of the Interior called the plan “a major step to boosting United States energy independence.”

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) plans to hold an 80-million-acre Gulf oil sale on December 10. In finalizing the offshore oil sale, BOEM announced that it would no longer comply with one of our nation’s bedrock environmental laws — the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — prior to conducting this and 29 additional planned sales in the Gulf through 2040 under the 2025 Reconciliation Act. But the Act does not exempt any offshore lease sales from NEPA.

By failing to comply with NEPA, BOEM is now advancing without understanding how this sale of public waters could expose the entire Gulf region to oil spills, harm endangered Rice’s whales, and leave behind a dangerous legacy of defunct oil wells, pipelines, and platforms. BOEM also failed to consider how Gulf communities could be harmed by the massive oil sale, even though earlier this year the Department of Justice guaranteed a federal court that the Trump administration would do so.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said that BOEM will do further examination before settling on a final leasing plan.

“Offshore oil and gas production does not happen overnight. It takes years of planning, investment, and hard work before barrels reach the market,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the statement. “‘The Biden administration slammed the brakes on offshore oil and gas leasing and crippled the long-term pipeline of America’s offshore production. By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come.”

a final decision or a directive that any particular offshore lease sale will occur. Before any potential proposal is finalized, there will be multiple opportunities for public comment, environmental review, and additional analysis. As my office reviews the proposal, I will work to ensure that we are weighing in and amplifying Alaskan voices and views.” 

Others expressed dissent about the plan.

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, was among a group of mostly California Democrats in Congress who blasted it during a Nov. 20 news conference.

‘‘We are here because President Trump just put out what we believe is an asinine pro-polluter plan to open up our coast to offshore drilling,” Huffman said.

It is ‘‘not just a little bit of offshore drilling,” he said, but the entire California coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico where residents have long opposed offshore drilling, and “‘every inch of Alaska.” Huffman is the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

Environmentalists singled out the proposed Arctic lease sales in particular.

“Drilling anywhere in the Arctic Ocean is completely irresponsible. It is remote, ice-filled, stormy, home to irreplaceable wildlife and subsistence traditions. There is no way to clean up oil spills in this environment, and they are inevitable,” Erik Grafe, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, saidi in an emailed statement.

Additionally, Grafe said, leasing in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas is unlawful.

“Those areas have been withdrawn from future leasing by Presidents Obama and Biden, and though President Trump has purported to reverse these withdrawals, he lacks that authority. Only Congress can open them up again,” he said.

That finding was the result of an environmental lawsuit that Grafe represented. In 2019, Alaska-based U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that Trump was barred from undoing Obama administration protections for Arctic and East Coast waters.

A new lawsuit filed in February by many of the same plaintiffs addresses that issue again. The new lawsuit, also with Grafe as one of the plaintiff attorneys, targets Trump’s Inauguration Day executive actions that aimed to open wide swaths of territory to drilling and other development, including the Arctic Ocean.

Another pending legal question concerns whether the federal government has the right to sell leases in the area designated as the High Arctic. That area, part of the North American extended outer continental shelf, lies beyond the 200-nautical-mile U.S. exclusive economic zone. 

The Biden administration made a territorial claim to the area, which is bigger than California. However, the claim has yet to be confirmed. The U.S. is not a party to the United National Convention on the Law of the Sea, and that international treaty is used to adjudicate nations’ territorial claims in the outer continental shelf.

The idea of leasing most of the non-Arctic areas off Alaska’s coastline got a poor reception on the day of the announcement.

Expecting the new Trump administration plan, a coalition of Alaska Native tribal governments in June sent a letter to Burgum expressing longstanding opposition to Bering Sea oil leasing.

The letter asked Burgum to drop all plans for selling leasing in areas from the Aleutian Islands to the Bering Strait.

“We, the Central Yup’ik, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, and Inupiaq people, have been here since time immemorial. Because we spend so much time out on the Bering Sea fishing and hunting, the sea is just as important to us as the land. The Tribes that still rely on these waters to hunt and fish remain unified in protecting these waters. Our people have been clear: the planning areas in our region should not be made available for oil and gas leasing,” said the letter, which was from the Association of Village Council Presidents, Nome-based Kawerak Inc. and the Bering Sea Elders Group.

Kawerak Inc. referred to that June letter to express its reaction to the new leasing plan.

The tribal organizations have been the forces behind establishment of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area during the Obama administration. The designation barred oil leasing and bottom trawling, addressed some shipping safety concerns and established a system for more tribal control.

The first Trump administration abolished the designation; President Joe Biden, in an Inauguration Day executive action, revived it. Trump, on the first day of his second term, abolished the protections again.

“The First Proposal is the first of three required steps before the Secretary can finalize the 11th Program. BOEM is including these areas now to meet legal requirements, conduct further analysis, gather public and industry input, and ensure the Secretary can fully evaluate all options before deciding what areas to include in the final program,” Alyse Sharpe, a senior public affairs specialist, said by email.

Huffman, at the Democrats’ news conference, said the public is likely to mobilize nationally against the plan and that his colleagues will work to prevent it from being implemented.

That includes the proposed Arctic and Bering Sea lease sales, which he called ‘‘incredibly reckless.”

“We know what the seafood economy means to the state of Alaska. And we know what happened with the Exxon Valdez,’ he said, referring to the 1989 oil spill disaster in Prince William Sound.

“I’m a Californian, but I will fight to protect Alaska’s coast and Alaska’s fisheries as well,’ 99 he added.

Eight years ago, when the first Trump administration released a similar plan for oil leasing in almost all areas of federal waters off Alaska, the idea was widely panned in the state.

While political leaders supported leasing in Cook Inlet and the Beaufort and the Chukchi seas, they objected to the idea of leasing other areas.

Among the groups objecting was the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages commercial seafood harvests in Alaska’s federal waters. The council, citing ‘the substantial risk to the sustainable management of Alaska’s fisheries,” asked then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to drop all the Bering Sea, Aleutian and Gulf of Alaska lease sales from the plan.

Then-Gov. Bill Walker and the all-Republican congressional delegation made similar requests to Zinke, asking him to focus the plan on Cook Inlet and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, while retaining longstanding buffers to protect whales and other subsistence resources. The Alaska Legislature passed a resolution with a similar request.

The first Trump administration’s expansive leasing plan never went into effect.

Gleason’s 2019 decision froze action on that leasing plan, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Interior agency that manages offshore oil and gas leasing, continued to work under the Obama administration’s 2017-2022 five-year plan. In 2023, the Biden administration released a five-year leasing plan for 2024 through 2029 that was limited to three Gulf of Mexico lease sales.

There has never been any oil produced from federal waters off Alaska except for a small portion of the Hilcorp-operated Northstar field in the Beaufort Sea, which lies mostly on state leases close to shore. The last federal offshore lease sale held in Alaska, a Cook Inlet sale held at the end of 2022, drew only one bid.

Link to recent case in 2023 claiming that environmental review failed to examine possible impact.

Link to case EarthJustice.org lawsuit here.

New Case Information

Case Name: Healthy Gulf, et al. v. DOI and BOEM

Case No.: Civil Action No. 25-cv-04016

Date: November, 18, 2025

Venue: The case is filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under federal law.

Legal Basis for the Case

Jurisdiction is based on federal question and the Administrative Procedure Act APA, allowing for judicial review of agency actions. ​Plaintiffs are seeking a declaration that the Gulf Lease Sale violates National Environmental Policy Act NEPA and the APA, and request to vacate the Final Notice of Sale.

Previous Case Information

Case Name: League of Conservation Voters v. Trump 

Case No.: No. 3:17-cv-00101

Ruling Date: March 29, 2019

Key Statute: The case hinged on the interpretation of Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) of 1953, which states the president "may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf"

Link to case documents here.