Biden to block oil drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. waters

President Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline, the White House announced Monday, in a last-minute attempt to hinder President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to boost the nation’s fossil fuel production.

While the move to protect more than 625 million acres from development ensures that Biden will have conserved more lands and waters than any other president, it could test the limits of presidential authority. After news of Biden’s action, Trump said in an interview Monday that he would reverse the ban.

“I’ll unban it immediately,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, without offering details about how he would do that.

Biden – who has sought to cement his legacy on climate change and conservation in the waning weeks of his presidency – is issuing two memorandums under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953 to safeguard large swaths of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement Monday. “It is not worth the risks.”

The 1953 law gives the president broad powers to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing, and U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason ruled in 2019 that such withdrawals cannot be undone without an act of Congress. The Trump administration appealed the decision at the time, but the federal government dropped the appeal after Biden took office, so a higher court never weighed in on the matter.

Andrew Mergen, a professor at Harvard Law School who previously worked on this offshore drilling litigation as a Justice Department official, said Gleason’s ruling took a very expansive view of presidential powers and could have been overturned.

“Do I think this statute is a one-way ratchet, such that once President Biden issues these withdrawals, President Trump can’t undo them? Well, only one judge has considered that issue, and she found that it is a one-way ratchet,” Mergen said. “But I think that probably the better argument is that it’s not a one-way ratchet and that Trump can come in and undo these withdrawals.”

Trump campaigned on a pledge to boost fossil fuel extraction and suggested that the country wasn’t producing enough oil. However, domestic oil production reached an all-time high under Biden.

Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt slammed Biden’s actions on Monday.

“This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices,” Leavitt said in a statement. “Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the new chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement that Senate Republicans would “push back” on the move “using every tool at our disposal.”

However, Republicans cannot overturn the move using the Congressional Review Act, which only allows lawmakers to nullify administrative actions undertaken by federal agencies. Instead, Republicans are expected to target the action using a process called budget reconciliation, which allows them to pass wide-ranging legislation with a simple majority vote.

Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, suggested that a GOP reconciliation bill could require more offshore oil and gas lease sales to offset the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

“While the federal deficit grows, President Biden’s decision to lock away 625 million acres of future energy potential undermines one of our nation’s greatest revenue streams – energy receipts, second only to income taxes,” Westerman said in a statement. “In the 119th Congress, we will use every tool, including reconciliation, to restore and unleash these revenues.”

The move could have the biggest impact in the Gulf of Mexico, which accounts for about 14 % of the country’s crude oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Industry operations there focus on a small sliver of federal waters off Louisiana’s coast.

The decision would have little effect on a stretch of the Atlantic from North Carolina to Florida, where no drilling is underway. There is weak industry interest in the region, and lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns about possible oil spills devastating local beaches and tourism.

The Northern Bering Sea, off the coast of western Alaska, is home to migrating marine mammals including bowhead and beluga whales, walruses and ice seals, which are hunted by many Alaska Natives. In 2016, President Barack Obama issued an executive order that prohibited oil and gas exploration across more than 112,000 square miles of marine habitat in the Northern Bering Sea and called for tribal comanagement of the protected area.

On Tuesday, Biden will travel to California to designate two national monuments on lands sacred to Native American tribes – the roughly 644,000-acre Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California and the roughly 200,000-acre Sáttítla National Monument near the Oregon border.