Interior: NEPA doesn’t apply to megalaw’s offshore lease sales

The decision to skip further environmental reviews applies to offshore oil and gas lease sales mandated by the Republican-backed law.

November 11, 2025

The Interior Department said Monday that the National Environmental Policy Act "is not applicable” to dozens of offshore federal oil and gas lease sales mandated by the megalaw signed by President Donald Trump in July.

Alyse Sharpe, a spokesperson for Interior, told POLITICO’s E&E News that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) requires regulators to use the same lease forms, terms, conditions and stipulations that were used for the last federal offshore lease auction held during Trump’s first term.

She said the megalaw doesn't give Interior or its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management the discretion to add new requirements or stipulations based on environmental concerns.

“Because BOEM does not have sufficient discretion to affect the outcome of these statutorily directed actions by making any changes based on environmental information, NEPA is inapplicable for OBBBA-mandated sales,” Sharpe wrote in an email.

Environmental groups cried foul Monday over Interior’s interpretation, saying the megalaw doesn't mandate that BOEM or other agencies stop conducting environmental reviews for offshore lease sales.

NEPA, which was signed into law in 1970, requires federal agencies to assess environmental impacts in their decisionmaking process. Historically, that has meant that departments like Interior and agencies such as BOEM and the Bureau of Land Management have created environmental assessments and environmental impact statements for major projects, including federal oil and gas lease auctions.

Those assessments form the basis of evaluations that look at the potential environmental damage that could come from a project and often include a close look at whether endangered species could be harmed. They also allow members of the public to weigh in with any concerns.

Agencies like BOEM cite such environmental studies in their records of decision, an official document outlining an agency’s reasoning for publishing a final rule.

On Monday, Interior said BOEM would not be issuing records of decision for any of the offshore federal lease sales mandated by the megalaw.

The Republican-backed law orders Interior to hold a combined 36 offshore oil and gas lease sales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump renamed the Gulf of America.

Thirty of those leases are in the Gulf, and the megalaw mandates they take place over the next 15 years. Six lease auctions must be held in the Cook Inlet between next year and March 2032, according to the megalaw.

Interior and BLM did not respond to requests for comment Monday about whether the department believes NEPA would also not apply to onshore leases mandated by the megalaw, including planned lease sales in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in nine Western states.

With offshore plans, BOEM announced Friday that it would hold the first of the law’s mandated offshore sales for the Gulf on Dec. 10. It also proposed a lease sale for 1 million acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet in March 2026.

The megalaw requires Interior agencies to conduct the mandated leases using terms and conditions set during lease sales in Trump’s first term: Lease Sale 244 in Cook Inlet, in June 2017, and Lease Sale 254 in the Gulf, held in March 2020.

That part of the law, Interior said, makes NEPA inapplicable to those mandated leases.

But Rachel Mathews, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s oceans program, said Monday the Interior Department is taking “great liberties” with how it is reading the law.

“Nothing in the OBBBA excuses the government from complying with our country’s bedrock environmental laws,” Mathews said. “Nothing in that law says NEPA doesn’t apply to this, or the Endangered Species Act doesn’t apply to offshore leasing.”

Retaining discretion

Legal analysts said that NEPA generally applies to discretionary agency actions, but noted that the mandated lease sales will be followed by the exploration and development phase, which gives agencies an opportunity to outline restrictions.

“BOEM retains discretion at these later stages to impose appropriate conditions beyond those required in Lease Sale 254 on how these stages are carried out and on whether to require mitigation of any adverse impacts that might be caused by exploration and development,” Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, said in an email.

Interior officials, however, said they have already done an environmental study of the Gulf.

Sharpe pointed to a final programmatic environmental impact statement BOEM released in August that reviewed the Gulf of America’s oil and gas leasing and post-leasing plans. She said the Gulf programmatic EIS analyzes the potential impacts of post-lease sites and actions on marine and coastal environments for sales mandated by the megalaw.

But the EIS says its discussions of environmental stipulations “would only be applicable to [Gulf of America] sales not mandated by” the megalaw.

Interior did not respond Monday to follow-up questions about the programmatic analysis.

Squillace, the law professor, said programmatic impact statements rarely address site-specific problems — and that forgoing further examination “could lead to a legal challenge,” particularly because lease sales in the Gulf could harm the critically endangered Rice's whale.

There are fewer than 100 Rice’s whales remaining, according to federal officials, and the Gulf is their only habitat.

Mathews with the Center for Biological Diversity said Interior’s comments Monday are part of a pattern of the Trump administration working to weaken environmental laws in favor of more fossil fuel production.

"This has been a concern because from the beginning the Trump administration has been trying to roll back and minimize environmental review,” Mathews said. “It’s not a complete shock, but that’s not to say it’s not outrageous.”

The American Petroleum Institute, one of the nation’s most influential oil and gas trade groups, said Monday that offshore energy projects already undergo multiple layers of environmental reviews over the course of their development.

“Congress’ decision to establish a legislated leasing program simply streamlines early-stage procedures without changing the rigorous environmental standards that apply before any production occurs,” wrote Justin Prendergast, an API spokesperson.

Republicans have also celebrated the planned lease sales.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Monday that ramped-up drilling activity in the U.S. would benefit the country. He called past Democratic efforts to limit drilling “madness.”

“I’m excited to see this lease sale move forward, strengthening our energy dominance, lowering energy costs for hardworking American families, creating more jobs here at home, and bolstering our energy security,” he said in a news release.

Democrats, by contrast, said the lack of further environmental analysis emphasized why NEPA was important in the first place.

"People deserve transparency about these projects' inevitable impacts and the opportunity to give input, not be silenced," Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. "But we all know this administration is trying to get out of it any which way they can to help their oil billionaire buddies at the cost of communities and the climate."


By:  Shelby Webb, Ian M. Stevenson
Source: Politico Pro