Trump Administration Proposes Opening Virtually Every American Coastline To Offshore Drilling, Reverses Course For Single State Whose Governor Asked Politely

WASHINGTON. The Department of the Interior on Thursday unveiled a draft five-year offshore leasing program that would open more than 90 percent of America's outer continental shelf to new oil and gas drilling, an action Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke characterized as a return of American energy independence to the American people, and which he indicated would extend to every coastal state with the exception of one whose Republican governor had requested otherwise.

The plan, drafted under President Donald J. Trump's executive order reversing an Obama-era moratorium, identified more than 25 lease zones across the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, and Arctic waters as eligible for new drilling between 2019 and 2024, an aggressive expansion the administration described as restoring "energy dominance" to a nation that was at the time already the world's largest combined producer of oil and natural gas. Coastal-state governors of both parties, mayors of nearly 200 affected municipalities, and bipartisan congressional delegations from several states promptly issued objections on the grounds that their constituents had repeatedly expressed a preference for retaining shorelines that could be visited without protective gear.

Two days after the unveiling, following a private meeting with Florida Governor Rick Scott, Mr. Zinke flew to Tallahassee, stood on a tarmac alongside the Republican governor (who was at the time preparing a Senate run in a state whose tourism economy depended on uncontaminated beaches), and announced via tweet that Florida would be exempted from the new leasing program, citing the state's "unique" reliance on coastal tourism, a characteristic Mr. Zinke did not appear to recognize in the comparable coastal economies of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, or California.

"The President understands the importance of our coastlines, and acted accordingly," said one senior administration official, asked whether the same understanding extended to the 21 other coastal states whose Republican and Democratic governors had simultaneously requested exemptions, none of which were granted. The official added that the President remained, in principle, opposed to oil spills in places that voted for him.

Environmental advocates noted that an exemption announced via tweet at a campaign-style press event did not constitute the legally binding removal of acreage from a draft federal leasing program, a critique that proved correct when the entire five-year plan was struck down by a federal court in 2019 on procedural grounds and ultimately allowed to expire. Industry observers, however, noted that the proposed scope of the program had successfully recalibrated the public conversation around offshore drilling, moving the post-Deepwater Horizon baseline from "extremely cautious about new leasing" to "negotiating with the administration over which specific coasts to defend," a shift the administration credited to ambitious thinking.

At press time, the Secretary was reviewing additional exemption requests from coastal states, sorting them by whether their governors had endorsed the President.