Trump Administration Opens Arctic Wildlife Refuge To Oil Drilling, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America's Largest Protected Wilderness Had Stayed Protected For 40 Years

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Bureau of Land Management announced this week that it had finalized a leasing program clearing the way for oil and gas development across the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that the largest stretch of undisturbed wild land in the United States had managed to remain undisturbed for four consecutive decades.

The Record of Decision, signed August 17, opens roughly 1.5 million acres of the refuge's coastal plain to leasing, an outcome officials described as the natural culmination of a process that began the moment a provision mandating the lease sales was inserted into the 2017 tax bill. "Every president since this area was set aside has looked at the same map and decided to leave it alone," said one senior Interior Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We looked at that map and identified the leaving-it-alone as the issue."

The coastal plain serves as the primary calving ground for the Porcupine caribou herd, a population of roughly 200,000 animals, and as denning habitat for polar bears. Administration sources acknowledged that the herd had used the area for thousands of years, but noted that in all that time it had never once submitted a competing lease bid, a procedural failure officials said left the federal government with little choice but to proceed.

For the Gwich'in people, who have relied on the Porcupine herd for subsistence across generations and who refer to the coastal plain as the sacred place where life begins, the announcement marked the apparent end of a campaign to keep the refuge closed that they had sustained since the refuge was created. Interior officials said they had reviewed the tribe's objections at length and found them to be sincere, thoroughly documented, and entirely outside the list of factors the leasing statute permitted them to weigh.

The program drew notably muted interest from the major oil companies, several of which had already pledged publicly not to drill in the Arctic refuge, and the administration's first lease sale would ultimately be carried almost entirely by a state-owned Alaskan development authority bidding on tracts no private firm wanted. Officials characterized the tepid turnout as a temporary matter of sentiment, and expressed confidence that the refuge, once leased, would remain leased long after anyone remembered why.

At press time, Interior officials were exploring whether the area could keep the word "refuge" in its name on the grounds that it now offered a meaningful refuge from federal land protection.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who secured a leasing program that Republican presidents going back to Ronald Reagan had wanted and failed to deliver, and who could claim it as a victory regardless of whether a single barrel was ever produced.
§Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who spent much of her career seeking to open the refuge and who attached the leasing mandate to the 2017 tax law, where it was considerably harder to remove.
§Congressional Republicans, who used the projected lease revenue, scored at roughly one billion dollars, to help the 2017 tax cut satisfy Senate budget rules.
§The State of Alaska, whose government had lobbied for refuge development for decades and whose state-owned development authority would later place the bids private companies declined to make.
§The domestic oil and gas industry, handed legal access to a long-sought reserve, even as its largest members kept a careful public distance from it.
§Future leaseholders, granted property interests inside a federal wildlife refuge that any later administration would have to litigate, buy back, or wait out.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment