Trump Administration Finalizes Plan To Drill Arctic Wildlife Refuge, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America's Largest Untouched Wilderness Was Still Untouched

WASHINGTON. Capping a Republican ambition older than most of the officials pursuing it, the Trump administration on Monday finalized its plan to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, resolving a long-standing concern that the largest stretch of undisturbed wilderness in the United States had gone six decades without a lease sale.

The Bureau of Land Management's Record of Decision cleared the way to auction portions of the refuge's roughly 1.5-million-acre coastal plain, a swath of northern Alaska that serves as calving ground for the Porcupine caribou herd, denning habitat for polar bears, and homeland for the Gwich'in people, none of whom had submitted a competing bid.

Officials noted that the legal authority for the sale had been quietly inserted into the 2017 tax law, where a projected windfall from future drilling was used to help make the arithmetic on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy appear less catastrophic. The refuge, in other words, had already done its part for the top 1 percent on paper. Monday's decision merely asked it to follow through.

"For 40 years people said it couldn't be done, and now it's done," said one source within the administration, describing the mood at the Interior Department, then led by a former oil and gas lobbyist, as jubilant. A separate source stressed that the plan represented energy independence, the cost of which would be borne entirely by animals that do not vote and by Alaska Natives whose objections had been carefully reviewed and set aside.

The administration conceded a few logistical headwinds, chiefly that every major American bank had already announced it would not finance Arctic drilling and that oil companies had shown little appetite for the leases. Officials expressed confidence that the absence of interested buyers would not prevent them from selling something that was never theirs to begin with.

At press time, the administration was racing to hold the auction before a new president could cancel it, having concluded that the surest way to protect a policy from the will of the voters was to complete it before they had finished voting.