The Oil Industry Wrote a Wishlist. Trump’s Interior Department Is Delivering.
A top oil trade group submitted a policy wishlist to top DOI appointees. The Department is moving quickly to give industry what it wants.
The oil industry wants many things out of the Trump administration, and it has collected its top priorities in a wishlist of sorts. Titled “Enabling Energy Dominance: Federal Policy Levers,” the 9-page document contains a sampler platter of Big Oil’s major policy desires, from rolling back key Endangered Species Act regulations to ending Biden-era protections for migratory birds and keeping the federal corporate tax rate at 21%.
The document was compiled this spring by the American Petroleum Institute, a leading oil and gas lobbying outfit, and describes in detail “specific actions the administration should take” at Big Oil’s behest. Public Domain obtained the wishlist via a Freedom of Information Act request. It can be accessed here.
On April 16, an API lobbyist named Kristin Whitman emailed the wishlist to three high-level officials working for the Trump administration — Matt Giacona, Brittany Kelm and Gregory Wischer. Giacona and Kelm were both lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry before joining the administration. Wischer was a long-time advocate for mining interests. All three have helped oversee the Interior Department’s wide-ranging oil and gas programs since Trump took office.
“We have several companies that would like to follow up with you directly to share specifics of the projects they are pursuing in the United States,” Whitman wrote in her email. She noted that the wishlist was drafted after her organization met with President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in March of this year.
In the months since, the Interior Department has been hard at work fulfilling the industry’s list of demands. The Trump administration has moved to deliver on at least 20 of API’s top priorities. In Trump’s Washington, the oil industry gets what it wants.
"The speed and efficiency with which the industry has gotten this administration to do its bidding is unheard of and very alarming,” said Lela Stanley, a senior investigator at Global Witness, an international environmental and human rights group.
When asked for comment, Interior Department Communications Director Kathryn Martin disparaged Public Domain, as is usual for the agency’s press office, before saying that “Interior is implementing President Trump's American Energy Dominance Agenda which is what an overwhelming amount of Americans voted for and sent him to Washington to accomplish.”
API did not respond to a request for comment
Consider migratory birds. During the Biden Administration, the Interior Department put forward a proposal under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to regulate the unintentional killing of ducks, cranes and other itinerant birds. The oil and gas industry is notorious for its harmful impacts on migratory birds, and the Biden proposal would have included fines for oil and gas operators who kill birds with oil spills and other industry activities. The Biden-era proposal was a departure from the policies of the first Trump administration, which effectively legalized the unintentional killing of such birds. The oil industry, in its wishlist, sought to return to the freewheeling days of Trump 1.0. It got its wish — just a few days after API sent the Interior Department its wishlist, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it was withdrawing the Biden administration proposal.
A similar trajectory played out with regard to offshore oil policy. In its document, API called on the Interior Department to move forward with a major new oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. Dubbed “lease sale 262,” it would offer some 80 million acres in the Gulf to the offshore industry. Lease sale 262 has been a priority for the industry.
Matt Giacona, who recently became a top appointee at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, advocated for the lease sale when he was a lobbyist for the offshore industry last year. Since taking the helm at BOEM, which manages offshore drilling, he helped push the lease sale forward, part of a pattern of ethically questionable behavior in which Giacona has worked on policies at BOEM that he previously advocated for as an industry lobbyist. In June, BOEM officially announced that it was moving forward with lease sale 262, which will take place in December of this year — another item checked off API’s want list.
The oil industry got its way in the deep south, and it is also getting its way in the far north. API’s wishlist included a specific request for the Interior Department to rescind a Biden administration rule, issued by the Bureau of Land Management, that effectively banned oil and gas development on more than half of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, a stronghold of wildlife and wilderness. In June, the Interior Department announced a proposal to rescind the Biden rule, reopening some 13 million acres of Alaska wildlands to oil and gas interests.
The Trump administration has also moved to supercharge drilling on public land in the western United States, another API demand. The powerful trade association asked BLM to “schedule and notice quarterly lease sales with acreage and terms consistent with those prior to 2021.” Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill made numerous changes to the public land oil and gas leasing program, including a requirement that the BLM “shall conduct a minimum of 4 oil and gas lease sales” in nine western states each year. The bill also nullified many of the “responsible leasing” practices created by the Biden administration’s Fluid Mineral Leasing Rule, also known as the Oil and Gas Leasing Rule.
These examples are only a taste of the Trump administration’s deferential approach to API and its allies. Other policies requested by the trade group — maintaining a 21% corporate tax rate, industry-friendly changes to the nation’s offshore oil and gas leasing regulations, weakening the Endangered Species Act, rolling back various EPA air quality protections and rescinding a Biden-era rule that aimed to better balance conservation with drilling and other extractive uses on federal land — are also in the works or have come to fruition. Indeed, of some 40 specific policy changes that API requested, the Trump administration has moved to fulfill about half of them in recent months.
The administration is “basically putting aside all of the other values and uses of our public lands that people embrace and love, and prioritizing development on those lands,” said America Fitzpatrick, conservation program director at the League of Conservation Voters. Though not a surprise, "I think it'll always feel shocking,” she added, “because public lands are so beloved by the people, for them to undo certain rulings or other things that aren't really in the interest of public lands and the things that the people love in the name of this manufactured energy crisis."
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