Posted on April 8, 2026
The Trump administration has often evoked the plight of whales in its efforts to undermine U.S. offshore wind development — despite there being no evidence that wind-farm activities are harming the giant mammals.
But those purported concerns didn’t stop federal officials last week from voting unanimously to override Endangered Species Act protections for imperiled whales in order to unleash oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico. Extensive fossil-fuel production there is already known to hurt cetaceans through vessel strikes, oil spills, and noises that lead to chronic stress.
The dissonance isn’t surprising.
In recent years, the well-being of whales has become a potent political weapon for President Donald Trump, Republican politicians, and right-wing groups to wield against America’s fledgling offshore wind industry. Yet those same factions haven’t fought with similar fervor, if at all, to protect whales from the real leading threats: marine-gear entanglements, boat collisions, and the effects of climate change.
Last week’s decision only highlights that whales were never really the point, environmentalists argue.
“I think it’s pretty clear they don’t care about marine species,” Michael Jasny, director of marine mammals for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the Trump administration.
On March 31, a committee of Trump-appointed officials voted to exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf from protections under the Endangered Species Act. The God Squad, so named because of its power to decide whether a species lives or dies, has convened only three other times since the landmark law was enacted over 50 years ago to prevent plant and animal extinctions.
The decision may not actually change that much on the ground for oil and gas companies developing and exploring resources in the Gulf. Operators are still expected to comply with existing measures to avoid and minimize environmental risks. These measures were set by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is in charge of planning offshore drilling operations, and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which provides regulatory oversight.
“It’s not going to be like the wild, wild west under this order,” said Seth Barsky, a partner at the Bracewell law firm and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department.
He said that a key reason for lifting the Endangered Species Act requirements was to shield oil and gas developers from having to potentially meet new environmental regulations that could force them to shut down. Environmental groups last year sued the National Marine Fisheries Services over its latest biological opinion — a document the agency was required to issue under the ESA to analyze how oil and gas activities could affect wildlife in the Gulf. The groups argued that the opinion failed to require stringent measures to protect endangered species.
An oil rig rises off the Gulf Coast of Alabama
The God Squad decision gives drillers certainty that the status quo will stick, Barsky said.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum chaired the seven-member committee, which also included the U.S. secretaries of defense, agriculture, and the Army, as well as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Council of Economic Advisors.
The group claimed its decision was a “national security imperative.” Global energy markets have been in disarray since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas supplies flow.
Oil production in the Gulf “provides a vital buffer, insulating our economy and military from foreign instability and reducing the strategic leverage of our adversaries,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during the committee’s brief meeting. He said the lawsuits brought by environmental groups risk “halting or severely compromising oil and gas activities in the Gulf.”
America’s offshore oil production has soared in recent years, even with endangered species protections in place.
Just a day after the meeting, Burgum announced that the U.S. produced over 714 million barrels in 2025 — the highest annual output on record. Some 3,500 oil and gas structures are spread across the Gulf, pumping out “beaucoup buckets of Texas tea,” as the journalist Craig Pittman recently put it.
The Interior Department also said last week that it is combining two of its bureaus in order to increase efficiency and accelerate permitting for offshore energy development, while still “maintaining all existing regulatory protections and rigorous safety standards,” according to the April 3 announcement.
Expanding offshore oil and gas development will likely only exacerbate the threats facing endangered whales, manatees, and five species of sea turtles in the Gulf, according to the fisheries agency’s biological opinion. Collisions with oil industry vessels in particular could “jeopardize the continued existence” of the endangered Rice’s whale, of which only 51 are estimated to remain.
A Rice’s whale in the foreground with a federal research vessel
The number of Rice’s whales has declined considerably since the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and subsequent cleanup efforts. Its tiny population size makes it harder for the species to bounce back from oil-industry disruptions.
The God Squad’s main argument — that energy security trumps all else — is similar to the “downside emphasis” tactic that fossil fuel companies use to delay climate action, said Alaina Kinol, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston who studies resistance to climate policy.
“It’s this idea that if we take climate action, it’s going to really hurt us, or it’s going to hurt marginalized people, or that [fossil fuels] are necessary for society,” she said.
She noted that even as the Trump administration pushes to boost fossil fuel production, it is undermining efforts to develop other domestic sources of energy like renewables. Since 2025, the GOP-led Congress has worked to repeal or scale back much of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which provided hundreds of billions of dollars in federal incentives for wind and solar, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, and other clean energy programs.
“That implies that this is really about supporting the oil and gas industry’s ability to extract fossil fuels from the Gulf,” Kinol said.
In the last year, the Interior Department has frozen almost all offshore wind development in the country, and Trump himself has regularly cited the health of whales as a key motivation for this. “The windmills are driving the whales crazy,” Trump said in January 2025, weeks before signing an executive order pausing federal permitting and new leasing for offshore wind farms.
More recent actions to stymie existing projects have used broad and ill-defined concerns about national security as the pretext.
The department has even tried — so far unsuccessfully — to halt construction of five in-progress offshore wind projects totaling nearly 6 gigawatts of capacity, even though those projects represent a crucial new energy source for densely populated and land-constrained East Coast states. Earlier this year, during a brutal cold snap, power plants fueled by fossil gas, oil, and coal were nearly pushed to the brink, a strain that existing offshore wind turbines helped alleviate in some places.
The double standard is a familiar move for the Trump administration, which has previously used the specter of bald eagle deaths to crack down on wind turbines while also easing the protections for the birds that could interfere with oil and gas production. The federal government has also quietly gutted key research programs meant to protect North Atlantic right whales and other marine mammals living in an increasingly industrialized ocean.
The God Squad decision is already facing legal challenges, and experts say it’s unclear whether this unprecedented maneuver will stand up in court. The Center for Biological Diversity, which initially sued to stop the meeting from happening, said it would amend its lawsuit to challenge last week’s outcome. The Natural Resources Defense Council also plans to take legal action, Jasny said.
The move to exempt Gulf oil and gas development from Endangered Species Act protections is likely a “test case” to see what the Trump administration can get away with, he added. The government is also looking to open up oil and gas operations off the coast of Alaska to flex America’s “energy dominance” and off California’s coast to protect Americans’ “energy security.”
“If the administration can allow the killing of [endangered] sea turtles and whales in the Gulf,” Jasny said, “then there’s no end to what this really dangerous development can lead to.”
