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Despite the government shutdown, the Trump administration began the process of offering up around 16 million acres of public land in the Arctic for oil and gas drilling. The areas targeted for drilling include lands adjacent to Teshekpuk Lake. Teshekpuk is the largest lake in Arctic Alaska and one that's vital to the Teshekpuk caribou herd and Indigenous subsistence practices.
The Trump administration published a notice in the Federal Register asking oil and gas companies for nominations of areas to include in an upcoming oil and gas lease sale. The "One Big Beautiful Bill" that passed on a party-line vote this summer requires the Bureau of Land Management to hold at least five lease sales of at least four million acres each over the next ten years.
Conservation groups blasted the Interior department for moving ahead with the lease sale while the government is shut down.
“We shouldn’t be focused on opening areas up for leasing for foreign companies to make profits when there’s hard-working Americans who aren’t getting paychecks,” said Andy Moderow, senior director of policy at the Alaska Wilderness League.
Kennedy threatens CRA chaos over owls
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana is trying to fast-track a resolution that would overturn a Biden-era plan to save the Pacific Northwest's spotted owl by killing hundreds of thousands of invasive barred owls. Kennedy wants to use the Congressional Review Act to block the Biden plan, even though that plan is also supported by Interior secretary Doug Burgum and timber companies. Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington indicated she was "kind of in agreement" and might be open to Kennedy's resolution.
The American Forest Resource Council raised alarms, saying using the CRA to overturn a forest management plan “would create unacceptable risks and delays to current and future timber sales, legal vulnerability for the agency, uncertainty for the local milling infrastructure and private sector workforce.”
Sen. Kennedy was undeterred. “I like owls. I love owls. I like owls better than people,” he told E&E News. “Those owls never did anything to the federal government. They just want to eat and live peacefully like everyone else.”
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...in our combined 90 years of professional work on national parks, we have never seen such a direct assault on the mission, public servants and resources of the National Park Service. Assault after assault on the agency will have a cumulative impact: the firing of employees, threats of retribution, closure of park support offices, budget proposals that would cut the entire operation by one-third, and the clearly stated goal of transferring over hundreds of small parks to the states. And now the parks are being left wide-open to vandalism as well.”
