Trump settles suits challenging Biden-era oil restrictions in Alaska

(CN) — The U.S. Department of Justice settled two cases challenging Biden-era restrictions on oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, agreeing that the limits ran afoul of federal law.

Both lawsuits challenged former President Joe Biden’s 2024 restrictions on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain. One lawsuit was brought by the state of Alaska and the other by Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.

Justice Department attorneys filed a stipulation of dismissal on Tuesday and said the settlement concedes the 2024 program violated the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a law passed during President Donald Trump’s first term that established an oil and gas program in the refuge.

“This settlement furthers President Trump’s commitment to unleash Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential,” Adam Gustafson, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division, said in a statement.

When Trump established a program for oil and gas leasing in the coastal plain in 2017, he directed the Interior Department and Bureau of Land Management to conduct at least two lease sales within seven years. The coastal plain is a 1.6 million-acre swath in the midst of the refuge that hundreds of species, including polar bears and caribou, inhabit.

The department said the Biden-era program wrongfully prevented the Interior Department from fulfilling its duty to conduct a second lease sale on the land, closed 75% of the coastal plain to exploration and leasing, imposed “unreasonable surface use restrictions” on the remaining 25% and unreasonably restricted surface disturbance.

The first lease sale was held in early 2021, when the Bureau of Land Management offered 22 tracts on 1.1 million acres. When Biden took office, he immediately issued an executive order directing the Interior chief to place a “temporary moratorium” on the leasing program and conduct a new analysis of the environmental impacts. The department suspended operations on the leases awarded in the 2021 sale and in 2023 canceled the leases — seven of which that had been awarded to the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.

Following Biden’s executive order, the Bureau of Land Management issued a supplemental environmental impact statement regarding the program that identified which lands are available for lease and added more restrictive terms and conditions for leases and authorizations under the program.

The Bureau of Land Management in late 2024 made 400,000 acres available for a second oil and gas lease sale, but no bids were received.

The state and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority filed separate suits against the Interior Department, accusing the Biden-era oil and gas leasing program of being too restrictive.

Trump’s Justice Department agreed with the plaintiffs, and federal officials lauded the dismissal of both lawsuits.

“The Biden-era Alaska oil and gas leasing program violated the law and improperly limited Alaska’s energy potential with unreasonable regulation,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward characterized the dismissal as a “correction of the prior administration’s congressional obstruction.”

“This settlement sets the record straight that the Biden administration’s 2024 restrictions on oil and gas production in Alaska were overly restrictive and contrary to Congress’ clear command to establish a competitive oil and gas leasing program in Alaska’s coastal plain,” Woodward said in a statement.

Under direction from Trump, the Bureau of Land Management issued a new decision in 2025 that opened up the entire coastal plain to oil and gas leasing and seismic exploration, superseding the challenged 2024 program.

However, the 2025 decision has not gone unchallenged by environmental groups and states that argue the expanded oil and gas program will harm migratory birds and increase greenhouse gas emissions.

In three lawsuits brought by Alaska Native villages and environmental groups challenging a 2020 coastal plains oil and gas program approved during Trump’s first term, a coalition of states recently filed new briefs to consider the 2025 decision as essentially a continuation of the five-year-old case and urged the court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs.

​​“Once again, this administration is breaking the law to prop up the fossil fuel industry, with no regard for the costs to our natural world,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a June statement. “The interests of oil and gas are not above the interests of the American people and our extraordinary ecology.”

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority had previously sued the Department of the Interior over the authority’s canceled leases, and in 2025, a federal judge ruled in the Alaska agency’s favor. Later that year, the same judge also ruled in favor of the federal government in a land dispute in which Alaska sought ownership of 20,000 acres of land within the northwest corner of the refuge.

Neither Alaska nor the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority responded to a request for comment before press time.