Biden’s big ban on offshore drilling won’t be easy for Trump to undo
President Joe Biden moved on Monday to block future oil and natural gas drilling and protect around 625 million acres of U.S. ocean, including the entire East Coast offshore as well as some areas off the West Coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks. … Now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren.”
Biden is doing this under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, making the move harder for President-elect Donald Trump to reverse. Revoking the action would require congressional approval.
“Our treasured coastal communities are now safeguarded for future generations,” Joseph Gordon, campaign director for the environmental nonprofit Oceana, said in a statement.
Predictably, the oil and gas industry had a different take.
Biden’s move was “significant and catastrophic,” said Ron Neal, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America Offshore Committee, an industry lobbying group.
And while Axios reports that most of the areas under the new protection “are locations that the oil and gas industry had not shown strong interest in for development,” the Trump team is still acting very exasperated about the whole affair.
Biden’s ban was “a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told media outlets. “Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Trump said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” on Monday. “I’ll unban it immediately. I will unban it. I have the right to unban it immediately.”
How he plans to “unban” this, though, is not yet known.
The Biden administration has spent considerable time “Trump-proofing” its domestic accomplishments. This includes moving to push through aid for Ukraine before they fall under the incoming Trump administration’s discretion.
In the spring, Biden added rules fortifying federal worker protections by creating more obstacles against “political firings”—something Trump has called for. Such firings are also advocated in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s fascistic agenda for Trump’s administration.
Biden also pulled back unfinished rules across many agencies, which will force the incoming administration to start from scratch if it wants to implement some of its more draconian bigotries, instead of simply perverting the existing work of the Biden administration.
While Trump will likely roll back much of the Biden administration’s progress—such as its electric vehicle and emissions policies—there are other moves, like Biden commuting the sentences of 37 people on federal death row, that Trump won’t be able to reverse.
It ain’t nothing. And we will need everything we can muster over the next few years.