Interior Secretary Haaland stands up to heat over drilling, mining restrictions

With optimism for clean energy development and an insistence that the Interior Department is following both the law and the science in decisions critics say are throttling domestic fossil fuel production, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland defended the agency's budget request across two days of hearings before Senate and House committees.

Interior is seeking $18 billion for fiscal year 2025, a $935 million or 5% increase over the prior year. Democrats mostly saw Interior's work as finally holding oil and gas companies accountable for their pollution and getting taxpayers a fair share of revenues from production on public lands and waters. But Haaland took heat from lawmakers who questioned the budget increase given the department's cut back on oil and gas lease sales, restrictions on drilling and mining and delays in implementing certain statutory tasks.

Haaland boasted about surpassing ahead of schedule the goal of permitting 25 GW of renewable energy on public lands by 2025, with 29 GW on the books, saying "Interior is leading the way to a clean energy future."

Still, Senator Angus King, Independent-Maine, called for greater urgency to permitting clean energy projects during the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing May 2. "Eisenhower retook Europe in 11 months; nothing should take longer than that," he said of environmental reviews.

"We've sought ways to improve permitting efficiency in the face of a growing workload that exceeds available staffing, quite frankly," Haaland answered, adding that work is being done to streamline environmental reviews and she remained proud of the clean energy projects approved.

Lease sales, revenues

Haaland also pointed to record oil and gas production, to which Republicans were quick to assert that production was due to leasing by other administrations.

Interior finalized the 2024-2029 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program in December 2023 with the fewest oil and gas lease sales in history, and 2024 will mark the first year since 1966 without an oil and gas auction held for acres in federal waters.

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican-Louisiana, pointed out it appeared likely that the single auction planned for 2025 may not happen as he's been told the reviews and planning steps required prior to conducting a lease sale "have not hardly begun."

Interior Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis admitted at the hearing that it would take 18 months at a minimum to conclude those reviews. "Eighteen months puts us almost into 2026 and you said at least suggesting it often goes [longer], so it looks like we might miss a lease sale in 2024 and a lease sale in 2025," Cassidy said.

Because the Inflation Reduction Act tied offshore oil and gas lease sales to Interior's ability to issue offshore wind leases, this could also derail plans for offshore wind development.

Lawmakers also noted Interior's failure to hold quarterly onshore oil and gas lease sales. With fewer lease sales and other actions that purportedly discourage production on public lands, Committee Chairman Joe Manchin, Democrat-West Virginia, said Interior would collect almost $700 million less in bonuses, rents and royalties in fiscal 2025.

"It's kind of hard to justify to the taxpayers why we should be using tax dollars to increase the budget for [Interior] $935 million when you have the ability to collect this and be self-sustaining," Manchin said.

Haaland responded that estimates for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 "reflect an overall upward revenue trend and differences between 2025 and 2024 reflect lower [Office of Management and Budget] price assumptions for oil and gas and lower offshore bonus amounts for 2025."

Final rules

Manchin agreed to disagree on the revenue issue, but also criticized Interior for failing to issue final regulations for offshore carbon capture and storage, with the department now two years behind the statutory deadline.

Haaland said she had no estimated time for when those rules would be completed but that staff was working with the industry and other agencies and countries to ensure an efficient, comprehensive process. She noted the complexity of creating a new regulatory program for a new applied technology.

Responding to opposition to a recently finalized rule that puts conservation on par with other uses of public lands, Haaland said she was keeping her promise to bring balance to the management of public lands. She added that the rule "enables the [Bureau of Land Management] to manage public lands to maintain their health and function for years to come because we believe we have an obligation to future generations for those public lands."

Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, however, contended that the public lands rule would allow third parties to lease land and block its productive use, including for energy development, mineral production, grazing and recreation.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican-Alaska, asserted that "every single decision coming out of the department is working against Alaskans." She said it was a particular blow for Interior, on the same day, to ban oil and gas drilling on 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and deny a permit for a mining access road through a national park to reach plentiful deposits of copper, cobalt, germanium and other critical minerals.

Murkowski said the Ambler Road project was guaranteed by federal law, and its rejection not only sets "a precedent for future administrations to ignore the law," but is counter to the Biden administration's need for critical minerals to advance its renewables and electric vehicle goals.

Tribal voices

House Republicans brought up similar grievances with Interior's actions at a budget hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee May 1. They've asked the Senate to take up bills pushed through the House this week that rescind the public lands rule to put conservation on equal footing with other use of public lands (H.R. 3397) and that reinstate leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while also rescinding the rule banning drilling in more than half of the NPR-A.

At the hearing, they adopted a narrative that Interior ignores "local voices in pursuit of vague undefined goals dictated by a radical agenda," as Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman of Arkansas put it, and several lawmakers questioned Haaland's commitment to tribal communities, asserting a lack of tribal consultation ahead of decisions that limited domestic fossil fuel production or mining.

Haaland assured them that the department had made great strides to improve communications with not only tribal nations but all stakeholders. She credited the department's success in permitting clean energy projects and transmission lines to early outreach and engagement, which she said allows for more informed participation and increases public buy-in, reducing risks of delays and litigation.

Democratic House members stepped up to defend Haaland's record on public participation, especially with historic measures to meet tribes where they are.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat-New York, noting that Haaland is the first-ever Native American cabinet secretary, said the insinuation that she does not care or is not extraordinarily attentive to tribal issues was "deeply offensive" and "completely unsubstantiated" given not just her identity but her record on the matter.

Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat-California, added that Republicans' concerns seem to derive from only talking to tribal groups that want oil and gas development or a mining project on their lands.

Haaland repeatedly said during that hearing that "tribes are not a monolith," and that "they're all going to have different experiences and advocate for different things." In Alaska's North Slope, for instance, while some tribal groups wanted oil development, others rely on a subsistence lifestyle dependent on caribou migration and other animals that could be disrupted by production activities.