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Senior lawyers at the Interior Department were caught off guard by President Biden’s abrupt halt of new oil and natural gas lease sales shortly after taking office and wrestled to put an “official rationale” on the decision, emails obtained by The Washington Times show.
More than a month after the January 2021 executive order from Mr. Biden, career Interior Department officials relied on internet searches for news articles with media statements from agency representatives to respond to concerned governors of states affected by the decision.
What sparked the internal confusion was a March 1, 2021, letter from the Western Governors’ Association requesting to be consulted about the fate of future leases. Senior Interior Department attorneys set out on a quest to uncover the “official rationale” for Mr. Biden’s executive order as they deliberated on how to respond to the Western Governors’ Association, a bipartisan group of 19 states.
On March 4, 2021, senior litigation specialist Merry Gamper sent an article by The Associated Press to Wendy Dorman, an agency attorney-adviser in the division of mineral resources. Ms. Gamper cited the response of Interior Department Communications Director Melissa Schwartz in the article.
“The onshore sales were postponed to confirm the adequacy of underlying environmental analyses, said Interior spokesperson Melissa Schwartz,” Ms. Gamper wrote to Ms. Dorman.
Ms. Dorman responded: “Merry, Thanks for your efforts in trying to track down the official rationale for lease sale postponements. I didn’t know where to begin.”
The episode raises questions about why attorneys handling administrative policies appeared to be kept out of the loop for so long.
The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The department produced internal emails for the Functional Government Initiative in response to a public records request.
“It turns out the ’most transparent administration ever’ is not even transparent with its own career agency employees,” said Peter McGinnis, a spokesman for the government watchdog group. “Political appointees should certainly be responsible for making key decisions, even if that means sometimes overruling career staff. But keeping them in the dark well after the decision is made is downright dysfunctional.”
Days after taking office in January 2021, Mr. Biden signed a series of executive orders on climate change, including the pause on oil and gas drilling lease sales in public waters and on public lands pending an environmental review.
A yearslong power struggle ensued among the president, Congress and the courts as the fossil fuel industry, states and environmentalists slapped the administration with lawsuits.
The administration was eventually forced to lift its moratorium and make new lease sales under the Inflation Reduction Act despite the president’s 2020 campaign promise for “no new drilling.” Sales under Mr. Biden pale in comparison with those of his predecessors.
The Interior Department issued a five-year plan last year that includes the fewest new drilling leases since the program began. Only three are slated for 2024 to 2029.
The email exchanges provided to Functional Government Initiative include heavy redactions from the Interior Department. Ms. Gamper, Ms. Dorman and other top officials also struggled to track down an internal memo with more information. The agency did not provide the memo as part of the records request.
Ms. Gamper sent two additional news articles to Ms. Dorman with more statements about Mr. Biden’s executive order from other state and national representatives.
One was an S&P Global article quoting Interior spokesman Tyler Cherry saying the pause “necessitates the postponement of proposed offshore and onshore lease sales on federal lands while the comprehensive review is underway.”
The other was from the Wyoming-based Casper Star-Tribune quoting a spokeswoman at the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming office stating the “delay will provide the new administration with time to ’get up to speed’ and ’go over environmental reviews.’”
“Once again, this is excellent intel,” Ms. Dorman said.
The Western Governors’ Association and the office of Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who co-authored the 2021 letter to the Interior Department, told The Times that their inquiry to the agency ultimately went unanswered.
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.
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