The Trump administration plans to convene the so-called God Squad, a high-level federal panel that has the power to override protections under the Endangered Species Act, for a meeting related to oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico.
The meeting, scheduled for March 31, will be the first time in three decades that the group, officially called the Endangered Species Committee, will gather.
Notice of the meeting was released on Friday and officially published in the Federal Register on Monday. The Gulf, which the administration calls the Gulf of America, is home to the critically endangered Rice’s whale, a species that exists nowhere else. According to the latest available federal estimates, around 50 of the animals remain on Earth.
Information in the notice announcing the meeting, called by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, is sparse.
“The Committee is meeting regarding an exemption under the Endangered Species Act with respect to oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities in the Gulf of America associated with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Program,” the notice states.
When emailed for additional information on what had prompted the move, the Interior Department declined to directly answer questions and repeated the published information. But President Trump has wanted the God Squad to convene since he returned to office last year.
Expanding oil and gas drilling has been a central goal of his administration. On Friday, it approved a $5 billion oil drilling project in deep Gulf waters.
Environmental law experts questioned the legality of convening the group in this instance.
To do so, the government must have received an application for an exemption to the Endangered Species Act, said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School who, in the 1970s, helped write the legislative language that created the God Squad provision. He had not seen any application, he said. The notice in the Federal Register did not refer to one.
“There are rules about what has to be in the application and who can file it and I don’t see any of that,” he said.
Last year, a biological opinion by the National Marine Fisheries Service found that oil and gas activities in the Gulf are “likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the Rice’s whale.” However, the opinion included actions that the industry could take to continue operating without risking the whale’s extinction, including monitoring whales and developing a plan to leverage technological advances.
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The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, did not respond to questions about those actions, but an official applauded the convening of the God Squad.
“The directive from Secretary Burgum underscores that balancing conservation and energy production requires a more streamlined, coordinated federal approach,” Holly Hopkins, a vice president at the institute, wrote. “This action is an important step toward ensuring a workable path forward for safe, responsible offshore development while minimizing impacts on endangered species.”
Conservationists strongly disagreed.
“It’s reckless and unnecessary,” said Steve Mashuda, managing attorney of the oceans program at Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit law firm. “There is no reason to give a free pass to the oil industry to cause the extinction of species to allow them to operate business as usual in the Gulf.”
Rice’s whales were recognized as a species only in 2021, after DNA analysis showed that they were distinct from Bryde’s whales, which have a similar outward appearance.
Scientists estimate that as much as 22 percent of the Rice’s whale population died as a result of the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. Vessel strikes related to oil and gas activities are a major threat, according to the fisheries service, but the industry has pushed back on speed restrictions. The noise associated with oil and gas exploration, such as the use of seismic air guns, can also be harmful, overlapping with the hearing and call frequency range of Rice’s whales. The species is believed to rely on hearing to communicate and to find food and mates.
While Rice’s whales are the species most likely to be driven to extinction by oil and gas activities in the Gulf, other threatened and endangered species stand to be harmed, including several sea turtles, sperm whales and Gulf sturgeon.
The committee has ruled three times since it was created in 1978. It is led by the interior secretary and composed of five other senior federal officials: the secretaries of agriculture and the Army, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The members can decide that major economic factors outweigh obligations under the Endangered Species Act if a federal action is deemed to be in the public interest and is nationally or regionally significant.
Most recently, in 1992, it gave an exemption for logging that would harm the northern spotted owl, but environmental groups sued, arguing that the decision had violated legal procedures and was based in politics. The request for the exemption was ultimately withdrawn.
Catrin Einhorn covers biodiversity, climate and the environment for The Times.
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