In the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico lives one of the rarest and rarest mammals in the world: the Rice Whale. There are only 51 left, according to the latest scientific estimates, which means they are on the verge of extinction.
That’s why, in 2019, the federal government – then under the first term of President Donald Trump – gave these delicate mammals a lifeline. It listed them as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, the country’s strongest wildlife protection law and among the strongest in the world.
The law makes it a crime to kill or harm animals, with certain exceptions. It also requires state agencies, including those that permit oil and gas leases, to ensure that their actions do not threaten the existence of ESA-protected species. This was the key to Rice’s whale, since the main threat they face comes from the oil and gas industry in the Gulf: ship strikes, exploration noise and spills.
Protecting the whale under federal law gave it a chance to survive, environmental groups said in the listing. But the new Trump administration has shown a strong ability to water down, or completely avoid, protection for species under the law – especially if those animals live in areas with an active oil and gas industry.
This brings us to this week: On Tuesday, several top Trump officials convened a rare meeting called the God Squad — a committee, chaired by the Secretary of the Interior, with the power to repeal the Endangered Species Act and approve actions that could lead to the extinction of species. Congress created the committee in 1978, shortly after the ESA was created, because rare cases of endangered species protection threaten the US economy or national security. It’s actually a loophole in the Act, and it’s been used a few times before.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — the highest-ranking official there — said ESA protections for animals in the Gulf, such as Rice’s whales, threaten to limit oil production. He said the Gulf produces 15 percent of the country’s crude oil, which helps the military and defends the US. “Exemption from the Endangered Species Act is not just a good idea, it’s a critical national security issue,” Hegseth told the group.
The meeting lasted only about 15 minutes and the group voted unanimously to exempt oil and gas operations in the Gulf from ESA protection. It was the first time “God’s Team” – formerly known as the Committee on Endangered Species – had ever granted freedom on national security grounds.
What Hegseth didn’t say was that the ESA rules for Rice’s whales and other species don’t ban oil and gas drilling, they just require companies to take steps to avoid harming them, such as limiting boat traffic in the whales’ prime habitat. (There was also no discussion of the administration’s role in disrupting the flow of oil because of the war in Iran.)
The Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, meanwhile, pointed out that efforts to stop the production of energy in the Gulf – which, again, is not what the law does – remove the production of fossil fuels in countries that do not produce energy in a clean and safe way like the US. Yet Burgum’s Interior Department is putting aside clean energy projects in favor of dirty fuels like oil and coal. The anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill is also fresh. It spilled 134 million liters of oil into the Gulf, which caused a real national emergency. Not to mention: Rice’s whale population declined by about 22 percent after the disaster.
“What happened today is a permit for the extinction of endangered species in the Gulf, signed by political appointees on behalf of the richest companies on Earth,” Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for natural resources at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, said in a statement. “‘God’s Team’ was designed for impossible, irresolvable conflicts where there was no other way forward.
Measuring the length of a school bus, Rice’s whales – named after the late whale scientist, Dale W. Rice – are found only in the Gulf of Mexico and nowhere else. For such a large and exciting animal, scientists know very little about it. In fact, only recently have researchers realized that Rice’s whales are a new species.
Ultimately, the God Squad release may hold up in the courts — the Center for Biological Diversity, a litigation advocacy group, said in a statement, “we’re going to overturn it.” In the meantime, these whales will continue to struggle to survive.
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