Trump tries to expand offshore drilling off Florida’s Gulf coast

by Craig Pittman, Florida Phoenix
January 30, 2025

A lot of us longtime Floridians commemorate big events with special T-shirts. Looking back through the collection in our closet is like having a photo album made of 100% cotton. Tom Petty Concert 1995! Gasparilla Parade 2001! Crystal River Manatee Festival 2009! 

Heck, I still have a T-shirt from 1992 that proclaims, “I Survived Hurricane Andrew!”

But I never saw anyone in Florida wearing T-shirts to commemorate the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Remember that? For months BP’s broken offshore well spewed oil that ended up as globs of thick, brown goop on the white sandy beaches of eight Florida counties. Ten years later, the damage to both the marine environment and human health still lingered.

Perhaps there were no T-shirts to buy because the vendors were too busy donning hazardous waste suits to clean up the mess BP left us. Or perhaps they realized nobody had money to buy T-shirts because all the tourists had fled, harming the economy.

But if our new president has his way, we’ll have another shot at printing up oil spill T-shirts.

Shortly after becoming the first convicted felon to be sworn in as president, Florida man Donald Trump signed his name to a flurry of paperwork: 26 executive orders, 12 memoranda, and 4 proclamations. 

Some of what he signed was silly, like his executive order calling for changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of ′Merica.” Some were far more serious, like his pardon of all 1,500 of the insurrectionists who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including everyone who attacked cops.

But the one that caught my attention involved offshore drilling.

“Hours after his inauguration, Trump rescinded a recent executive order by former President Joe Biden that banned new oil and gas drilling leases in public waters off Florida’s coast and the eastern Gulf of Mexico,” FloridaPolitics.com reported. “The new president went a step further and issued his own order on ‘Unleashing American Energy’ that made clear that coastal waters would be open to new leases.”

Trump’s own order makes no mention of any exceptions, not even for his many fans in the Florida Panhandle counties that suffered through the 2010 disaster. In fact, his whole executive order seems geared toward rushing this through as fast as possible (more on that in a minute). 

He claimed this is necessary because of a “national energy emergency”— except there’s not one. During Biden’s four years in office, the oil companies set records for both oil production and oil and gas company profits. Their only emergency is finding new pockets in which they can stuff all that cash.

Yet this week the U.S. Department of Energy tweeted, “As President Trump outlined in his inaugural address, the policy of the United States and the Department of Energy is once again to drill baby, drill!”

And the way he’s doing it, odds are you’ll wind up walking your beaches in a hazmat suit, scooping up brown globs of spilled oil. Bid adieu to the offshore drilling safety rules passed following the BP oil spill. Trump repealed them during his first term and Biden put them back, so you better believe Trump will repeal them again.

But there are a few things that could still thwart his ugly plans for our beautiful beaches. One of them is the U.S. Air Force.

Eglin is the bomb

The portion of the Gulf that’s part of America doesn’t belong to any one of us, but to all of us. It’s taxpayer property. Under normal circumstances, the folks who want to drill for oil there have to jump through a lot of hoops to qualify for a permit.

But these are not normal circumstances. 

For one thing, as he did in his first term, Trump has loaded the federal regulatory agencies with people eager to say yes to polluters because that’s who they used to work for.

“President Trump is stocking the Environmental Protection Agency with officials who have served as lawyers and lobbyists for the oil and chemical industries, many of whom worked in his first administration to weaken climate and pollution protections,” The New York Times reported this week. If there were federal chicken coops, Trump would put them in the hands of the Fantastic Mr. Fox. 

His nominee to run the Department of the Interior threw a big shindig for oil, gas, and coal executives last year.  Meanwhile, his nominee to lead the Department of Energy is Chris Wright, the CEO and founder of Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy.

Wright has argued that oil and gas are “virtuous.” If I ever encounter Mr. Wright, I’ll tell him he’s Mr. Wrong. I saw the Deepwater Horizon’s oil staining a beach that I once played on as a child. I didn’t see any halos on those poisonous petrochemical smudges.

These, then, are the folks who will make the decisions on permitting oil wells in the eastern Gulf. They’re supposed to hurry, too. The executive order their boss sent out says they “shall undertake all available efforts to eliminate all delays within their respective permitting processes.” 

And they’re not to let any of those pesky environmental concerns stand in the way, including the Endangered Species Act.

In other words, Trump wants the oil tycoons who donated so much money to his presidential campaign to be quickly approved for drilling so close to his home state. (Yet not in front of Mar-a-Lago. Go figure.) 

But Trump’s eager minions may want to slow down, because someone important got there first: Eglin Air Force Base.

Eglin, located near Fort Walton Beach, has two claims to fame: It’s where the Father of Gonzo Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, began his literary career. And at 640 square miles, it’s the largest air base in the world.

Eglin’s main mission is blowing stuff up. It’s a place for testing bombs with names like the “Massive Ordnance Air Blast.” They need a LOT of room to do that — including a huge chunk of the Gulf: 180,000 square miles of air space and 17 miles of shoreline access.

So, whenever some oil company pops up to say, “Hey, we’d like to drill for oil in the eastern Gulf,” everyone in the Panhandle quickly responds: “Not in Eglin’s territory you don’t.”

“You don’t want to launch any live ammo around oil rigs,” Hunter Miller of the environmental group Oceana pointed out. 

The Defense Department declared the Eglin testing range a national asset that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the U.S. It’s been a federal policy since 1983 to protect the eastern Gulf by restricting oil drilling there.

“Trump does not have the authority to take this action” on drilling in Eglin territory, Miller told me.

This is not the first time we’ve been through this with him, though.

In 2017, when Trump was in office the first time, his Interior Department announced it would auction off 73 million acres in the Gulf for new oil and gas exploration — including in the eastern Gulf. Fifteen members of Florida’s congressional delegation jumped up and down and screamed, “Nuh-uh!” Republicans and Democrats alike demanded the feds protect Eglin’s testing range.

Of course, the Eglin exception might not stop Trump this time because he’s shown little respect for the military. Remember, he called the honored war dead “suckers” and “losers.” And he picked as his defense secretary a TV host who knows more about booze than battalions. Eglin’s needs might not mean much to him.

Still, Trump did back off that last time. Maybe he’ll do so again this time — especially when he learns about the other president who put a moratorium on drilling in the eastern Gulf. 

It was a fellow named Trump.

Trump vs. Trump

The first time I met Mark Ferrulo was back when Chevron wanted to drill in a part of the eastern Gulf known as “Destin Dome.” 

In 1999, the Interior Department held a public hearing in Pensacola that drew about 500 people, ranging from buttoned-down yuppies to teenage skateboarders with mohawks.

The one person who spoke in favor of Chevron’s plans was a New Orleans attorney working for Chevron. The other 499 were opposed — including Ferrulo. My point is, the Progress Florida executive director been involved in these battles for more than a minute.

“The eastern Gulf of Mexico has truly been in the target sights of Big Oil for a long time,” he said this week.

When I talked to Ferrulo about Trump trying to drill in the eastern Gulf, he pointed out that the last guy who put a moratorium on drilling there before Biden did was Trump himself.

There was a pre-existing ban on drilling off Florida’s Gulf coast that was set to expire in 2022, FloridaPolitics.com reported in 2020. “But with Trump’s signature during an event in Jupiter, he extended the moratorium 10 years and added the Atlantic coast to the ban from the Florida Keys to South Carolina.”

After signing the order, Trump told the crowd, “Trump is the great environmentalist,” referring to himself in the third person like Gollum from “The Hobbit,” which never sounds the least bit creepy or pretentious. Then Gov. Ron DeSantis made himself useful by lobbing Trump’s Sharpies to people in the front row.

So even before the Biden ban, there was a ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf that Trump himself imposed. It’s supposed to last until 2032. The law that allowed Trump to do that, by the way, is the same law that Biden cited in imposing his moratorium, Ferrulo told me.

As Martha Collins, executive director of the environmental group Healthy Gulf, pointed out, if Trump tries to push drilling in the area now “he’s undermining his own authority. The hypocrisy here is hilarious.”

Collins noted that after Biden issued his executive order, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Alaska, the American Petroleum Institute, and Gulf Energy Alliance sued to overturn it, including in the eastern Gulf. She pointed out that the ban near Florida would be none of those other states’ business. 

Both she and Ferrulo predicted that, should those suits go to a hearing, the courts would say Florida’s waters are off-limits, upholding both the Biden and Trump drilling bans.  

But as we’ve seen this week, Trump is no respecter of the law. He’s refused to enforce a measure meant to shut down Tik Tok, fired people he can’t legally fire, and temporarily halted tens of billions of dollars in federal spending he has no power to halt. 

As Politico put it this week, “Trump barrels through guardrails, daring courts and Congress to stop him.”

However, there’s still one more speed bump that might at least slow down the oil industry: the oil industry itself.

 Hurray for the free market

Several drilling opponents I talked to asked where Florida’s Republican officeholders were in this fight. Politicians who were vocal last time have been noticeably quiet this time — for instance, Sen. Rick Scott, who hailed Trump’s return to power as “a golden age.”

But a few have spoken up. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is such a Trump fanatic that she’s filed a bill to have his face added to Mount Rushmore. But she saw the Deepwater Horizon spill’s damage firsthand, so she wants a permanent ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf.

“We have a very unique ecosystem in the state of Florida that is untouched, and we have to ensure that it stays that way,” she told WFLA-TV.

I tried contacting some of the others, such as Rep. Neal Dunn, R-Panama City, but they never returned my calls. Perhaps they were too busy genuflecting toward their tangerine-faced messiah to defend their constituents’ lives and livelihoods.

For now, then, the last line of defense against the destruction of the eastern Gulf is capitalism.

While Trump is pushing hard to make drilling there as easy as picking up a chicken sub at Publix, the oil industry doesn’t seem interested. Remember, they had record production and record profits under Biden.

While they like Trump’s pro-oil stance, they say they’ll hold off expanding their offshore drilling until gas prices go up. One of them told The New York Times that he likes Trump’s “positivity” but “it’s too early to say that that’s going to translate into a change in actual activity levels here.”

Thus, the free market may spare the eastern Gulf, at least for now. But that could change. I’d feel a lot better if Congress were to pass a bill like the one that Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Kathy Castor co-sponsored in 2023 to permanently ban drilling in the eastern Gulf.

If and when that happens, I’ll gladly pay for a commemorative T-shirt that says, “We Saved the Gulf of Whatchamacallit!”

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