Federal judge in Alaska dismisses challenge to Trump's reopening of offshore waters to leasing

A federal judge in Alaska dismissed a lawsuit seeking to reverse Trump's reopening of over 600 million acres of federal offshore waters, including a stretch of the Northern Bering Sea, to potential oil and gas leasing.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska dismissed the complaint earlier this week for lack of standing, according to a Justice Department release issued Friday. The court found the coalition failed to demonstrate a substantial risk of imminent harm. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason signed the order Monday in Northern Alaska Environmental Center v. Trump.

The coalition had argued that Trump's rescission of the offshore withdrawals was unlawful and would cause imminent environmental harm from exploration activities, including seismic surveys that typically precede drilling. The release does not name the eleven groups or carry any response from them. The court file names them: the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Oceana and the Natural Resources Defense Council among them, represented by Earthjustice. The State of Alaska and the American Petroleum Institute intervened on the government's side; Alaska's own motion to dismiss was denied as moot.

The dismissal was without prejudice. The court found there were "no pending applications for [geological and geophysical] exploration activities in any waters outside of the Western and Central [Gulf of America]."

"The court properly dismissed plaintiffs' case, because they failed to show an imminent injury from President Trump's reopening of the OCS," said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the Justice Department's Energy and Natural Resources Division. "Neither the President's policy priorities nor industry's expressions of interest could convert a speculative injury into a concrete one."

President Biden withdrew the waters in his final days in office, using Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. The January 6, 2025 memoranda covered the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the eastern Gulf, and 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea. Trump rescinded the withdrawals on his first day in office. Gleason herself ruled in 2019, in League of Conservation Voters v. Trump, that a president exceeded his authority under Section 12(a) in revoking Obama-era withdrawals. That ruling was vacated as moot on appeal in 2021.

Western Alaska tribal organizations Kawerak, the Association of Village Council Presidents and the Bering Sea Elders Group said in a January 2025 statement that tribes in their regions "have opposed offshore oil and gas activities since commercial leasing was first proposed in the early 1980s."

No lease sale is scheduled in the reopened waters. Six Cook Inlet sales are on the federal schedule through 2040, in waters the withdrawals never covered.