Of course the Trump administration assembled the God Squad.
I blame the name — “God Squad.” It sounds like a big-budget summer action movie or a Christian youth group. Irresistible to an administration obsessed with shiny things.
If we’d just stuck with the group’s real name — the Endangered Species Committee — it might have remained in mothballs, shoved under layers of bureaucracy.
Instead, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week dusted off the collection of six senior administration officials and sat them around a table to deliver an unhinged decision: Oil and gas exploration, development, and operations in the Gulf of Mexico need no longer abide by the Endangered Species Act.
The “go big or go home” decision covered not one, but roughly 20 endangered species, including the critically endangered Rice’s whale, which lives only in the northern Gulf of Mexico. There are about 50 of them left on the planet.
The meeting took 17 minutes. It included no debate, no science, no serious attempt to articulate members’ decision-making process.
If not for open meeting laws, it could have been an email.
After Burgum delivered opening remarks, he turned over the microphone to his guest, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who had requested the meeting.
Hegseth spoke not to his colleagues but directly into the camera, channeling his former job as a Fox News weekend host. He claimed that energy companies operating in the Gulf are so burdened by environmental lawsuits that it puts oil production at risk and poses a national security threat.
Then each committee member delivered a canned statement in which they thanked each other for their incredible leadership and rubber-stamped Hegseth’s request.
Compare that to the last time the committee met, in 1992 during the first Bush administration.
At issue back then was the northern spotted owl, whose habitat in the Pacific Northwest was threatened by logging interests.
Before the committee convened, lawyers spent four weeks in Portland gathering testimony from biologists, economists, and other expert witnesses, building a body of evidence for the committee to consider. The owls lost that battle (they’re still endangered), but the committee appeared to take their responsibility seriously.
Hegseth didn’t bother with all that. His rationale boiled down to one sentence: “To be secure as a nation, we need a steady, affordable supply of our own energy.”
No argument here. However, the biggest threats to our energy supply come not from environmentalists, but from Hegseth and President Trump.
Trump detests windmills so much that last month, the administration signed a deal to pay French company TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon offshore wind projects on the East Coast.
