Huffman, Heinrich, Markey Lead 60 Lawmakers in Condemning Trump’s Plans to Sell Off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Huffman, Heinrich, Markey Lead 60 Lawmakers in Condemning Trump's Plans to Sell Off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Washington, D.C. - Today, House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) led 60 members in the House and Senate in condemning the Trump administration's plans to auction off sacred and sensitive lands within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas companies.

The administration's push comes despite two failed lease sales that exposed drilling in the Refuge as an economic fantasy. The first sale in 2021 generated less than one percent of projected revenue, while the second in 2025 received zero bids. Today, no oil company holds leases on the Coastal Plain of the Refuge. Major companies, including Chevron and BP, have abandoned their Arctic Refuge interests entirely, in some cases paying millions to walk away. Every major bank in the United States and Canada has refused to finance Arctic Refuge drilling, citing no real industry interest, extreme costs, remoteness, and decades-long bipartisan opposition.

"These outcomes were not anomalies but rather reflect a clear and consistent lack of market interest in Arctic drilling," the lawmakers wrote. "As a Goldman Sachs analyst previously observed, 'there is almost no rationale for Arctic exploration.'"

The Coastal Plain provides critical habitat for polar bears and the Porcupine Caribou Herd, which Alaska Native and Indigenous communities, particularly the Gwich'in people, depend on for subsistence. The lawmakers added, "Even preliminary activities, such as seismic exploration, risk causing lasting damage to this remote and highly sensitive landscape."

Republicans have repeatedly tried to use Arctic drilling to help offset tax breaks for the wealthy. Trump's first billionaire giveaway - the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act - mandated lease sales in the Arctic Refuge that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would generate $1.8 billion. Those projections proved wildly inaccurate. The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill repeated the same scheme anyway, requiring more lease sales to pay for tax giveaways to the ultra-wealthy.

"Taken together, these facts underscore a fundamental reality: oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Refuge has failed to generate meaningful revenue, failed to attract industry participation, and failed to demonstrate any realistic prospect of benefiting American taxpayers," the lawmakers wrote.

Read the full letter here.

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