On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that weakened federal procedures to protect environmentally and culturally significant places to address a “national emergency” on energy.
Trump singled out Washington, Oregon and California as places “where dangerous state and local policies jeopardize our nation’s core national defense and security needs, and devastate the prosperity of not only local residents, but the entire United States population.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later identified 688 projects nationwide whose clean-water-related reviews will be fast-tracked, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.
Washington and 14 other states have filed a lawsuit against this executive order in federal court in Seattle to stop these shortcuts, saying the Trump administration is going overboard on declaring “emergencies,” and this executive order’s “emergency” is not real.
“No such emergency exists. … [Trump] has already declared more ‘emergencies’ than any president in U.S. history,” Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown said at a press conference earlier this year announcing the lawsuit. Washington Department of Ecology director Casey Sixkiller added: “We’re pushing back on the federal government in their use of ‘emergencies.’”
Washington leaders also argued that Trump’s energy policy has less to do with an emergency than with moving away from green energy efforts by boosting fossil fuel projects.
Washington does not have any expansions in oil projects on the drawing board. But at least three natural gas projects, at least one floodplain project and at least one underwater transmission line venture in Washington face shortcuts in federal oversight. Meanwhile, Trump’s executive order does not call for bypassing regulations for wind turbine and solar power projects — which Washington leaders are pushing to create new sources for electricity.
At a May 9 press conference in Seattle, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown described the executive order to give the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation the power to bypass review procedures in order to speed construction of energy-related projects. The executive order is vague on details of which procedures would be bypassed. Brown said the shortcuts will likely vary from project to project.
Washington has many habitats for federally and state protected species, plus numerous places that are culturally sensitive to the state’s Native nations.
The White House did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the lawsuit.
The states argue that these rules and procedures are needed to protect people’s health and the environments of these 15 states. Without them, dangers will be overlooked, the lawsuit said.
For example, the lawsuit cites a project by Northwest Pipeline LLC, a natural gas pipeline network, to decommission and rebuild a natural gas pipe beneath the Columbia River to connect Washington and Oregon. The current 16-inch pipe is 4,670 feet long, or almost 0.9 miles. After removing the 16-inch pipe, Northwest Pipeline will then install a new longer, almost mile-long 18-inch pipeline beneath the Columbia River, where federally endangered and threatened species of chinook and coho salmon and steelhead pass.
Additionally, Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order says that United States energy production is “far too inadequate to meet our nation’s needs.” The order defines “energy” as crude oil, natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, hydroelectric dams and critical minerals.”
The emergency declaration also omits any mention of wind or solar power, two blossoming industries in Washington — meaning they won’t get the shortcuts provided to the fossil fuel industry, the lawsuit said.
In fact, another Jan. 20 Trump executive order stops federal permitting activities on land wind-turbine projects. The same executive order stops offshore wind turbines from being installed along America’s coasts, while still allowing offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. At least 58 such projects are on the drawing board. A decision is slated for next year on whether Washington should join those offshore turbine efforts with a public/private partnership.
Brown contended Trump’s motive is a distaste for climate change measures, which leads him to boost the coal, oil and gas industries — also industries that donate money to his PACs.
“It’s all about eliminating competition and shackling America to dirty fossil fuels forever … We in Washington state and the other 14 states joining us will not let him maximize fossil fuel profits at public expense,” Brown said.
The lawsuit also questions whether America’s natural gas industry needs help, given that five seaside terminals were recently approved to export liquid natural gas overseas.
Meanwhile, the oil industry is already meeting the nation’s needs, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In fact in 2024, the United States produced more oil than any other nation in history, the federal agency said.
The nation’s petroleum exports jumped higher than imports for the first time in 2020. In every year since then, except for 2021, U.S. petroleum exports exceeded imports. In 2023, the United States imported 8.51 million barrels a day of crude oil and other petroleum products, and exported 10.5 million barrels of oil and other petroleum a day. Those numbers were similar in 2024, with 8.5 million barrels a day in imports and 10.5 million barrels a day in exports.
“[Trump] declaring a national emergency when we have more energy doesn’t reflect reality,” Washington’s Sixkiller said.
Wolf Richter, a Wall Street analyst whose coverage on his blog Wolf Street includes the oil industry, noted that from 2010 to 2014, the United States more than doubled its extraction of crude oil.
Richter warned against creating a glut of American-drilled crude oil.
“Currently, the mantra in the oil and gas industry is ‘discipline’: Keep production growth at a pace that doesn’t collapse the price of oil again. They have learned the hard way twice in recent years, and they don’t want to relearn the hard way again, that overproduction causes the price to collapse,” Richter wrote. Gluts led to crude oil prices plummeting in 2014-2017 and 2019-2021, leading to numerous bankruptcies among drillers, he said.
No expansions of Washington’s five oil refineries are on the drawing board, according to the Western States Petroleum Association, a trade association for the oil industry in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona and Nevada.
Boost to fossil fuels
The lawsuit alleges that at least five environmental fix-it projects — four involving natural gas pipelines — face short cuts in federal reviews in Washington.
The first is Northwest Pipeline’s natural gas pipe beneath the Columbia River.
The second consists of repairing a 30-inch natural gas pipeline in the Little Washougal River in Clark County. The shortcuts called for in Trump’s executive order are expected to speed the actual replacement from August 2027 to August 2026, the states’ lawsuit said.
The third is realigning a tributary to Gosnell Creek in Mason County to lower and widen the floodplain in 2026 in support of another natural gas pipeline project. Critical habitat for Puget Sound winter steelhead — listed by the feds as a threatened species — is about 350 feet downstream of this project.
The fourth would convert a little more than three acres in Cowlitz County for industrial use in late 2026, including an electric compressor station and other above-ground facilities relating to a natural gas pipeline.
The fifth project cited would benefit alternative energy. The upcoming installation of 100 miles of power lines beneath the Columbia River between The Dalles and Portland will require extensive environmental reviews, the lawsuit said. This is intended to handle roughly 1,100 megawatts of electricity from wind turbines, solar farms and other alternative power sources.
The lawsuit also cited a 2020 example in which the Corps of Engineers designated an “emergency” to fast-track reviews of a flood control project in Skagit County. That project did not take sufficient erosion prevention measures, which led to sediments piling up in Nookachamps Creek, a tributary of the Skagit River. That affected chinook salmon headed to Puget Sound to be eaten by orcas — and also put pressure on flooding problems in that tributary system, the lawsuit said.
“Environmental regulations aren’t red tape. They are guardrails,” Sixkiller said.
The federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is also a defendant in the 15-state lawsuit. That’s because the expedited federal permitting also covers cultural preservation.
Additionally, it’s unknown how the executive order to find shortcuts for energy projects would affect the U.S. government’s treaties with Native nations, which affect traditional hunting and fishing sites and reservation land.
It is largely uncharted legal territory if Trump’s executive order violates treaties signed in the 19th century between the majority of Washington’s Native nations and the U.S. government. Those treaties cover protecting culturally significant sites within the reservations and within Native traditional hunting and fishing grounds in Washington. Twenty-one Washington Native nations have signed treaties with the United States, and another eight are federally recognized in other ways. The agreements vary, as each sovereign Native nation charts its own course with the U.S. government.
Without speaking for all the tribes, Bill Iyall, general council chairman of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe (one of the eight non-treaty tribes), speculated at the May 9 press conference that “there will be treaty implications” with Trump’s executive order on energy. He added that some Washington Native nations are “just beginning dialogues with the administration.”
