The Trump administration said it was going to launch a new era for American oil and gas production, tearing away Biden-era restrictions on fossil fuels and increasing the use of abundant natural resources.
Yet, petroleum industry executives are not nearly as happy as they were when Trump won the election, sources familiar with their thinking tell NOTUS. Why? Trump’s parallel agenda gutting the federal workforce could actually make it harder for this promised new energy production to actually take place.
These concerns have reached the highest levels of the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House, multiple people, including House of Representatives staffers and an industry lobbyist, told NOTUS.
The Trump administration, through its DOGE initiatives and other federal workforce reduction plans, has put jobs in energy and resource permitting, inspections and monitoring at risk. Already Interior and the EPA have lost workers, ranging from archaeologists to land law examiners, who were fired as probationary employees and declined return offers, took DOGE’s voluntary buyout or have been poached by higher-paying private firms.
“Under Biden, the oil and gas program wasn’t being built up to be able to support the capacity at the demand that is being decreed has to happen,” said one current staffer at the Bureau of Land Management. “You want this higher demand, fine, but we have to hire. We have to build that capacity.”
Industry representatives want agencies to protect certain workers from a reduction in force. While they love Trump’s deregulatory agenda, they don’t want the agencies to stop enforcing environmental and permitting regulations immediately, because this exposes them to lawsuits. And they are deeply concerned about the costs of tariffs.
“I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” one industry executive wrote in the first quarterly energy survey from the Dallas Fed published since Trump retook office.
“The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” another executive wrote.
These surveys typically reflect the sentiment of the industry — and despite Trump’s energy production promises, the industry sounded pessimistic.
“Across the board, major energy companies are concerned about this. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management — they want to have certainty that their permits are going to hold up in court and they want to make investments in America that they can depend on,” the staffer of one Texas representative told NOTUS.
Another House staffer from an oil and gas region called Trump’s actions so far “a double-edged sword” for the industry. “Industry folks are realizing that once you lose institutional knowledge, it’s harder to get projects done,” he said.
Interior spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace told NOTUS in a statement that the agency “continues to prioritize staffing and resources for permitting, inspections, lease management and other essential energy development functions.” Peace said any claims that projects have been delayed due to staffing cuts are “inaccurate.”
Likewise, the White House said in a statement that the concerns from the petroleum industry are “fake news” and that the Department of the Interior has “everything it needs to implement President Trump’s agenda to unleash American energy and ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ and it’s paying off as Americans benefit from unprecedented energy growth, lower gas prices, and massive lease sales.”
There’s some indication, however, that the agencies see the issues the oil and gas industry are raising. The Department of the Interior has posted a temporary job opening in Rock Springs, Wyoming, to address the “backlog of final abandonment inspections and general environmental surface inspections.” The job description states that Interior expected to “fill many vacancies.” The listing was initially open for applications for just five days, from March 31 to April 4, but was extended on Wednesday to April 8. The listed job would be ineligible for career civil service protections.
The EPA said all staffing cuts were “in accordance with President Trump’s agenda to eliminate DEI programs,” an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email to NOTUS. The email also cited permitting reform as one of the policy priorities for Lee Zeldin, the EPA’s administrator. “We are actively listening to employees at all levels to gather ideas on how to better fulfill agency statutory obligations, increase efficiency, and ensure the EPA is as up-to-date and effective as ever,” the email read.
The thinly stretched staff on energy projects has been a thorn in the side of oil, mining and solar companies alike for years, four current employees at the Bureau of Land Management said to NOTUS. Getting a single permit for new energy production usually requires at least five or six different staffers across multiple agencies and departments.
And it’s not just permits. The federal agencies are responsible for inspecting ongoing energy production, such as mining equipment, drilling rigs, storage tanks and construction to ensure that pipes aren’t leaking, runoff isn’t polluting drinking water or that a big storm won’t topple a tank into the ocean. Petroleum engineers and technicians and natural resource specialists are frequently poached by high-paying private sector offers, leaving the federal inspections staff stretched thin.
“Industry is always pointing out that BLM isn’t getting enough inspections done,” said one government worker in the oil and gas sector. “And the oil and gas industry usually has a good relationship with the field offices, they know about the staffing issues, they know about the time frame issues, they understand the problems. But they want their permits yesterday,” she said.
While significant deregulation and reforms to the permitting process — both pledged by Trump — could bring down the amount of work each of those staffers have, it will be years before many new regulations are finalized and fully protected against legal challenges. That’s if the administration can even succeed in achieving what it has promised.
Until then, federal workers with specific technical skills are needed to move projects forward at all, let alone at the increased speed promised by the new administration.
“What was true in the last Trump administration, what was true in the Biden administration, is whatever you prioritize, whatever the this is that you want to get done, there is not enough slack in the system already be able to surge the kind of resources you need to get those processes moving really quickly,” said Justin Pidot, the former general counsel for the Biden White House office that worked on permitting reform.
The federal government is under a hiring freeze with very limited exceptions, and the Department of the Interior is planning to cut a significant swath of its workforce.
“We never regrew the planning shop at BLM,” said Ryan Hathaway, a former environmental justice leader in the Biden White House and a former permitting staff leader for the Bureau of Land Management during the first Trump administration. “It is still atrophied. If they come in and fire any more, not only will they not get permitting done efficiently, I think we are at a risk that all of that institutional knowledge will now be getting paid more to work for the consulting firms.”
Even if Interior were to lift the hiring freeze for some jobs, hiring people with special skills for energy projects is especially difficult because the office locations are in remote regions of states including Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana and California. Telework options could persuade prospective workers to take the job in the first place, several staffers said, but the Trump administration’s return-to-office order prevents those hires.
“We’ve had retention issues and recruitment issues for years now, and seen a significant exodus from just retirements,” one staffer who works on oil leases said. BLM is responsible for managing lease sales and approving the transfers of mineral rights, and one key office in the Permian Basin was already more than a year behind on some of that work when Trump took office, this staffer said. The timeline is now stretching closer to two years, they said.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has repeatedly pledged to increase lease sales on public lands and up opportunities for minerals extraction.
“We’ve had examiners take the fork in the road offer, and now with the hiring freeze, there’s no timeline for when we can get new employees to help with that workload,” a staffer said.
Though the Biden administration did not focus on hiring in the oil and gas sector, they did launch a program to hire more permitting staff toward the end of Biden’s term.
One key area identified by the Biden administration? Archaeologists. Several laws passed in the 20th century require the government to determine how projects could impact historical sites, like ancient tribal art or old mining ghost towns. Unless Congress amends those laws, archaeologists are must-have staff.
In the last year and a half of Biden’s term, agencies onboarded some new archaeologists.
Then Trump took office — and because some of these federal workers were still probationary employees, they were promptly fired. Interior eventually offered their jobs back, but not everyone took them, staffers told NOTUS.
“They were hesitant to take their jobs back. Trust was broken. It was a slap in the face,” said one staffer who helps manage the overall permitting process in a BLM office.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.