Doug Burgum Just Reversed Every Oil Lease Deb Haaland Killed in the Arctic

Deb Haaland killed seven oil leases in the Arctic in the name of climate protection.

Doug Burgum just proved her cancellation was illegal and started handing every lease back.

Now Alaska Natives are backing him up with three words environmentalists never wanted to hear.

Deb Haaland Killed Seven Oil Leases and Blamed the Weather

The Trump administration awarded seven oil leases covering three hundred sixty five thousand acres in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the final days of Trump's first term.

Joe Biden froze all federal oil and gas leasing on his first day in office.

His Interior Department ordered new environmental reviews of those same leases that June.

Then-Secretary Deb Haaland terminated all seven leases in September 2023.

She justified the move by saying Arctic warming happens "more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet."

A federal court ruled in March 2025 that Haaland's cancellation broke the law.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is now reinstating every lease Haaland killed.

An Interior Department spokeswoman said the agency is "moving quickly to reinstate the wrongfully terminated leases, consistent with President Trump's order to unleash Alaska's energy resources."

Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy called the reinstatement "a positive step forward in responsible development."

Haaland's cancellation didn't just cost the companies that bought those leases in good faith.

It cost Alaska years of production on land Congress had already approved for drilling.

Alaska Natives Showed Up and Said the Three Words Haaland Never Wanted to Hear

Burgum didn't stop at the wildlife refuge.

He traveled to Utqiagvik with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for a joint town hall, the first coordinated Alaska visit by Trump's National Energy Dominance Council.

Local leaders showed up to tell them what Biden's restrictions actually meant on the ground.

Utqiagvik Mayor Asisaun Toovak said the visit itself meant something to her people.

"It means they're listening, they're taking the time to come here, to listen to our Indigenous voices," she said.

A Kaktovik resident named Charles Lampe didn't need a prepared statement to make his point.

"Drill, baby, drill," he told them.

Burgum is now moving to rescind separate Biden-era rules that blocked development across thirteen million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve, rules Alaska Native communities opposed from the start.

Environmental Groups Are Fighting to Undo It All in Court

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Wilderness Society, and a coalition called Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic have all filed suit to stop the reversal.

The Center for Biological Diversity has been trying to kill Arctic drilling since 2020, years before Burgum ever took office.

Their lawsuits target a February lease sale covering more than six hundred tracts and more than eighteen million acres of federally managed land, the largest undisturbed stretch of public land left in the country.

The Bureau of Land Management opened that land under a mandate Congress wrote into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, not an executive order a future administration could casually undo.

The Justice Department is defending the agency's process, telling the court it is meeting what it calls "state-of-the-art obligations" under federal law.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason heard oral arguments and said she will rule before the end of the month.

Her decision will decide whether Burgum gets to keep what he just reinstated, or whether a federal judge hands it right back to the groups who fought against him.

The irony here isn't subtle: the same activist groups who claim to speak for indigenous communities are in court right now trying to kill the drilling that actual Alaska Natives asked for in person.

Burgum's team didn't manufacture that contradiction.

Alaska Natives put it on record themselves, on camera, at the town hall Burgum's team organized.

Sources:

• Free Beacon, "Trump Admin Moves To Reinstate Major Alaskan Oil Leases Canceled Under Biden," Washington Free Beacon, 2026.
• Free Beacon, "Alaska Natives Cheer as Trump Admin Axes Biden-Era Oil Drilling Restrictions," Washington Free Beacon, August 2026.
• Institute for Energy Research, "Interior Secretary Burgum Reverses Biden's Climate Policies in Alaska," Institute for Energy Research, 2026.
• U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, Oral Argument in Center for Biological Diversity v. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, October 2026.