Following Unusual White House Meeting With Big Oil, Haaland Joins Chair Grijalva and 15 House Democrats Urging Sec. Bernhardt to Reject Calls for Royalty Cuts

Albuquerque, N.M. – Congresswoman Deb Haaland (NM-01), Vice Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee joined Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and 15 other House Democrats urging Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to reject Republican and fossil fuel industry calls for royalty cuts on oil and gas taken from federal lands and waters. Such a move, the authors write, would be illegal, unnecessary, and disconnected from the realities the country faces during the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government royalty rate is already lower than that received by the New Mexico State Land Office, which oversees energy leases across some 14,000 square miles of state trust land and additional underground resources to help fund schools, universities, and hospitals.

“Regardless of the Trump administration’s policy preferences,” the members wrote. “Bernhardt cannot decree across-the-board royalty cuts because of a landmark 1986 decision by the Interior Board of Land Appeals, which found that that the Bureau of Land Management can only cut the royalty rate at a specific natural resource extraction site if a corporation can demonstrate that the cut is necessary for that particular site to keep operating. It is not sufficient to demonstrate that a cut would benefit the company financially.”

“Note that it is the interests of the Government, and the taxpayers it represents, that are critical here, not the interests of individual oil and gas companies,” the lawmakers write today. “These two sets of interests are not synonymous.”

Even if the clear legal restrictions were somehow overcome, the lawmakers write, cutting royalties across the board

“would do nothing but cheat the American taxpayer of potentially billions of dollars in revenue that will be needed to help struggling workers, rebuild stockpiles of medical supplies, and recover from the current crisis. Ill-considered offshore royalty cuts passed by a Republican Congress in 1995 have already resulted in an $18 billion (and growing) loss for taxpayers – money that should be going to important national needs but instead is simply padding the profits of Big Oil at no discernible benefit to the public.”

The letter follows President Trump’s unusual and inconclusive White House meeting last Friday with oil and gas industry leaders. Chair Grijalva said after the roundtable that rather than meeting with any of the millions of Americans now filing for unemployment, Trump is “spending his time calculating how much taxpayer money he can stuff in fossil fuel corporations’ pockets in the name of economic recovery.”

The full letter is available here.

In addition to the Chair Grijalva and Vice Chair Haaland, Alan Lowenthal (Calif.), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Joe Cunningham (S.C.), Mike Levin (Calif.), Nanette Diaz Barragán (Calif.), Darren Soto (Fla.), Mike Quigley (Ill.), A. Donald McEachin (Va.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), James McGovern (Mass.), Grace Napolitano (Calif.), Joe Neguse (Colo.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and David Price (N.C.) signed the letter. 

Lowenthal chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources and Huffman chairs the Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife.