This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration is turning to the nuclear option on endangered-species protections in the name of national security.

A rarely tapped panel nicknamed the “God Squad” will meet Tuesday to discuss whether overriding Endangered Species Act regulations for all federally regulated fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico is more important than preventing the extinction of several imperiled species. That includes sea turtles and a whale species down to its last 51 individuals.

“This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the upcoming Endangered Species Committee meeting last week, with no details on specific projects in the Gulf or the basis for what would constitute an extraordinary action. Only twice in the panel’s nearly half-century has it ever lifted restrictions.

But after the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the meeting, the Trump administration told the court that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf exempted “for reasons of national security.”

A federal judge declined Friday to block the meeting.

“It’s disappointing that the court didn’t immediately stop Hegseth’s reckless power grab, but this is just the first battle in a longer fight to protect the Gulf’s endangered whales and turtles,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

The situation puts the country in uncharted waters. No administration has ever before requested a national security exemption from endangered-species protections.

It’s a challenging case to make. US oil production is hovering around record highs. Companies working offshore in the Gulf’s federal waters produced 1.9 million barrels of oil per day last year, and that’s with endangered-species protections in place, which require companies to minimize their impact on animals rather than limiting or prohibiting oil and gas operations altogether.

Experts also say it’s doubtful that increasing oil production there would have any immediate benefits to national security.

But it does align with President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” platform. His administration has called for much more production—especially after gas prices soared since he authorized strikes on Iran in February. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a $5 billion deepwater oil drilling project in the Gulf this month.

Though the committee meeting is moving forward, the Trump administration skipped several usual steps in the process, experts say. “It was written to be a rare but necessary emergency escape clause when there was no alternative and human welfare was desperately at issue,” said Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law School. “This is not carefully done. This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

Plater was lead counsel in a high-profile 1970s lawsuit that gave rise to the creation of the Endangered Species Committee. A dam under construction in Tennessee, his legal team and environmentalists in the area argued, would threaten a tiny endangered fish called the snail darter.

Many saw this “Tellico Dam v. Snail Darter” case as the first real test of the Endangered Species Act’s powers. It eventually reached........

© Mother Jones