| | | Drill, Baby, DOGE
by Lauren Egan
Donald Trump ran a campaign on a commitment to “drill, baby, drill.” He promised to slash regulatory red-tape in order to ramp up American oil and gas production. And he’s stacked his administration with officials like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the former head of a Denver-based oilfield service company.
But some in the oil industry have been unimpressed with the president’s actions so far. Even in parts of deep-red and oil-rich Oklahoma, there’s been disappointment.
That frustration is largely aimed at the slapdash approach of Trump’s and Elon Musk’s DOGE, and the uncertainty that their hurried attempt to shrink the federal government has injected into the oil industry.
Adam Trumbly, the superintendent for the Osage Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs—the federal agency that oversees oil and gas drilling on Osage Nation land—was fired last month as part of DOGE’s budget cuts. The superintendent plays a critical role in managing and permitting new oil projects in the Osage Nation. And his firing set off a wave of panic about the future of new investments in the region. A few weeks later, it was announced that the Osage Agency—which provides a wide range of services including resources to help operators drill—would close its doors once the building’s lease is up in September thanks to DOGE cuts.
As with a fair number of other DOGE cuts, some of the mess-up was later corrected.Much to the relief of oil producers and shareholders in the region, Trumbly was reinstated last week. (Trumbly did not respond to The Bulwark’s request for comment.) But the chaotic handling of the situation has left many of the mom-and-pop oil producers that operate in Osage County anxious about doing business there.
“While the superintendent is back, he’s been removed once by what can only be described as reckless incompetence—and it can happen again,” said Shane Matson, a subsurface geologist and the former president of the Osage Producers Association whose family has been in the oil industry in the region for four generations. “If you threaten to close the agency without a solution, when really you should triple the budget so we can ‘drill, baby, drill,’ the effect of that on the industry is ‘kill, baby, kill.’”
Oil production in Osage County has steadily declined over the past few decades, and producers have long complained about burdensome regulation. Today, the region only accounts for a small fraction of the nation’s oil production. (Long gone are the days when oil royalties paid to the Osage made them some of the richest people in the world, as depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon.)
Still, DOGE’s move-fast-and-break-things approach there could very well result in fewer barrels of oil being produced in the United States, undermining Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
“This DOGE thing has just added fuel to the fire in terms of uncertainty,” said Susan Forman, an Osage shareholder and a former member of the Osage Minerals Council, which represents shareholders of the tribe’s mineral estate and advocates for increases in oil production. “Our producers rely on that office [the Osage Agency] for all the work they do. They cannot work on an existing well unless they have a permit, they cannot drill a new well unless they have a permit.”
Earlier this month, the Osage Minerals Council issued a statement insisting that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “explain how closing our Agency and displacing BIA employees will improve oil and gas permitting.” Myron Red Eagle, chairman of the council, told The Bulwark that its members were scheduled to visit Washington, D.C. next week for a rare meeting with Burgum, during which they will seek to get more answers.
In a statement to The Bulwark, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly defended the administration: “After four years of radical environmental policies that restricted domestic energy production, President Trump has taken unprecedented action to unleash American energy and eliminate red tape for new oil projects. He will continue to deliver on his promise to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and use the liquid gold under our feet.”
Whether the administration recognizes that Musk is getting in the way of that objective is another matter entirely. After all, the hiccups are not limited to Osage County or Oklahoma. Reuters reported that the Trump administration’s mass layoffs at departments including the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have slowed permitting in some of the top-producing oil and gas states, such as New Mexico and Alaska.
DOGE, Baby, DOGE. |
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