The US government just used a dormant 48-year-old committee to strip endangered species protections from the entire Gulf of Mexico.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration convened the "God Squad" - the Endangered Species Committee - for the first time in 34 years. It voted unanimously to exempt all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act.
The request came from Pete Hegseth. The Defense Secretary. Not the Interior Secretary, not the EPA. The Defense Secretary, invoking national security.
The species most at risk:
The Rice's whale. It lives exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico. Population: approximately 50. It was already reduced by 22% from Deepwater Horizon - a spill that occurred outside its primary habitat. NOAA's own data says it would take 69 years to recover from another comparable event. The professor who literally wrote the God Squad exemption provision told CNN this decision could make Trump "the first person in history to knowingly extirpate a species from the face of the earth."
The timeline:
- April 2024: Trump holds a private dinner with ~20 oil executives at Mar-a-Lago. Asks for $1 billion in campaign contributions. Promises expanded Gulf drilling, rolled-back regulations, faster permits in return. The industry gives at least $75 million to Trump and affiliated PACs.
- March 14, 2026: The Trump administration approves BP's Kaskida project, a $5 billion ultra-deepwater Gulf drilling operation. BP's first new Gulf oilfield since Deepwater Horizon. Drills deeper than Deepwater Horizon. Blowout risk 6-7x higher than standard deepwater operations. Congressional letters warned of a potential 4 million barrel worst-case spill. Approved anyway.
- March 31, 2026: The God Squad strips ESA protections from the entire Gulf. The protections removed were the primary legal mechanism through which Kaskida's approval could have been challenged.
The gap between Kaskida's approval and the removal of the legal tools to challenge it: 17 days.
The congressional angle:
Steve Scalise, House Majority Leader (R-LA): $499K in oil & gas donations in 2023-24. He personally inserted the provision raising the GOMESA revenue cap - the federal law that routes Gulf oil royalties directly to Louisiana for coastal infrastructure, into the One Big Beautiful Bill. Voted for it in a 218-214 House vote. Louisiana received $203.7 million in Gulf drilling revenues on the same day as the God Squad vote.
GOMESA means more Gulf drilling = more public infrastructure funding for these politicians' constituents. The financial incentive to remove environmental constraints is encoded in federal statute. Scalise literally wrote that encoding.
Mike Johnson, House Speaker (R-LA): $504K in oil & gas donations. Shepherded the bill through Congress. Also voted for it.
The Hegseth finding that's actually more damning than corruption:
Public records show no significant direct oil & gas donations to Hegseth personally. He was a Fox News host before this job. The industry had no particular reason to invest in his career.
Which means he wasn't acting out of personal financial interest. He was the packaging, chosen specifically because routing the request through a Defense Secretary made the national security framing harder to immediately challenge. The transaction happened elsewhere. He delivered it.
What the law's own author said:
Pat Parenteau - the emeritus law professor at Vermont Law School who helped write the original exemption provision - called the national security rationale "the worst possible basis they could have come up with" and said it was "too good to be true from a litigation standpoint." Environmental groups have already filed legal challenges.
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This is from a Medium article called 'Pete Hegseth's National Security Threat Has a Population of Fifty' - probably the most thorough breakdown of the money trail I've seen on this story so far