Commerce Department Orders New Review of California's Coastal Commission, Reigniting Offshore Drilling Fight

The Trump administration is taking another run at California's offshore energy rules, and this time the target is the legal mechanism that lets the state review federal projects along its coast.

In May 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it would conduct a formal review of California's coastal management program under the Coastal Zone Management Act, a 1972 law signed by President Nixon that gives 35 coastal states and territories authority to weigh in on federal actions affecting their shorelines. The order came from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who directed NOAA to assess whether California is giving "priority consideration" to projects tied to national defense, energy, ports and transportation, according to the review letter cited by sigtrib.

The California Coastal Commission, the independent state agency created in 1972 that carries out the review, doesn't hold veto power over federal projects. It can request environmental mitigations, tribal consultations and public hearings, but the projects can proceed regardless, according to the commission's own description of its authority.

A previous NOAA review of the same program was completed as a draft in June 2025 and found the commission was "successfully implementing its program," according to the California Natural Resources Agency. That report was never finalized or published, something Surfrider Foundation policy coordinator Mitch Silverstein attributes to the change in presidential administrations. Environmental groups describe reopening the review just months after that unpublished finding as abrupt.

The numbers behind the fight

The commission has approved 96% of federal and federally regulated projects since it was created, a rate higher than the roughly 95% average across the other 34 states with coastal management programs, according to data from the California Natural Resources Agency cited by sigtrib. On spaceport infrastructure specifically, the commission found nonconcurrence on just two of more than 135 projects, and both went forward anyway. It has approved every undersea cable and pipeline maintenance request that's come before it and denied only one desalination project.

These figures stand in tension with the administration's stated rationale that California is obstructing energy and infrastructure development.

What the administration is actually pushing

The review isn't happening in isolation. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum proposed as many as 34 potential offshore oil and gas lease sales in November 2025, including six off the California coast, according to the Epoch Times. Federal officials also helped restart a Plains All American pipeline system off Santa Barbara that had been idle since a 2015 rupture blackened 150 miles of coastline from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, KIRO 7 reported. The administration has moved toward authorizing fracking on an old oil platform nine miles off Ventura County, over the state coastal commission's objection.

Stanford environmental law professor Deborah Sivas told KIRO 7 the administration's approach reflects a broader ideology: "We're the feds, we're going to tell the state what to do."

The administration's defenders would argue the review is procedurally normal. NOAA reviews of state coastal programs typically happen every five to ten years, and this one follows that cycle even if the timing looks pointed. Commerce Secretary Lutnick's letter frames the request around energy security and job creation, priorities the administration has pursued nationally, not just in California, including a since-dismissed lawsuit over reopened offshore drilling in Alaska, the Pacific, Atlantic and the Gulf.

That Alaska case is instructive on how far courts will let this play out before intervening. Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska dismissed a coalition of environmental groups' lawsuit against Trump's 2025 reversal of Biden-era offshore drilling withdrawals on Aug. 24, ruling the groups lacked standing because no actual leasing or drilling had been approved yet. Gleason wrote the court could "only speculate" whether the previously withdrawn acreage would end up in a new leasing program. The ruling didn't touch the deeper question of whether a president even has authority to undo a predecessor's drilling withdrawals, and left the door open for the same groups to sue again once concrete leasing decisions are made.

The alarm from an unlikely corner

Christine Todd Whitman, the Republican former New Jersey governor who ran the EPA under George W. Bush before leaving the GOP in 2022 to co-found the Forward Party, wrote in a Hill op-ed published Sept. 13 that she's "extremely concerned" the review amounts to a federal takeover attempt. She called Lutnick's order a "duplicative review" and warned that even Republicans backing the effort are enabling a precedent "future presidents of any political stripe" could exploit.

If NOAA's review finds California isn't adequately weighing federal priorities, the Coastal Commission could ultimately be decertified and defunded, stripping the state of its say over federal coastal projects entirely. No such finding has been made. NOAA has not set a public timeline for completing the new review, and until it does, the commission keeps operating under its existing authority.