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For Immediate Release
July, 22 2025, 04:00pm EDT
Contact:
Kristen Monsell, kmonsell@biologicaldiversity.org
Lawsuit Challenges Trump's Failure to Protect Endangered Animals From Gulf Oil Drilling
Oil spills put birds, nesting sea turtles at risk
The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a new legal claim in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s failure to comply with the Endangered Species Act in assessing harm to endangered and threatened species from offshore oil and gas extraction.
“Federal officials have forgotten the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, because they’ve missed obvious threats to some of the Gulf’s most vulnerable critters,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This analysis falls far short of what the law and science demand, which is why we’re challenging it in court. Our government is required to protect manatees and sea turtles and other threatened animals Americans adore. Officials need to redo these assessments with a much larger dose of reality and much less deference to oil and gas interests.”
Monday’s lawsuit challenges two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service analyses, issued in 2018 and 2025, because they fail to adequately consider a range of harms from oil extraction to several endangered species living in the Gulf. These include major oil spills, collisions with drilling rigs, light pollution and habitat degradation. The Service is required under the Endangered Species Act to complete a consultation on oil and gas operations that could harm threatened and endangered species.
In April 2024 the Center filed a lawsuit challenging the 2018 consultation, known as a biological opinion. That analysis claims to consider the effects of 50 years of Gulf oil and gas extraction on West Indian manatees, nesting Kemp’s ridley and loggerhead sea turtles, whooping cranes, Mississippi sandhill cranes, several other bird species and beach mice.
Monday’s filing seeks to amend the 2024 lawsuit to also challenge the 2025 consultation the Trump administration prepared. The purpose of the new consultation is to consider whether new information about the harms of Gulf oil drilling invalidates the 2018 biological opinion and to evaluate the potential harm from drilling to the newly listed black-capped petrel.
In the 2018 analysis, the Service ignored the potential harms from a major oil spill. Although the analysis admitted that up to one oil spill greater than 420,000 gallons in size “is likely to occur,” the agency claims no endangered species would be harmed. The 2025 addendum did not correct that claim, or evaluate the effects of a larger spill, despite evidence indicating a larger spill is likely to occur. Instead, the 2025 consultation reaffirms the conclusions in the 2018 analysis, despite a host of new science demonstrating its conclusions are invalid.
The Gulf contains a massive amount of federal oil and gas extraction, including more than 2,070 active oil and gas leases. Those leases enable thousands of platforms and rigs, tens of thousands of miles of pipelines, and tens of thousands of oil and gas wells.
In 2010 the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 people and caused more than 200 million gallons of oil to spill into the ocean. Millions of marine mammals, sea turtles, birds, fish and other wildlife were killed, and the damage continues to this day.
The Center is part of a separate May 2025 lawsuit challenging a biological opinion conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service regarding the effects of Gulf oil and gas activities on endangered sperm whales, Rice’s whales, corals and other species.
“History is a valuable guide, and it’s negligent to ignore the possibility of another disastrous Gulf oil spill,” Monsell said. “Sea turtles nesting on the shore and birds relying on Gulf coast marshes are depending on us to keep them safe from oil and gas extraction.”
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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Sanders Meets Freed Trump Political Prisoner Khalil as Columbia Punishes Gaza Protesters
"We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment," Sanders said as the Ivy League school expelled or suspended scores of students in what critics called a bid to win back blocked federal funding.
Jul 22, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday met with Mahmoud Khalil—the former Columbia University Palestine defender recently imprisoned by the Trump administration—on the same day that the school expelled or suspended more than 70 students who protested Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza.
Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a photo of himself with his arm around a beaming Khalil, with the caption: "I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's illegal and horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous. We must not allow [U.S. President Donald] Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent."
Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent married to a U.S. citizen, last year finished his graduate studies at Columbia. He was arrested at his New York home by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers on March 8 before being transferred to New Jersey and then Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his first child.
Accused of no criminal offense and widely considered a political prisoner, Khalil was arrested following Trump's issuance of an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who take part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which allows for the deportation of noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to foreign policy interests—to target peaceful Palestine protesters who have committed no crimes.
Khalil was released last month upon a federal judge's order. He is far from the only student jailed for opposing the Gaza genocide; others include Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung—both permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and others.
On Tuesday, Columbia announced disciplinary action against more than 70 students who took part in last year's protests for Gaza at the New York City school's Butler Library. Around 80 Columbia students were arrested amid the violent police crackdown on campus encampments and occupations.
"While the university does not release individual disciplinary results of any student, the sanctions from Butler Library include probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions," Columbia's Office of Public Affairs said in a statement.
The school's announcement came days after Columbia and Trump administration officials met in Washington, D.C. to negotiate an agreement to restore most of the nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the university that were canceled in March over an alleged failure to tackle antisemitism.
As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to adopt the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal.
The school also said it would partner with the Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the ADL for what it called a "pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate."
Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has already been working with white nationalist Stephen Miller—Trump's White House deputy chief of staff and a primary architect of the president's first-term migrant family separation and Muslim travel ban policies—to restore lost contracts.
Columbia's acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 215,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving amid an increasingly fatal famine fueled by Israel's siege of the enclave, which is partly the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Israel has also been accused of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed or damaged.
"Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry," said one student quoted in a recent Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. "This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure."
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Largest Trial Yet Finds Four-Day Workweek Boosts Worker Well-Being
The analysis "shows improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies."
Jul 22, 2025
Echoing previous research from countries including Iceland and the United Kingdom, the biggest trial ever conducted of a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay found that the shift positively impacts workers' well-being.
For the new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, 4 Day Week Global invited independent researchers to collect and analyze data. Four experts from Boston College in the United States and Ireland's University College Dublin collected data from 2,896 employees across 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.
The organizations underwent a "pre-trial work reorganization to improve efficiency and collaboration, followed by a six-month trial," the paper details. Analysis of the data collected "shows improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies."
"Both company-level and individual-level reductions in hours are correlated with well-being gains, with larger individual-level (but not company-level) reductions associated with greater improvements in well-being," the paper says. "Three key factors mediate the relationship: improved self-reported work ability, reduced sleep problems, and decreased fatigue. The results indicate that income-preserving four-day workweeks are an effective organizational intervention for enhancing workers' well-being."
There are limitations to the study, which the authors acknowledged: The organizations were generally smaller companies in English-speaking countries and participated voluntarily, and the outcomes were self-reported by workers. Given all that, the experts encouraged future randomized, government-backed research.
Still, the apparent impact of the study seems to bolster researchers' conclusions. According to co-author Wen Fan, an associate professor of sociology at Boston College, over 90% of companies opted to keep the four-day workweek after the trial.
In coverage of the study published by Boston College, both Fan and her co-author and colleague in Boston, Juliet Schor, noted how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted conversations about working conditions, including the length of the workweek.
"This would've been a difficult sell pre-Covid—it would've struck a lot of people as pie-in-the-sky, and not feasible for companies," said Schor. "But the pandemic created such levels of stress and burnout, and led many employees to say, 'I want to live my life differently,' and this created more of a space for reimagining work—and, as part of that, the four-day week."
Noting that the "traditional" 40-hour, in-office model is still dominant in many places, Fan said: "Social change is always difficult, especially when it comes to challenging the deep-seated institutional logics dictating how, when, and where we work. Let's hope we don't waste the crisis of Covid in terms of the profound workplace innovations it has precipitated."
The new study comes amid the Trump administration's "barrage of attacks on workers," with the U.S. Department of Labor planning to overhaul dozens of rules intended to protect employees from exploitation and wage theft.
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Trump Labor Department Launches 'Barrage of Attacks' on Workers
"They're showing their true colors as an anti-worker administration," Andrew Stettner of the Century Foundation told Common Dreams.
Jul 22, 2025
In what has been described as a "barrage of attacks on workers," the U.S. Department of Labor under President Donald Trump is planning to overhaul dozens of rules that protect workers from exploitation and wage theft.
The administration announced this month that it planned to change over 60 regulations it deems "unecessary" burdens to businesses and economic growth.
According to an analysis released Tuesday by labor policy experts at the Century Foundation—senior fellows Julie Su and Rachel West and director of economy and jobs Andrew Stettner—most of the changes "reverse critical standards that ensure workers get a just day's pay and come home healthy and safe."
In one of the most sweeping changes, the department plans to reverse a 2013 rule that extended minimum wage and overtime protections to home healthcare workers.
These workers, who care for elderly and other medically frail individuals, already make less than $17 an hour on average.
Stettner told Common Dreams that the changes will "suppress wages" and allow agencies to "put the screws on workers to work 50- or 60-hour weeks."
The Trump administration is also rolling back a Biden-era rule that banned bosses from paying subminimum wages to disabled employees.
This discriminatory practice has been on the wane due to state-level bans in 15 states. But in the absence of a federal ban, nearly 40,000 employees—most of whom have intellectual disabilities—still received less than the federal minimum wage as of 2024.
The Century Foundation report says that by ending the rule, the Trump administration would be once again "relegating workers with disabilities to jobs that pay as little as pennies per hour."
The department is also taking a hatchet to workers' rights and safety. Another major change it proposed would do away with protections for seasonal migrant farmworkers under the H-2A visa program who raise complaints about wage and hour violations.
It was commonplace for farm owners to take advantage of these seasonal employees, whose legal status was tied to their work, and who therefore risked deportation if they lost their jobs.
Cases of exploitation, however, declined to an all-time low after the Biden administration introduced the rule, which banned employers from firing, disciplining, or otherwise retaliating against workers who attempted to participate in collective bargaining.
"These reforms protected the rights of farmworkers in the H-2A program to speak out individually and collectively against mistreatment and prevented employers from arbitrarily firing them from their jobs," the report says.
The department also proposed weakening the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) general duty clause, which allows businesses to be punished for putting their employees in dangerous situations. The proposed change would exempt many jobs that are deemed "inherently risky" from protection.
The administration described it as a way to prevent OSHA from cracking down on workplace injuries among athletes and stuntmen.
However, Stettner suggested that the broad language could allow the administration to go much further in defining what is considered "inherently risky." The report notes that the administration is "crowdsourcing" suggestions from employers about what other occupations to exempt.
"The employer community, they're jumping onto this," Stettner said. "They're telling their members to write in to the Department of Labor about other inherently dangerous occupations they should accept from the general duty clause."
The authors pointed out that the administration has previously rolled back restrictions meant to protect workers from heat-related stress on the job, which results in more than 600 deaths and over 25,000 injuries each year.
As the administration pushes to expand coal mining, it is also weakening protections for the miners themselves. After laying off most of the employees at OSHA's research arm—which monitors cases of black lung disease—earlier this year, it is now weakening safety requirements to prevent roof falls, mine explosions, and exposure to toxic silica.
"The DOL's role should be to protect the most vulnerable workers: farmworkers, people with disabilities, people that have suffered discrimination," Stettner said. "They're showing their true colors as an anti-worker administration."
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