Audio of private meeting shows oil industry ripping into Trump administration

At a closed-door meeting this summer, oil and gas industry lawyers criticized the Trump administration's failure to recruit enough qualified people to secure policy victories that would outlast this presidency, according to a recording of the gathering.

The audio from an Independent Petroleum Producers of America meeting in Colorado Springs, Colo., obtained by the Western Values Project and shared with POLITICO, contains some of the most unvarnished opinion coming from an industry that has been happy with the administration’s talk on oil and gas but frustrated with its results.

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“Two and a half years later, I don’t see the agencies getting better,” Mark Barron, head of energy litigation in the Denver office of BakerHostetler, told the group. “I don’t see that leadership or competence in the administration.”

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The June meeting came amid mounting frustration over the slow pace of the Trump administration’s major energy policies, including regulatory rollbacks at EPA and efforts from the Interior Department to spur new production. A commitment to open up more federal waters to offshore drilling has stalled amid legal and political pushback, the administration's move to expedite permitting of pipelines, including for Keystone XL and the Mountain Valley Pipeline has been challenged in court, and states have sued over a rollback on methane emissions rules that even some oil companies have complained is too broad.

During the meeting, Wayne D’Angelo, head of energy litigation at D.C.-based Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, noted that EarthJustice, Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups had sued the administration more than three hundred times over its rollbacks of Obama-era rules, including those on methane emissions and hydraulic fracturing.

“There is a metric buttload of litigation going on in respect to the regulatory agenda,” D’Angelo said, adding that there were “a lot of early wins for environmental lawsuits.”