WASHINGTON— A new Trump administration legal filing says that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants to exempt all oil industry activities in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act.

The exemption could drive the extremely endangered Rice’s whale to extinction and land a crippling blow to the conservation of sea turtles, whooping cranes and endangered wildlife throughout the larger Gulf of Mexico.

“It’s grotesque for Pete Hegseth to use national security as a pretext for giving the oil industry a free pass to wipe out America’s most endangered whales,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hegseth is illegally perverting a narrow mechanism within the Endangered Species Act to target the Rice’s whale for extinction. He's cosplaying as a tough guy yet again to impress his boss because performative cruelty is the Trump administration’s goal.”

The Rice’s whale population collapsed after the Deepwater Horizon spill and is today only at about 51 animals.

The Hegseth revelation accompanied the Trump Department of Justice’s filing late yesterday of its opposition to the Center for Biological Diversity’s motion for a temporary restraining order against the Gulf oil exemption.

The Center filed an emergency lawsuit to prevent the administration from convening the Endangered Species Committee, also known as the Extinction Committee, on March 31.

It’s the first time in the 53-year history of the Endangered Species Act that the defense secretary has attempted to exempt an activity based on national security grounds. Although the statute requires all the committee’s documents and meetings to be open to the public, the administration has refused to give the Center or public any documents or records that purportedly justify Hegseth’s claimed “national security” exemption.

The Justice Department argues it can bypass all other requirements in the law governing the Endangered Species Committee process for considering an exemption at the March 31.meeting, and that the meeting itself will be nothing more than a formality to exempt oil and gas activities.

Hegseth wants the committee to take this unprecedented action, which the Center believes is illegal, to approve the extinction of the Rice’s whale and the killing of endangered sea turtles and sperm whales by overriding a National Marine Fisheries Service requirement for the oil and gas industry to drive ships at safe speeds in the eastern Gulf and monitor the location of whales to avoid strikes and deaths.

“It’s tragic that the Rice’s whale, which has lived in this planet’s oceans for millions of years, could now go extinct because of a small man’s petty indifference,” Hartl said. “We’ll continue our court fight and we’ll prevail because Hegseth, like so many of Trump’s incompetent cronies, has no idea what he’s doing.”