Sen. Sullivan: WH Block on Alaskan Resources 'Lawless'

The Biden administration's actions blocking natural resource development in Alaska, including the rejection of a road project that would have opened up millions of acres of wilderness to oil drilling and mineral mining, is equal to "national security suicide," Alaska GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan said Sunday.

"It's lawless," Sullivan told CBS' "Face the Nation." "He [President Joe Biden] doesn't have the authority to do it, and I could go into all the laws that support me on that. It's, as I say, national security suicide."

Biden also won't sanction Iranian oil and gas, said Sullivan, "but he has no problem sanctioning Alaska."

"This administration has issued 63 executive orders and executive actions, singularly focused on Alaska to shut our state down," he said. "Now that, of course, hurts my constituents. National resources, energy critical minerals, that's an American strength."

Friday, The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management recommended against the construction of the 211-mile-long Ambler Road project, putting zinc and copper deposits out of reach in an undeveloped part of Alaska.

It also issued a final rule removing 11 million acres of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve, the entire U.S. Arctic Ocean, and almost 3 million acres of federal waters off the state's cost from being considered for new oil and gas leasing.

Sullivan told CBS that in his nine years in the Senate, he has never seen "such a cynical and dishonest display coming out of any presidency" that occurred with the Alaska announcement.

"This president on Friday with [Interior] Secretary [Deb] Haaland announced that they did this because the Alaska Native, the Indigenous people on the North Slope of Alaska, asked them to," Sullivan said. "The leaders of the North Slope of Alaska were unanimous in opposition to this. They tried to meet with Secretary Haaland but she wouldn't meet with them. This is a rule that focuses on their lands where they've been living for thousands of years."

The indigenous people of Alaska, he added, are "very upset that the president was canceling their voices and now stealing their voices."

Sullivan also Sunday talked about the House vote to extend billions of dollars of funding to Ukraine, admitting that he "can't guarantee anything" about whether the funding will remain if former President Donald Trump is elected, but also blamed the situation in Ukraine on Biden's "weakness," including with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"They cut defense spending, you know, every, every, year in terms of the president's budget," Sullivan said. "Their energy policies exude weakness, and the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened [Vladimir] Putin to undertake the invasion of Ukraine."

Sullivan said, though, that he does support the supplemental funds for Ukraine, as the agreement will benefit both that country's war efforts and the United States' industrial base, "which has atrophied dramatically" in recent years.

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