Environmental groups are suing the administration over circumventing a bedrock federal environmental law in a recently announced oil and gas lease in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Nov. 7, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced the first of 30 leases in the Gulf of Mexico required in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” bill signed in July. The bureau plans to lease 80 million acres, or 125,000 square miles, in the Gulf, along with 1 million acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet.

In the lawsuit, the groups accuse the bureau of failing to conduct reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law that requires federal agencies to study and consider the environmental consequences of their actions.

The Trump Administration took aim at NEPA with a February proposal to remove regulations specifying how federal agencies apply NEPA. In issuing the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease, the bureau said it will not follow the NEPA guidelines and performed its own assessment, an agency spokeswoman told the New York Times.

Environmental groups Healthy Gulf, Friends of the Earth, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club argued in the lawsuit that the bureau failed to take the “hard look” required by NEPA at environmental impacts of the lease. These include oil spills, such as the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, which are already affecting marine life, including the endangered Rice’s whale.

The groups also accused the bureau’s acting director, Matthew Giacona, of participating in the lease despite a conflict of interest. Giacona used to work for the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group representing energy industries in the Gulf.