Can D.C. police Big Oil?
Just before federal troops descended on the District, a House committee quietly introduced a provision to shield oil and gas companies from D.C. law.
In the shadow of President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in the nation’s capital, House Republicans are attacking the District of Columbia’s ability to police an industry that helped put the president in power.
The District’s lack of statehood has allowed Republicans in Congress to regularly insert policy riders, or add-ons, aimed at undermining local D.C. policies to the end of must-pass legislation. But when the House Appropriations Committee released a draft spending bill in late July, attached at the tail end of the 204-page document was a specific new provision to prohibit the nation’s capital from using funds to enforce its consumer protection law against “oil and gas companies for environmental claims.”
That language targets a lawsuit filed by D.C.'s attorney general five years ago charging oil majors BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell with “systematically and intentionally misleading District consumers about the role their products play in causing climate change.” If Congress approves the version of the bill with that language, the lawsuit — which survived the companies’ attempt to dismiss it earlier this year — could come to an abrupt end before ever reaching trial.
Claire Mills, D.C. campaign manager for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a local climate advocacy group working to oppose the rider, said the add-on was part of a “massive expansion” of far-reaching attacks on D.C. home rule from Congress. The new provision would “stop the District from implementing its own laws,” she said.
It’s the first time this particular rider has appeared, according to Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office. The House Appropriations Committee just passed its version of the bill, including the rider, and once the Senate proposes its version, a final bill could be settled on in Congress by the end of the month.
The House Appropriations Committee did not respond to questions from Martin Austermuhle, reporting for the D.C. outlet The 51st, about who introduced the rider or floated the idea. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Big Oil companies are lobbying Congress for a shield against climate lawsuits brought against them by a growing number of states and cities across the country. Reporting from the New York Times this week seemed to confirm that such a campaign was underway.
The attack on D.C.’s lawsuit echoes one recommendation by a group of Republican attorneys general made to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi for how to insulate the fossil fuel industry from lawsuits: by restricting federal funding to state governments that attempt to impose liability on oil companies.
In D.C., Congress can intervene even further by dictating how the District spends its own local tax dollars.
“It’s really important that D.C. has the autonomy and ability to protect D.C. residents just like any state around the country,” said Mills. “These huge fossil fuel companies make billions in profit every year, and to them these lawsuits are a drop in the bucket — but to places like D.C., it’s really important that they’re held accountable for the harm that’s been done to consumers.”
Mills argues that the District’s residents and future generations are put at risk by the continued use of fossil fuels, the result of climate disinformation intended to delay policy change. Yet the D.C. rider is the latest in a series of recent federal efforts to stop climate lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry — and like the deployment of armed federal troops throughout D.C. streets, they’ve been cast as an issue of public safety in the United States.
In an executive order just weeks after fossil fuel executives reportedly raised concerns about the lawsuits with the White House, Trump directed his Department of Justice to intervene in state laws and lawsuits that he claimed “threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.” The DOJ then filed lawsuits against Hawaiʻi and Michigan state officials who had announced plans for their states to sue Big Oil, citing alleged threats to “national security and economic prosperity.” (Hawaiʻi still filed its lawsuit days later, and Michigan’s attorney general said she was “undeterred” in her plans to sue.)
In their plea to Attorney General Bondi, the Republican attorneys general wrote that they “unhesitatingly support President Trump’s goals to ‘restore American prosperity’ and ‘rebuild our Nation’s economic and military security’ by unleashing American energy… Ending the unlawful assault on American energy is critical to achieving those objectives.”
D.C.’s lawsuit aims to hold the oil companies accountable under its consumer protection laws, arguing that the companies’ “deceptive and unlawful conduct targeted consumers in the District, and in significant part occurred in the District.” The defendants continue to “falsely promote themselves as sustainable, environmentally conscious companies committed to finding solutions to climate change,” according to the complaint.
Today, Exxon is using ads disguised as news articles in mainstream media outlets to “manipulate mass public opinion” about their role in the climate crisis using “misleading” advertising, according to recent research from Boston University and the University of Cambridge. In a report published by ExxonMobil last week, the oil giant claimed that “fossil fuels remain the most effective way to produce the enormous amounts of energy needed to support commercial transportation, manufacturing and industrial production,” but that society can still reach its climate goals with industry-backed technologies such as carbon capture. (Experts warn that carbon capture technology, which got a boost in tax credits under Trump, is being used to drill for more oil.)
Two other lawsuits have been filed by environmental groups against fossil fuel interests under the District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act: one by Client Earth against utility Washington Gas, which was dismissed in 2023, and another by Beyond Pesticides against Exxon, which has been paused pending the resolution of D.C.’s lawsuit against the company.
D.C.’s residents are facing more severe flooding, dangerous heatwaves, and worsening storms, and D.C.’s low-income communities and communities of color are being hit the hardest.
While a part of a broader attack on climate lawsuits, the rider is also symptomatic of D.C.’s unique vulnerability to powerful interests. According to data from OpenSecrets, members of the House Appropriations Committee received at least $2.8 million in donations from the oil and gas industry for the 2024 election cycle. Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, a Republican member of the committee, last year received $27,950 in donations from DCI Group, a longtime lobbyist for Exxon under investigation by federal prosecutors for its alleged role in commissioning a hacking campaign targeting climate activists.
According to Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment expert and law professor at Harvard University, the effort may just be “another way for Congress to override the will of D.C.'s voters.”
Note: ExxonKnews is a reporting project of the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), an advocacy group that supports communities’ efforts to hold oil and gas corporations accountable for climate deception. CCI’s lobbyists and political team had no role in producing this story.