This week President Joe Biden invoked the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) to prohibit oil and gas drilling in most of America’s offshore areas, in perpetuity — or so he thinks. President-elect Donald Trump called the order “ridiculous” and pledged to reverse it immediately.

That’s precisely what Trump should do, but it won’t be easy. In 2019, a federal judge in Alaska tossed out Trump’s revocation of a similar (though far more modest) Obama-era withdrawal, holding that Trump had exceeded his authority under OCSLA. While that decision lost most of its relevance when Biden’s election mooted the appeal, any similar effort by Trump will be challenged on the same legal theory.

Section 12(a) of OCSLA provides: “The President of the United States may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf.” The district court reasoned that because the provision doesn’t mention revocation, a withdrawal “without specific time limit” can’t be revoked except by an act of Congress.

In other words, Biden would have no power to modify a withdrawal he announced this week, even though no private rights or obligations were impacted. That defies common sense. The evident purpose of Section 12(a) was to make clear that the president has discretion to not lease any particular area, a natural incident of executive authority.

The notion that the power to do something doesn’t imply the power to undo it sounds like it could be a canon handed down from ancient Rome, but there is no such canon. If there were, the president’s power to appoint officials wouldn’t include the power to remove them.

Congress’s power to establish lower federal courts wouldn’t include the power to dissolve them. The power of agencies to modify or rescind prior rules and regulations could be called into question in thousands of instances.

But the Supreme Court has consistently recognized the power to undo or modify prior actions as implied in all of those instances, suggesting if anything the opposite canon: The power to do something necessarily implies the power to undo it. And even in the context of OCSLA, where withdrawals have been rare, President George W. Bush modified several prior withdrawals with no objection from Congress or the courts.

Indeed the district court’s interpretation would plunge OCSLA into major constitutional problems. If the president can withdraw all the areas under the OCSLA from disposition for all time until Congress passes a new law, that would mean that the president in effect has authority to repeal the law altogether.

But repealing a law requires the power to make law, and the president has no such power. The president can only exercise legislative powers under delegation of legislative authority from Congress, and the Supreme Court has said that such delegations must have “intelligible principles” to guide the president’s action.

If the president could permanently withdraw any and all the areas subject to OCSLA in his unfettered discretion, the law would fail that basic test. This is all the more true given the intelligible principle enshrined in the law’s explicit purpose: the “expedited exploration and development” of those areas.

The Supreme Court also requires Congress to have spoken clearly in statute before the president claims an unheralded power to transform a major part of the American economy. Its “major questions doctrine” prohibits courts from finding such sweeping powers in ambiguous statutes. All OCSLA says is that the president may withdraw offshore from development “from time to time,” which implies flexibility, not permanence, and which, as even the district court conceded, renders the statute ambiguous.

Legal issues aside, one marvels at how short-sighted and self-defeating Biden’s withdrawal would be. In the long run the move would have no measurable impact on climate; its main impact would be to preserve vast fossil resources for future generations. In the short term it merely helps oil companies to maximize profits by limiting production, which they would readily agree to do on their own if it weren’t a criminal violation of the antitrust laws.

The climate lobby still has not grasped that curtailing the supply of an essential commodity for which demand is overwhelming only makes people pay more for it. That’s why Biden spent much of his presidency denying responsibility for rising gas prices.

But as the 2024 election showed, people weren’t fooled. His actions this week prove that higher prices were always part of his plan.

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Mario Loyola is a Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

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