For months, the Trump administration has sought to open the California coast to a radically industrialized future: large-scale desalination plants, floating nuclear reactors, more rocket launches and expanded offshore oil drilling along the state’s most iconic beaches.

Holding the line against all this is a little-known but longstanding federal law, the Coastal Zone Management Act, which grants coastal states like California the right to review and object to any project in federal waters that clashes with state policy.

Now, citing California’s “environmental extremism,” Trump officials are attempting to decertify the state’s power under this law. Framed as a performance review of the state’s coastal management practices, this challenge begins in earnest Monday during a public hearing in Santa Monica, where hundreds of emboldened regulators, elected officials, environmentalists, Indigenous leaders, community activists and everyday Californians are expected to speak out.

The review will be conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management and comes amid federal efforts to dismantle clean air policies, endangered species protections and other landmark environmental regulations that have long drawn the ire of industry and fossil fuel producers. In California, efforts to override environmental protections have been most apparent along the Santa Barbara coast, where a Houston-based oil company has sought President Donald Trump’s influence to bypass state oversight and restart a once-dormant offshore operation.

Experts say the outcome of the review seems preordained, although the matter is playing out in unexplored legal territory. Never before has a coastal state been stripped of its rights in this way, and the politicization of the review process sets a troubling and far-reaching precedent.

“This administration is essentially looking to silence the voices of states and local governments … there is no parallel to what we are seeing here,” said Meg Caldwell, who directed Stanford’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy program for more than two decades. “This would result in a massive power grab ... and a very dangerous, chilling effect on other coastal states.”

The Coastal Zone Management Act, or CZMA, was signed into law by President Nixon in 1972 in the wake of a devastating oil spill in Santa Barbara that has come to be known as the “ environmental shot heard round the world.”

The CZMA was celebrated as an elegant, bipartisan co-management framework that gave coastal and Great Lakes states the power to review federal projects that affect their shorelines. Under the law, each state can create its own guiding principles on how to oversee its coast, and federal officials must honor this state coastal management plan once it’s certified.

“Because there are no local or state boundaries to the problems of our environment, the federal government must play an active, positive role. …But Washington must not displace state and local initiative,” Nixon said in a state of the union address. “Land use policy is a basic responsibility of state and local governments. They are closer to the problems and closer to the people.”

For the last five decades, this state and federal partnership has led to a culture of collaboration, and supporters say it has resolved some of the nation’s most contentious cases without costly litigation that can drag on for years.

In California, where the state’s coastal commission largely has been tasked with maintaining this state-federal balance, the process had been relatively smooth through every presidential administration until Trump’s.

Out of the more than 3,700 federal actions that have come before the coastal commission for review since the 1970s, the commission has aligned with the actions 96% of the time.

(The other 4% is a testament to why the CZMA is widely considered a state’s most powerful tool in standing its ground. In the early 2000s, for example, California managed to halt 36 controversial offshore oil leases between Monterey Bay and the Channel Islands under the law. And in 2007, the state blocked an offshore liquefied natural gas port that would have posed significant risk of explosion for thousands of residents from Ventura to Malibu.)

But Trump repeatedly has taken aim at the coastal commission, which also has come to blows with Elon Musk over the frequency of SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Tensions escalated in May when U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared that “California has repeatedly and unfoundedly obstructed spaceport development in bad faith” and announced that he was ordering a fresh evaluation of the state’s CZMA compliance.

“Obstructionist policies that delay critical national infrastructure in the name of environmental extremism are unacceptable,” said Lutnick, who alluded to a “new approach” in evaluating compliance that specifically would scrutinize “how, if at all, California has interfered with not just spaceport development, but also other economic development and federal view considerations concerning offshore oil production, maintenance of pipelines and desalination.”

Performance reviews under the CZMA are not uncommon — most states are subject to a routine review every five to 10 years — but what’s unusual in this case is that California had just undergone a review during the Biden administration.

A draft of that review, which was completed in 2024 but not finalized because of the change in administration, gave top marks to the three California agencies charged with implementing the CZMA — the coastal commission, the coastal conservancy and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The review found no issues.

“This proceeding is a sham,” said Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He noted that California’s coastal practices have long been held up as a gold standard in this country. “This is really an unprecedented situation, and I honestly don’t believe it’s going to stand up in court.”

Derek Brockbank, executive director of the Coastal States Organization, which represents the 34 states and U.S. territories with certified CZMA programs, said the administration’s actions could ripple far beyond California.

“The concern here is that this reopening of a review that was largely finished in 2024 is very — not only is it unusual, it really is almost unprecedented and does not follow standard procedure,” Brockbank said. “If reviews can be reopened without clear reasons or established process, every coastal state has reason to be concerned about the precedent that sets.”

What happens after Monday’s hearing and the mandatory 45-day public comment period will be uncharted territory, Brockbank said. (Federal officials already have received more than 9,000 written comments.)

If the review ends up taking issue with California’s coastal management program, Brockbank said the state technically should be given the opportunity to respond to any proposed changes. Whether the state agrees or disagrees to the changes then could lead to decertification, but the process laid out in the law appears to include multiple steps and opportunities for discussion.

Kate Huckelbridge, executive director of the coastal commission, said many questions remain as to how the process will play out. If the performance evaluation is conducted honestly and based on merit, she said, the commission has nothing to fear.

“The bottom line is that we stand on our record,” Huckelbridge said. “We have successfully implemented California’s coastal management program for almost 50 years, and we are happy to talk about any portion of that with the federal government and welcome any scrutiny to that record.”

Created in the 1970s by a vote of the people, the coastal commission has had to navigate some of the most high-profile and divisive battles in the state and has had no shortage of critics. But the Trump administration’s attack on the commission — and the looming threat of expanded offshore oil drilling — has galvanized people across the state to take a united stand.

“It’s not just environmentalists who think this is a bad idea; there are a lot of powerful interests who don’t want this,” said Grant Bixby, a prominent residential real estate broker in Orange County and founding member of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Pacific Coast, a coalition of more than 8,250 businesses in California, Oregon and Washington state.

“The coastal commission and the Coastal Zone Management Act have protected the business ‘brand’ of California, if you will — people come here from all over the world, and they do that because of what they see and they hear about California’s beaches, and all the great places you can stay and all the activities that you can do along our coastline,” Bixby said. “I would hate to see that just be eviscerated by an administration who doesn’t really value what we have to sell here in California.”

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that more than 8 in 10 Californians (82%) think the creation of the coastal commission has been mostly a good thing for the state.

Susan Jordan, a longtime environmentalist and founder of the California Coastal Protection Network, said the one silver lining is the tens of thousands of people who have come together — and who now have a deeper appreciation for the coastal commission and what the agency stands for.

“It feels like an awakening of California’s collective soul,” said Jordan, who has been working with Surfrider Foundation, Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, Heal the Bay, Azul and dozens of other environmental and community groups to answer questions and guide members of the public through the comment process. “I’ve been doing this work for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. ...People from San Diego up to Eureka and Humboldt, everybody is mobilizing because everybody realizes what’s at risk.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his cabinet leaders also have been calling on the public to speak out. Despite the uncertainty of how the decertification will unfold, what’s clear is California will not go down without a fight.

“We won’t stand by while Trump sidelines the people who rely on and care for California’s coast. Now is the time to make our voices heard,” Newsom said. “Give the Trump administration an earful.”

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