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Anne Bradbury, chief executive officer of the American Exploration and Production Council said in a statement that oil and gas extracted from federal lands accounts for 20 percent of domestic energy production, arguing the administration should support it.

“Arbitrary leasing or permitting restrictions only serve to cause uncertainty for American businesses and strained budgets for state and federal governments as well as local communities,” she said.

Meanwhile, environmentalists said they were concerned that the Biden administration was backtracking on a central climate pledge.

“We expected the agency to do a programmatic review of the entire fossil fuel leasing program that takes into account not only the environmental harms of drilling at the local and landscape level, but also the impact on the global climate crisis that we’re in,” said Brett Hartl, director of government affairs for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised to stop issuing new leases for drilling on public lands. “And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” Mr. Biden told voters in New Hampshire in February 2020.

This month, he appeared at a global climate summit meeting in Glasgow to urge other world leaders to take bold action to cut emissions from oil, gas and coal. Mr. Biden has pledged to cut United States greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is a former environmental activist and former member of Congress who had a campaign website that included this quote from her: “We need to act fast to counteract climate change and keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

But last week, the Biden administration offered up to 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for drilling leases — the largest sale since 2017. The administration was legally obligated to hold the lease sales after Republican attorneys general from 13 states successfully overturned a suspension on sales that Mr. Biden had tried to impose. Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil offered $192 million for the rights to drill in the area offered by the government.