By LISA FRIEDMAN | THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON - One of President-elect Donald Trump's biggest "drill, baby, drill" initiatives suffered a significant setback Wednesday as the Interior Department announced that a lease sale in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended without a single bidder.

The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness - home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife - has been a flop.

The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it's worth the cost, despite insistence by Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling.

The Eiden administration offered 400,000 acres after shaving off 1 million acres from the original boundaries to avoid areas crucial to the polar bear and Porcupine caribou populations.

"The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along: There are some places too special and sacred to exploit with oil and gas drilling," Laura Daniel­ Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in a statement.

Some Alaska lawmakers and officials, including the governor, had said before the sale that the decision by the Eiden administration to shrink the leasing area would guarantee failure. Republican lawmakers have said that the wilderness area would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside the refuge.

But Daniel-Davis noted that the oil and gas industry is "sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere" and should pursue those first.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is an expanse of roughly 19 million acres along the North Slope of Alaska. It's one of the last trulywild places in the United States. It also includes land considered sacred by the Gwich'in, an Alaska Native group.

Several major banks have said they would not finance any projects in the refuge.