Estimates by a watchdog organization and opponents of drilling also fall well below the administration’s. In a new estimate provided to The Times, the watchdog group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, detailed what it said was a likely scenario for the sales: bids on only about half the acreage, at a price of a little more than $53 an acre, which is the average for state and federal lease sales on the North Slope over the last five years. That would raise $20.8 million over a decade.

“It is hard to view these Congressional Budget Office estimates as based on reality,” said Ryan Alexander, the group’s president.

Separate from the budget estimates, the documents reviewed by The Times — thousands of pages in all — capture the worries of scientists and other specialists about the speed at which the administration has pushed to open the refuge and the potential effects of moving so quickly.

In 2017, a manager wrote in an email that a political appointee overseeing the research process had voiced concerns about the United States Geological Survey, an Interior agency, not “being given carte blanc” to do fieldwork in the refuge that summer as part of the push to update assessments of the oil potential there. Another email said the same appointee had asked why a research team’s helicopter wasn’t allowed to roam freely in the refuge.

The plan to conduct that fieldwork had been submitted to another Interior agency, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, without the required notice for such activity in the environmentally sensitive refuge.

Later, Fish and Wildlife officials were asked to change agency regulations to eliminate any time restrictions on scientific exploration in the refuge.

A Fish and Wildlife planner wrote in an email that the result would be to open the refuge “to an unending window to allow exploration plans.” (Changing the regulations eventually became unnecessary with the passage of the 2017 tax law, which put the Bureau of Land Management in charge of the lease program.)