Updated: 3:19 p.m.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday that the administration is ending its moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling, a ban that has been in place since May.

Salazar made the announcement during a conference call with reporters. The moratorium came in response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico following an explosion on a BP rig in April.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said politics did not play a role in the administration lifting the ban more than a month sooner than was expected.

“This was a very deliberative policy process,” Gibbs told reporters during a briefing. “Quite frankly, it just got done more quickly than the original timeline.”