Fueling The Conversation, Week of April 7th, 2025
After campaigning on a message of replacing the Biden administration’s policy of climate alarmism and energy poverty with one of energy abundance and “drill, baby, drill,” President Trump has so far kept his promise through a slew of executive orders and regulatory reviews.
Our advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance, has taken up the mission of tracking all of President Trump’s and Congress’s actions to promote energy abundance. Late last month, we published 50 Actions the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans Have Taken to Unleash Our Energy Potential, a comprehensive list of all energy-related actions taken since inauguration day.
With 17 energy-related executive actions on his first day in office, President Trump wasted no time in ending many of Biden’s most harmful policies, including resuming the processing of liquified natural gas export permit applications and reversing the withdrawal of areas off the Arctic Coast and Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) from oil and gas leasing. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continued the administration’s progress last month by announcing 31 Biden-era regulatory reviews. These involved reconsidering restrictions on coal and natural gas power generation, electric vehicle mandates, the endangerment finding, and many other rules that limited choice and raised energy prices for consumers.
President Trump’s decisive push for energy abundance has set a bold tone for his administration, dismantling burdensome regulations and unlocking America’s vast energy potential. From day one, he has delivered on his promise to prioritize affordable, reliable energy over restrictive climate policies. The responsibility now falls on Congressional Republicans to sustain this momentum.
Codifying the Trump agenda into lasting legislation and ensuring that these victories withstand future challenges must remain a top congressional priority.
Congress has made some progress in holding up its end of the promise. The House and Senate have already used a law known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the tax on methane emissions from oil and gas companies and repeal the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management requirement that oil and gas companies produce archaeological reports for exploration or development plans on the Outer Continental Shelf.
These actions should be celebrated as great first steps towards fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promises, but Republicans have much more work to do. Congress has an opportunity this week to move forward on reversing a critical piece of the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandate through the use of the CRA.
The EPA has submitted to Congress a waiver request for California’s Advanced Clean Cars II regulation, which is in essence a ban on gasoline-powered cars and trucks. Currently, Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, has aligned with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), claiming that the CRA should not be used to overturn the waiver because it is their belief that it is an adjudicatory order, not a rule. But nowhere in the law does it state that Congress must receive buy in from the GAO or the Senate Parliamentarian. As I explained recently, “Despite misleading reports, the Congressional Review Act is crystal clear: once an agency action is submitted to Congress, it is Congress—and Congress alone—that holds the unassailable power to approve or disapprove that action.”
Over the next few months, Congress should also repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits during the budget reconciliation process. While some Republicans advocate for keeping some of the credits, they need to realize that the short-term gain from keeping the credits will be overridden by the long-term pain of higher energy prices and a less reliable electric grid for their constituents.
For the rest of President Trump’s time in office, Republicans need not look further than our recommendations in the American Energy Blueprint. Congress and the administration have already taken important steps in pursuing some of these recommendations, but there is still much more to do. For instance, President Trump should look to open up federal lands by shrinking Biden and Obama-era national monument designations and realigning the definition of Waters of the United States with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett v. EPA. For Congress, we also recommend turning mismanaged federal lands over to states or private managers and repealing appliance efficiency standards, among others. Enacting these proposals will take a lot of time and hard work from Congress and the administration, however, they are all absolutely necessary if – as President Trump says – we want producers to “drill, baby, drill” the resources our country needs.
As our 50 actions list shows, both the president and Congress have made tremendous progress in enacting sound energy policies. But now is not the time for complacency; Republicans need to roll up their sleeves and get to the business of codifying these necessary and important changes in law in order to secure our energy future and preserve consumer choice.
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Fueling the Conversation, a weekly column by IER President Tom Pyle, offers a principled take on energy events. Energy underpins all aspects of modern life, so policies that artificially limit production hurt everyday people paying to heat their homes and driving to work. “Green” groups push these policies for idealogical reasons, but this column uses economic logic and hard facts to advocate for energy freedom.
