Over the course of 2012, Donald Trump tweeted at least 59 times about energy prices. “Gas prices are at crazy levels—fire Obama!” he posted in late October of that year, when the average cost of a gallon of gasoline was $3.69. Obama was reelected in a landslide exactly 15 days after Trump implored voters to fire him. But Trump’s suspicion that politicians can live or die by energy prices never went away. Four years later, he campaigned to bring “complete American energy independence” and won. Eight years after that, he pledged to slash electricity prices in half and bring gas below $2 a gallon and won again. Since he returned to office, energy prices have risen by nearly 7 percent, outpacing inflation. As of early October, a gallon of gas costs an average of $4.37. So much for promises.
Trump has described the recent spike in energy prices as a “very small price to pay” for the as-yet-unrealized benefits of the Iran war. But although gas prices didn’t sink President Barack Obama, Trump has good reason to be nervous ahead of the midterms: A wealth of political science research suggests that gas prices and presidential approval are connected. One 2016 study found a 10-cent rise in gas prices correlated with a 0.60 percent drop in presidential approval.
What’s striking about today’s high energy prices is that Trump created a White House council at the start of his second term specifically to facilitate energy abundance and bring those prices down: the National Energy Dominance Council, which has a linguistically Trumpian name, and is staffed by executive and Cabinet-level leaders. According to experts, however, the council appears to be driven by self-serving, unethical behavior; short-term decision-making—problems that plague much of Trumpworld but are an especially bad recipe for energy policy and infrastructure—and a related fixation on fossil fuels that would be disastrous even if the president weren’t entangled in a prolonged conflict in the Middle East.
The National Energy Dominance Council is at least an inspired idea: It comprises the secretaries of state, energy, the interior, the treasury, defense, commerce, transportation, and agriculture, along with the attorney general, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, among others, and was designed to recommend policy to the president. It’s basically akin to the National Security Council or the National Economic Council—just about energy.
As with those groups, in theory, and at times in practice, the NEDC has facilitated cross-agency coordination and streamlined permitting through creative uses of government levers—including those typically reserved for emergencies, such as the Truman-era Defense Production Act. But in many ways, experts see the council as a cut-rate version of the Cheney Energy Task Force of the early 2000s. Ostensibly formed to reduce America’s reliance on foreign energy sources, Vice President Dick Cheney’s task force was routinely criticized for closed-door proceedings that allowed oil, gas, and utility interests to effectively dictate U.S. policy. Today, the NEDC is plagued by similar issues. It operates with the same secrecy and is similarly accessible to and influenced by industry. And it’s led by a less capable, more self-interested administration.
In theory, the National Energy Dominance Council exists to bring down prices for consumers. In practice, however, most of its focus is elsewhere. The NEDC’s deputy executive director, Blake Deeley, said the quiet part out loud in an interview with the National Mining Association in June. The National Energy Dominance Council is “really meant to be a one-stop shop for energy projects,” he explained. “We want to help you not only navigate the White House, but across agencies … we want to provide white-glove service to the energy sector as they … build and bring new energy infrastructure online.”
In hands like these—perhaps the fossil fuel–friendliest administration in history—an organization such as this sounds catastrophic for the planet (even with those white gloves), and nearly as bad for consumers. But despite the lofty status of the figures on the council, its power and its activities remain unclear. (Former advisers to and members of the council declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story.)
The council baffles even right-wing think tanks. “It’s not particularly transparent,” Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the press last year, several months after the NEDC’s founding. “It’s just kind of a black box.” It remains opaque today. Pielke told The New Republic through a spokesperson that he still doesn’t know much about it, and he’s not sure anyone does. The fact that the council is housed in the executive branch makes Freedom of Information Act requests difficult. Nevertheless, environmental legislative experts and a well-placed House staffer shared a common suspicion: that the National Energy Dominance Council appears to be a vehicle for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who was spurned for flashier appointments such as vice president or secretary of state, to transcend his post in the backwaters of the Interior Department and play a larger, more international role in the administration.
If Burgum has primarily been saddled with lower-stakes headaches such as this summer’s Reflecting Pool debacle and spending nearly $4 billion to buy back wind farm leases from renewable energy companies, the NEDC gives him an outlet to influence energy policy to an extraordinary degree. “When secretaries like Burgum or [Energy Secretary Chris] Wright meet with foreign nations, they get to put on their Energy Dominance crown and negotiate with the weight of Trump behind them,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director of the Sierra Club.
The council appears to have played a part in shaping one of Trump’s most significant foreign policy adventures. According to Politico, current NEDC Executive Director Jarrod Agen and his staff visited Venezuela earlier this year on the first direct commercial flight to Caracas in seven years. Agen was accompanied by executives from Hunt Oil, Halliburton, and several foreign oil companies, all of whom traveled to the country to prepare deals for oil and mineral rights with interim President Delcy Rodríguez. After landing in Caracas, Agen signed a guestbook inside the airport terminal with Trumpian decorum, writing, “Drill Baby Drill.”
If the NEDC and Trump’s energy policy are influenced by anyone outside the fossil fuel industry, it’s China, or at least the specter of it. According to Daniel Driscoll, a climate policy fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, policy advisers in the Trump administration are keenly aware that, historically, control over energy automatically comes with global power. All of this is exacerbated by the president’s worldview, in which global relations are a zero-sum battle between winners and losers; the result is a hegemonic power theory on steroids. The administration is convinced that China is seeking to rule through energy dominance by exporting decarbonization technology such as solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles to the world at a competitive price, free of the supply-chain shocks that often come with oil. Its response is to double down on fossil fuels—even though recent reporting has suggested China’s oil reserves are significantly larger than previously thought.
Republicans’ general disdain for renewables—as unserious, liberal-plaything energy sources that don’t involve drilling holes in the ground—makes all of this more destructive. Trump discarded the decarbonization plans that were set in motion under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, effectively giving up on competing against China on renewable energy (though Trump and his NEDC are facing China head-on in critical minerals extraction, utilizing equity investments in order to increase production).
Instead, the administration is prolonging the life of coal power plants that had been scheduled to be taken offline, while attempting to rescale a largely dormant nuclear energy sector—all at a time when electricity grids are being maxed out as more data centers switch on every month. And the administration has done all of this while the price of renewables has largely been cheaper than fossil fuels in recent years.
That selective approach shows what the mission really is. “If they really cared about grid affordability, they would do an all-of-the-above approach, not scrapping renewables,” Driscoll said. “That tells us that they’re focused on fossil fuels rather than actually helping consumers out.”
One way that works in practice is by using oil as a power lever by signing export agreements with other nations. The NEDC has made agreements under this model to export liquid natural gas to Japan and fossil fuels to Europe. But this strategy, which is similar to agreements made with European nations under the Marshall Plan, doesn’t make sense in the twenty-first century, Driscoll said. Even heavily fossil fuel countries like those in the Middle East are now aiming to decarbonize themselves, because they make more money exporting fossil fuels rather than using them domestically, thanks in part to supply shocks that lead to price volatility. The Iran war is pushing other countries further toward Chinese green technology.
According to Driscoll, the error is the Trump administration’s reliance on outdated theories about the centrality of fossil fuels. “This commitment to calcified, old ideas of how fossil fuels once helped us in the global economy are backfiring right now,” Driscoll said. “Living in the past just means you have no real vision or ideas for the future—you just keep looking back.”
The all-of-the-above strategy is exactly where the Biden administration’s energy policy ended up. Despite Biden’s push for renewable energy, oil production reached a record high during his tenure due to a combination of factors: leases that were signed a decade earlier; Interior continuing to approve permits; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which caused gas prices to spike and led to more demand for domestic oil production. Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act had several provisions designed to compete directly against China on renewable energy.
The NEDC has accelerated domestic energy production by using the Defense Production Act to push forward projects that have been tied up in permitting or environmental review. This is a creative solution that has proved durable against court challenges. But such fast-tracking can be a double-edged sword, according to Todd Tucker, director of the industrial policy and trade program at the Roosevelt Institute.
“In the abundance debate, it shows how government can get out of its own way to boost production,” Tucker explained. “On the other hand, it brings government into closer proximity with private interests, which can lead to corruption.”
Jeff Hauser, the founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, concurred. He argues that energy is particularly susceptible to malfeasance. “When the government has such lucrative favors to hand out, it breeds corruption,” he said.
He outlined two possibilities for how an executive branch can deal with policy. One is with thick sets of procedures and regulations. The other is heavily personalist. “A personalist government hands out favors to those who do favors for it, and builds interconnections with those who support the administration,” Hauser explained. “This is true of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Mussolini’s corporatist Italy, and in [Jair] Bolsonaro’s Brazil. It’s part of why few heavily energy-producing countries have efficient governments and robust democracies.” Trump clearly favors the personalist approach.
Every once in a while, it’s possible to get a glimpse into the black box of the NEDC. Over the summer, one of its staffers seemed to be straddling the line between government and private industry while still technically serving as a White House employee. At a June press conference celebrating Sable Offshore Corp.’s ability to once again operate an undersea oil pipeline near Santa Barbara, California, the site of two high-profile oil spills, NEDC senior policy adviser Brittany Kelm wore a Sable shirt and hat to the event, as if she were an employee of the company. She officially became one two months later—after she had also posted various comments on LinkedIn such as “Let’s go Sable” while still at the NEDC.
“It’s pretty typical for someone who works in a Republican administration on energy policy to go work for an oil company,” a senior House staffer said. “Most of them in the past, though, have tried to honor their ethics requirements—this administration seems to ignore much of that. I have not seen a revolving door like this before, spinning at such a high rate.”
NEDC advisers have left, sometimes only after a few months, for the private sector.
At least one person has already departed to avoid potential conflicts of interest: Oliver McPherson-Smith, who reportedly resigned in part because his husband was employed by ExxonMobil. Others have simply returned to their previous jobs, like former NEDC policy adviser and power grid expert Peter Lake, who left in July to return to his own company and advise on private power and water infrastructure projects.
Democrats don’t intend to let some of them off easily. The House Natural Resources Committee has taken a keen interest in former government employees like Kelm, and if things go well for Democrats in November’s elections, committee members will likely have questions for her.
In the meantime, consumer energy prices keep increasing, and gas prices really are at a record high—which Trump mentions a lot less these days—all while renewable energy remains on the administration’s discard pile. Is this what dominance is supposed to look like? Definitely not for consumers, and not at all for the Republican Party heading into November.
“We already were energy dominant under the Biden administration, really,” said Steve Feldgus, former principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department. “We were the number one energy producer in the world. Even if you’re supporting oil and gas and coal, there’s no reason to put your thumb on the scale against renewables. That’s just terrible policy.”
