Faced with rising fuel costs due to a weeks-long military operation targeting Iran, President Trump on Monday invoked wartime powers to boost energy production in the United States.
In a series of five memoranda, Trump stated that the United States faces a national emergency in energy production, as laid out in Executive Order 14156, signed on his first day in office last year. Invoking that emergency declaration and the Cold-War-era Defense Production Act, Trump ordered that funds made available through the One Big Beautiful Bill be used to strengthen energy production and infrastructure in a variety of sectors, including coal, petroleum, electricity and liquified natural gas.
“Without sufficient coal-fired baseload power, the United States will lack the stable electricity required to support defense installations, industrial expansion, and the high-energy demands of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence,” Trump said in the memorandum devoted to coal. “I have declared a national emergency under Executive Order 14156, and I further determine that action to expand coal supply chain capacity and baseload generation availability is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability.”
The memoranda empower the Energy Department to use federal funds to make energy purchases, support related businesses and bypass delays and regulatory hold-ups. Potential projects for investment include coal-fired power plants, electrical transformer production facilities and energy grid infrastructure.
Mixed messages on fuel costs: Earlier Monday, Trump pushed back against a statement by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who told CNN on Sunday that gasoline prices may not drop back to $3 a gallon, where they were before the war with Iran, until next year.
In an interview with The Hill, Trump said Wright was mistaken. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong,” Trump said.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told The Hill that the increase in fuel prices is temporary. “President Trump brought oil and gas prices down to multi-year lows at record speed, and as traffic in the Strait of Hormuz normalizes, these energy prices will plummet once again,” Rogers said.
Energy experts aren’t so sure. The Strait of Hormuz appears to be more closed than open at the moment, and the energy markets tend to be sticky at the retail level. “Gas prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather,” Dan Eberhart, a Republican oil company CEO, told The Hill.