President Trump on Monday outlined his administration’s plans to take actions to support the energy industry and reduce inflation in his inaugural address to the nation.
“I will direct all members of my Cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices,” Trump said in his speech.
Trump pointed to high energy prices as one of the key drivers of the inflationary cycle that caused prices across the U.S. economy to rise by about 20% over the last four years. He said he plans to declare a national energy emergency that he will use to facilitate more domestic production.
“The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices. And that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill,” he said.
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Trump went on to say that America’s energy resources will help spur the domestic manufacturing industry while also helping to lower prices and enabling the U.S. to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) under his plans.
“America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have – the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth. And we are going to use it,” Trump said.
“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top and export American energy all over the world,” he said. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
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Data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) showed that drawdowns in recent years have left the SPR at its lowest level since 1983. When Trump began his first term in 2017, there were 695 million barrels in the SPR, and it contained 637 million barrels when Biden took office four years later in 2021.
The Biden administration authorized historic releases from the SPR in an effort to curb high prices for consumers as inflation rose and global energy markets experienced disruptions from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as conflict in the Middle East. That left the SPR at a 40-year low of about 347 million barrels in the summer of 2023. As of Jan. 10, 2025, the SPR had 394 million barrels of oil in its inventory.
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The U.S. has emerged as a major energy exporter in recent years and led the world in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports in 2023 and retained that title in 2024.
Trump also said his administration will reverse former President Biden’s electric vehicle mandate to support the auto industry and its workers, who he thanked for their support in the November election.
“With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump said.
“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice. We will build automobiles in America again at a rate that nobody could have dreamt possible just a few years ago, and thank you to the autoworkers of our nation for your inspiring vote of confidence, we did tremendously with their vote,” he added.
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