The lame duck Biden-Harris administration is already working to undermine the energy agenda of President-elect Donald Trump after he handed Vice President Kamala Harris a crushing loss in Tuesday’s election.
Less than 48 hours after Trump won decisive Electoral College and popular vote victories, federal agencies are moving to interfere with Trump’s plans to expand and unfreeze approvals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and to drill for more oil and gas on American lands, according to Bloomberg News and CNN. The Biden-Harris administration paused approvals for LNG export hubs in January and took numerous actions to restrict energy production on government-controlled lands, and Trump campaigned hard against those policies leading into November.
The administration justified the LNG export approvals pause on the basis that regulators needed to conduct a fresh study examining the emissions impacts of LNG exports, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggesting in May that the new analysis would be published sometime in early 2025. However, the Department of Energy (DOE) is now reportedly rushing to complete the study by the end of November, possibly teeing up legal problems for the export hub projects that Trump has promised to greenlight, according to Bloomberg News.
White House Announces Plan To Protect Bureaucrats From Being Fired By New Trump Admin https://t.co/wr7UHgAB3O
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If the DOE’s forthcoming analysis finds that more LNG exports are not in the public interest or otherwise attach new conditions, export approvals from the incoming Trump administration could be challenged in court, according to Bloomberg News. It would take the Trump administration about a year to issue a new study altogether, or approximately a month to amend it meaningfully.
If the Biden-Harris DOE publishes a study that finds additional LNG exports are not in the public interest, the incoming Trump administration could essentially ignore it and approve new projects anyways, though developers may still be exposed to legal risks, according to Bloomberg News.
Notably, a government watchdog group has accused the DOE of actually beginning that new study in 2023 and effectively burying it because the draft likely indicated that the final version would not reach conclusions that would justify announcing a pause on approvals. A questionable study by Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University, claiming that LNG exports produce significantly more emissions than domestically-mined coal for energy production also influenced some inside the Biden White House.
Freeing up LNG exports is not the only major Trump campaign promise on energy policy that Biden-Harris bureaucrats appear to be trying to undermine in the administration’s final days.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed while Trump was first in office, mandated two lease sales for fossil fuel development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a region of Alaska thought to sit atop considerable oil reserves, according to CNN. That law required the second sale to happen before the end of 2024, and the Biden-Harris administration indicated Wednesday that it will only lease the bare minimum 400,000 acres required by the statute.
“The 2017 Tax Act requires a second lease sale and we are following the law as we always pledged we would,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Biden-Harris administration officials have also moved to “Trump-proof” various other rules, regulations and policies in policy areas like international affairs. Trump and his allies have pledged to rein in a federal bureaucracy they consider to be out of control once officially assuming power on Jan. 20, 2025.
The DOE did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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