Joe Biden Is Weakening American Energy Production on His Way Out of Office

J oe Biden’s last weeks as president will be spent bowing to environmentalists by trying to permanently ban new offshore oil and natural gas.

The outgoing president is preparing to issue formal designations of “sensitive marines areas,” according to Bloomberg. Biden’s offshore actions would follow a late December formal proposal to block energy development in Nevada for 20 years. Naturally, sources of offshore energy favored by Biden, such as offshore wind turbines (which may be killing whales), would likely be exempted from the designation.

The post-election timing of the move, along with its leak near a holiday, suggest that the goal is politically minded. Once and future president Donald Trump openly campaigned on pledges to spur the development of American energy, both on land and in water, by removing numerous executive roadblocks.

Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Trump would get to work on energy development “on Day One, within seconds of his arrival at the Oval Office.” He plans to issue executive orders “to drill, baby, drill,” and “to expedite permits for drilling and for fracking all over this country so we can immediately bring down the cost of living here in America” and “is also going to take strong action on the world stage to deter Iran.”

Trump could — and likely will — attempt to reverse Biden’s designation. But any effort to do so would be met with wide array of legal challenges and a tidal wave of headlines worrying about how “previously protected waters” could be vulnerable to new drilling operations. In 2019, during Trump’s prior administration, a federal district court blocked an attempt to overturn a similar offshore drilling ban instituted by former president Barack Obama’s order concerning the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.

“The move is certain to complicate President-elect Donald Trump’s ambitions to drive more domestic energy production,” writes Bloomberg. “Unlike other executive actions that can be easily undone, Biden’s planned declaration is rooted in a 72-year-old law that gives the White House wide discretion to permanently protect US waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly empowering presidents to revoke the designations.”

The law referred to here is the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. It grants any president exceedingly broad power to designate protected areas without the approval of Congress, power Obama repeatedly used to set land off-limits to energy development during his second term. However, the act doesn’t explicitly grant anyone authority to undo those designations.

If Biden invokes the 1953 legislation, it would add to his previous efforts to actively restrict offshore energy development, which led to literally zero sales of offshore leases to oil and gas in 2024. Such restriction can strongly affect American energy production: Offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone account for roughly 15 percent of America’s domestic oil production, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

There’s also an international dimension to the decision. The American energy dominance created during the first Trump turn has been a key component of national power. In 2018, American ingenuity allowed our nation to harness the powers of fracking and horizontal drilling to pass Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. This gave our country priceless international leverage. American energy exports even became competitive against Russia’s in Europe, critically meeting the demands of our European allies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Trump also heavily sanctioned Iran’s capacity to export oil, greatly damaging Iran’s economy with a “maximum pressure campaign” that he appears likely to renew in term two.

Biden threw much of this away. He has opposed conventional U.S. energy development at every turn, causing the once booming industry to stutter. The number of U.S. oil-drilling rigs is down almost 26 percent compared with the March 2020 peak under President Trump. The anti-energy policies of the Biden administration, which have created legal and regulatory uncertainty, bear much of the blame. Biden outright blocked of American energy exports, greatly weakening the growth of this strategically vital industry and forced our allies to return to relying on foreign dictatorships Iran for their energy security. Many turned to Iran to make up for lost American and Russian supply.

Biden has also lifted many of Trump’s sanctions on Iran and flat-out ignored violations of many others, allowing the theocracy’s energy exports to roughly double, from $19 billion in 2020 to $42 billion in 2022. This extended a lifeline to Iran’s troubled economy and government, which derives about half its revenue from oil exports.

Biden’s potential decision will do nothing for the environment but will greatly harm America’s position in the world and that of our allies.

“Moves that restrict domestic U.S. energy production risk ultimately increasing U.S. exposure to geopolitical shocks in the Middle East,” John Allen Gay, executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society and author of the book War with Iran, told National Review. “To put it more bluntly, if there’s a big war in the Middle East that starts impacting the ability of the Middle East to export oil, we’re going to regret not developing our own domestic capacity.”

Biden is set to devote a portion of what’s left of his presidency to undermining America’s energy sector and the next administration. He will go out cementing his reputation for spite and opposition to energy abundance.