Trump’s Policies Are Creating Uncertainty for Fossil Fuel Companies

“Lawyers are going to have a field day with this,” says Hathaway, who now works as a director at Lawyers for Good Government, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy.

It’s clear these new rules are exclusively a gift to extractive industries like drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects—which the administration has repeatedly attacked, withdrawing leases for offshore wind and ordering a construction halt on projects already underway—are notably absent from the list of projects allowed to undergo accelerated timelines. But ironically, these orders are only contributing to an increasingly uncertain environment for fossil fuel producers under the new Trump administration.

Even before the chaos caused by Liberation Day, Big Oil faced a potential reckoning with the president it helped elect. While the shale oil boom of the early 2010s rewarded executives for increased production, that strategy led to too much supply, leading prices per barrel to drop during the first Trump administration. After prices bottomed out during the pandemic, investors became more careful about unrestrained production.

“It’s not government regulation that’s limiting the production growth rate in the United States. It’s Wall Street,” says Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

The industry was given a boost in the early 2020s with the worldwide energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but investors kept a cautious eye on prices. Despite President Joe Biden’s climate focus, the US oil and gas industry became the world’s biggest crude oil producer in 2023, and reached a record high of producing 13.4 million barrels per day late last year. The challenge under the Trump administration would become balancing profitability with the president’s goal of unleashing “energy dominance.” Trump, after all, has stated that he wants oil to drop to $50 a barrel—a price far too low to be profitable for the industry.

Each quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas publishes a regional report on the state of the oil and gas industry in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, which includes anonymous survey responses from executives. The vitriol towards the White House in these comments from the first survey of this year, published in late March, shocked analysts.

“The key word to describe 2025 so far is ‘uncertainty’ and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty,” one anonymous executive said. “This uncertainty is being caused by the conflicting messages coming from the new administration. There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.”

“’Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,” another wrote.

Trump has continued to hand out questionable gifts to industry. On Thursday, Interior announced that it had changed some policies around offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that could, according to the agency, increase production in the Gulf by up to 100,000 barrels a day. Meanwhile, Interior is also reportedly assembling a list of fossil fuel deposits on public lands that it plans to open up for production.