The White House is intensifying a pressure campaign against the oil industry over rebounding gas prices as it tries to contain the political fallout of rising fuel costs just ahead of the midterms.
Top Biden administration officials in recent weeks have publicly warned companies against inflating prices. In private, their message has been even more direct. They’ve aired complaints to executives over their ballooning profits and threatened drastic new restrictions — such as limits on companies’ fuel exports — if the industry refuses to help ease the price at the pump, according to people familiar with those discussions.
The offensive comes as the cost of gas trended up again nationwide, erasing weeks of declines that President Joe Biden had championed as evidence his economic policies were working. Though that trend abated over the past few days, the longer-term picture looks bleak, alarming officials who worry that fluctuating prices could cause eleventh-hour damage to Democrats’ midterm chances.
Biden in late September directly urged oil and gas companies to slash prices, accusing them of profiting excessively off higher fuel costs, even as the global price of oil declined. In a statement, White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan characterized the administration’s aggressiveness toward the industry as aimed at “advancing the interests of the American people — whether that meant asking the industry for their ideas to increase oil and gas production, or calling them out for setting record profit margins at a time of war.”
“You can yell at them all you want,” said Ryan Kellogg, an economist and professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. “There’s no switch you can turn that’s immediately going to cause a bunch more oil to come out of the ground.” Another industry official said that despite months of discussions, Biden and the industry share virtually no common ground on policies they believe could ease fuel costs.
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