Last week, Joe Biden complained that he was “sick” of Americans blaming him for inflation and high gas prices. We should be blaming COVID-19 or Vladimir Putin, not him, he says.
But according to administration memos, Biden’s policies are undoubtedly the cause of higher prices at gas pumps. The memos, which were obtained by National Review, reveal that anti-energy policies were implemented in the earliest days of his presidency, resulting in hampered domestic production, thus causing people’s expenses for fuel and consumer goods to go up long before Russia invaded Ukraine.
“On the day Biden took office, his Department of the Interior issued a memo suspending the authority of local Bureau of Land Management offices to approve leases, drilling permits, and mining operations plans that would support America’s oil supply,” National Review reports. “Sixty days later, a second memo was sent out by political appointee Laura Daniel Davis extending the suspension of local authorities indefinitely and making the fate of all future leasing and drilling permits contingent on her personally rubber-stamping them.”
Despite claiming last week that “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production,” the memos obtained by National Review “appear to show that the Biden administration intentionally handicapped the domestic oil industry from day one as part of its mission to transition the U.S. to a green economy.”
The first memo, issued in January 2021, “suspended a range of activities that would help promote U.S. energy independence, barring the Interior Department from issuing ‘any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill,'” explains National Review.
Chad Padgett, a former career senior executive for the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska, “confirmed that all activities related to leases and environmental processes ‘came to a screeching halt’ due to the first order.” Because of the order, Padgett no longer had the authority to direct his employees to work on existing projects, because all such work, including all permits to drill, had to be approved by Laura Daniel Davis, the then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM.
The second order “took all decision making authority previously delegated to the state director down to field manager level and made it basically so we couldn’t do our jobs. We had to be approved from a political level to be authorized for the simplest of permits,” Padgett explained.
Despite White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki insisting that “there are 9,000 approved drilling permits that are not being used,” and companies could be drilling if they want to, it simply doesn’t work that way. Padgett explains that there are several “bureaucratic hoops that must be jumped through before those existing 9,000 leases can be drilled.” As such, immediate production is unrealistic.
“There’s a lot of evidence that Biden administration policies have been detrimental to oil production supply in this country,” Padgett says. “The simple fact that we’re seeing less incentive to enter and produce in this market when you know that Biden administration is going out of its way to be unfriendly to oil production.”
