Drilling Back to Dominance: How Trump Is Rewriting America's Energy Story — and Why Voters Should Stay the Course
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The Road Ahead
The Trump administration has moved aggressively to reverse course since taking office in January 2025. The Department of Energy announced in May 2025 the largest deregulatory action in its history, proposing the elimination of 47 regulations estimated to save Americans $11 billion in costs.
By early 2026, the DOE had completed 27 deregulatory actions representing approximately $254 million annually in avoided costs to consumers and businesses.
The question for Chester County families — and for Pennsylvania as a whole — is how long it will take to fully unwind four years of regulatory pressure on the energy sector that produces the power heating their homes and fueling their commutes.
Analysts tracking domestic output and refinery capacity expect Pennsylvania pump prices to fall again before summer's end.
That work is well underway. But it requires patience, persistence, and — critically — a Congress that will not undo the progress being made.
What Trump Has Already Delivered
From his first day in office, President Trump made clear that the federal government's war on American energy was over.
On January 20, 2025, he signed a battery of executive orders reversing course on virtually every major Biden energy restriction: "Unleashing American Energy," declaring a National Energy Emergency, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, rescinding Biden-era EV mandates, and — crucially — restarting liquefied natural gas export permits that the previous administration had blocked.
The results have been dramatic. U.S. crude oil production reached record-high levels in 2025 at over 13.6 million barrels per day, and the U.S. is currently producing 24 million barrels per day in oil and liquid fuels — more than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined. America is now, without question, the world's leading energy producer.
Pennsylvania drivers got a taste of what that progress looks like late last year, when gas prices dipped to below $3.00 a gallon in early 2026 — a direct result of record domestic production and a deregulatory agenda finally taking hold.
Prices have ticked back up to the current statewide average of $4.32 a gallon, driven in part by global market volatility and the long tail of infrastructure constraints left over from the Biden years, which caused gas prices to soar 50% from 2021 to 2022.
Neverthelessthe fundamentals that pushed prices down haven't changed — they've only gotten stronger. American drivers are expected to spend $11 billion less at the pump in 2026 — translating to an average household spending of $2,083 on gas, down from $2,716 in 2022.
For LNG, the turnaround has been equally historic. In 2025, the United States set a new record by exporting more than 100 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas in a single year — the first country in history to achieve that milestone. The allies and trading partners that Biden's LNG ban would have pushed toward Russia and Qatar are now buying American.
Offshore production tells a similar story. U.S. offshore oil production totaled over 714 million barrels in 2025 — the highest annual output on record.
And the EPA's role as a regulatory wrecking ball has been reversed. The Trump EPA rescinded the Obama-era Endangerment Finding, eliminating over $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs that had stifled innovation and driven up energy prices. The administration also rolled back Biden-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, averting a $1,000 increase in the average cost of a new vehicle.
The drilling permit pipeline is wide open again. The Trump administration has approved nearly 6,000 applications for permits to drill on federal lands — a 55% increase compared to the same period in 2024–2025.
The One Big Beautiful Bill: Locking In the Gains
Perhaps the most consequential legislative achievement came on July 4, 2025, when President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law.
For energy, the bill was transformational. It dismantled the market-distorting subsidy structure at the heart of the Biden IRA, ending taxpayer-funded handouts to the wind and solar industry and cutting off the EV tax credit gravy train. The Act eliminates after 2025 tax credits for commercial and residential electric vehicles and accelerates the phase-outs for solar and wind projects — ending the government's practice of picking winners and forcing consumers to subsidize technologies they may not want or need.
On offshore drilling, the OBBBA mandated structural change. In the Gulf of America, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is now required to hold at least two offshore lease sales each year through 2039. The Biden administration held just three lease sales in its entire five-year leasing program. Under the OBBBA, that becomes the minimum number required in a single year — for the next decade and a half.
The bill also corrected a punitive royalty rate the IRA had imposed on domestic producers. The federal royalty rate was reduced to between 12.5% and 16.67%, giving the Department of the Interior increased discretion to encourage domestic production and investment — reversing the IRA's 16.67% minimum, which had discouraged investment in American oil and gas.
And in a direct rebuke to the green energy-China nexus that conservatives have long warned about, the OBBBA includes Foreign Entity of Concern restrictions designed to prevent Chinese companies from claiming clean energy tax credits and to reduce U.S. reliance on China for supply chains of clean energy technologies.
What Remains To Be Done
Progress is real — but the job is not finished. Honest conservatives should say so plainly.
Energy prices for Pennsylvania families, while trending down at the pump (from the Biden era), remain elevated in some areas due to factors that federal policy cannot fix overnight: grid infrastructure built around policies that prioritized intermittent renewables over reliable baseload power, long-term utility contracts negotiated during the Biden years, and global market conditions. The work of rebuilding American energy dominance after four years of deliberate dismantling cannot be completed in eighteen months.
Several important priorities remain on the to-do list:
Permitting reform. Even with record drilling permits being approved, the legal and bureaucratic obstacles to actually building new energy infrastructure — pipelines, refineries, LNG terminals, transmission lines — remain formidable. The Trump administration has directed agencies to sunset a wide array of energy regulations by October 2026, and the Interior Department has dramatically cut environmental review timelines. But Congress needs to do its part by passing durable permitting reform legislation that cannot be unraveled by a future administration through executive action alone.
Grid reliability. Years of policy that pushed coal and natural gas off the grid in favor of wind and solar have left America's electricity system more fragile than it should be. The Trump administration has already saved more than 17 gigawatts of coal-powered electricity generation that was slated for closure, preventing blackout risks and stabilizing the grid. That work must continue, with a clear-eyed focus on keeping baseload power online.
Nuclear energy. The Trump administration has ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to undertake a wholesale review and revision of its regulations, with final rules due by November 2026. America's nuclear fleet is the most reliable, carbon-free source of power in the country, and unlocking new nuclear development — including advanced small modular reactors — is essential to long-term energy security. Congress should continue funding and accelerating this effort.
Pennsylvania's natural gas advantage. The Keystone State sits atop one of the world's greatest natural gas reserves. Completing pipelines like the Northeast Supply Enhancement that politicians and regulators have blocked for years would, by some estimates, save Pennsylvania families thousands of dollars annually. That infrastructure will not build itself — and it will not be built at all if Washington reverses course.
A Message for Chester County Voters: Don't Hand Back the Keys
As the 2026 midterms approach, there is an understandable temptation among some voters — particularly in suburban communities like Chester County — to send Washington a message of frustration. Energy prices, while falling, haven't dropped as fast as many hoped. Tariff uncertainty has added economic noise. And the political media environment is always eager to amplify discontent.
Conservative voters should resist that temptation — and here is why.
Every major gain described in this article — the record oil and gas production, the deregulation, the LNG export revival, the OBBBA's dismantling of Biden's green subsidy machine, the offshore lease mandates — exists because Republicans hold the White House and Congress simultaneously. It took the entirety of that unified government to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill over unanimous Democratic opposition. Not a single Democratic vote supported the legislation.
Every Democrat running for Congress this fall has either opposed these measures, campaigned against domestic energy production, or pledged to restore the IRA's market-distorting subsidies. A Democratic House — or even a narrowly divided one — would mean investigations designed to slow the deregulatory agenda, budget fights that threaten energy permitting reform, and a return of the green lobby's stranglehold on federal energy policy.
The Biden administration spent four years building its regulatory architecture piece by piece. Undoing it fully requires time — and an uninterrupted mandate to see the job through.
Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry put it plainly at a recent town hall: "Who you elect is going to make a policy choice that is going to affect your affordability." He is right. The policy choices being made right now in Washington are moving energy prices in the right direction for American families. Changing course in November would mean handing that progress back to the party that created the problem in the first place.
Chester County families have already paid for four years of the Democratic energy agenda. The bill, quite literally, showed up every month. The smart move now is to let the correction run its course — and to send to Washington the representatives who will keep the foot on the gas, not slam on the brakes.
The Bottom Line
America is producing more oil and gas than any nation in history. LNG exports are at an all-time record. Offshore drilling is being unlocked at a pace not seen in decades. The regulations that cost Pennsylvania families $100 a month in excess energy costs are being systematically dismantled.
This did not happen by accident. It happened because voters in 2024 elected a president and a Congress committed to American energy dominance — and because that government has delivered on its promises.
Analysts tracking domestic output and refinery capacity expect Pennsylvania pump prices to fall again before summer's end.
The midterms are not the time for a timeout. They are the time to finish the job.
This article was first published on ChescoVoice.com and is being used with permission.
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