Trump is Trying to Make Us Pay More for Gas

The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.

At a White House photo op last week, surrounded by rich auto executives and congressional Republicans, Trump delivered his latest blow to Americans’ pocketbooks by announcing a policy change that could cost us consumers up to $185 billion when filling up our tanks at the pump.

If you’re scratching your head trying to recall this event, you probably read or watched coverage that framed it as Trump gleefully attacking Biden rules that encouraged electric vehicles. The proposal from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has to do with the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program, or CAFE standards. To say that it rolls back the Biden administration’s approach to fuel economy standards is a wild understatement.

Read my UCLA Emmett Institute colleague Ann Carlson (here and here). As the former acting administrator of NHTSA, Carlson helped set the Biden-era standards, so she knows better than most people what is lost in scrapping the rules and the legal problems with the new proposal.

Much of the media coverage offered scant details about the Trump proposal. Few stories included the potential cost to Americans who are already hurting from high consumer costs. Instead, most reporting fixated on how Trump was attacking Biden and EVs. This misses a more compelling dynamic that audiences want to know about in this affordability crisis, even if Trump calls it a Democratic Party “con job.”

Anyone who puts gas in a car knows that fuel economy is not a con job.

This new Trump proposal would raise fuel consumption by around 100 billion gallons through 2050 relative to the Biden standard, costing Americans up to $185 billion. That’s according to NHTSA’s own economic analysis. Reuters reporter Valerie Volcovici lays out those brutal facts in a story titled “Trump fuel economy rollback may make cars cheaper, but higher gas bills will absorb savings.”

So, while American families are spending more money on energy, those automakers who were sucking up to Trump in the Oval Office last week would save $35 billion through 2031 and average upfront vehicle costs could decline by about $930. That’s if they decide to pass along the savings — a big if and a small savings in the long-run.

“Consumers will be paying more in lifetime fuel costs than saved in technology costs beginning in model year 2027 in every single one of their three alternative (scenarios) compared to the original standards under Biden,” Dave Cooke at Union of Concerned Scientists told Volcovici.

Some other reports got close to hitting on these important points but fell short. “Fuel savings vs. car costs” is how one Politico story framed Trump’s rollbacks of the CAFE standards.  “The higher [Biden] standards would have saved drivers a combined $35 billion over the lifetime of a fleet built to the higher specification,” the story says. But rather than just pointing out that requiring vehicles to be more fuel-efficient saves money for consumers by helping them buy less gasoline, the story prefaces that sentence with the words “Democrats and environmentalists contend…” Why?

Hopefully more reporters will follow Volcovici’s example as they cover Trump’s attempts to blame others for the affordability crisis. Eleven months into his term, consumer prices are rising. Polling consistently shows that public trust in Trump’s economic leadership has faltered. His line last week about “affordability being a con job” clearly didn’t land, because this week he traveled to Pennsylvania to try a rebrand. “You can call it ‘affordability’ or anything you want,” Trump said this week, “but the Democrats caused the affordability problem and we’re the ones that are fixing it.” Not much better and no, they really aren’t.

Cost of living will continue to dominate politics from now until the mid-term elections, including energy affordability. To be sure, energy affordability isn’t always a simple message. But this particular lane of the affordability crisis is pretty easy to navigate. Trump just intervened to essentially make you buy more gas and increase corporate profits. That’s a helluva message for voters heading into 2026. It’s fuel economy, stupid.

Cover photo: By Legal Planet