This op-ed first appeared in The Advocate on March 28, 2025.
President Joe Biden spent four years trying to drag the United States into the dark ages with his anti-energy policies. Thanks to the wisdom of the American people, though, those days are over.
American energy independence is back on the horizon under President Donald Trump’s leadership. He signed my resolution to repeal the first of many Biden-era rules that were crushing Louisiana’s energy producers. This is only the beginning of our shared effort to clean up the massive mess that the Biden administration left behind.
In total, Biden and his team saddled American energy producers with more than 200 new regulations. Some of these policies were bone-deep, down-to-the-marrow stupid.
They killed thousands of jobs by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, halted new oil and gas permits on millions of acres of America’s public lands, encouraged radical climate activists to file lawsuits against energy producers over “environmental justice” violations and tried to derail several liquefied natural gas development projects in Louisiana by pausing all new export terminal permits.
Even after voters rejected Vice President Kamala Harris in November, the Biden administration continued to ignore the will of the American people by banning offshore drilling on millions of acres of coastline just days before Trump returned to the Oval Office.
These breathtakingly bad policies drove up energy costs for the American people. During Biden’s time in office, the average American’s energy bill increased by 29%. In Louisiana, the average household paid $5,202 more for energy and $10,703 more for transportation because of Biden’s inflation.
Trump’s team began unwinding some of these terrible energy policies on day one. Importantly, Trump scrapped Biden’s terrible executive order that paused all permits for new LNG export terminals. He also announced that Cameron Parish will be home to America’s newest LNG export terminal — a huge win for Louisianians.
These export terminals will be essential in helping the United States power its allies. Under Biden’s watch, Russia exported a record-breaking amount of LNG to the European Union. Once we unwind all these harmful Biden-era LNG export regulations, our allies will be able to purchase LNG from Louisiana instead of buying it from countries that hate us.
While Trump’s team has made some tremendous progress in scaling back these anti-energy policies, they cannot do it all on their own. If the Biden administration implemented these changes as formal rules, the Trump administration must introduce its own formal rules to reverse the initial policies. This can take months.
Congress, however, has a tool to help the Trump administration expedite rule changes. It’s called the Congressional Review Act (CRA), and it allows lawmakers to wipe bad rules off the books.
I’ve already started putting this tool to work for the American people. I introduced a joint resolution of disapproval under the CRA to eliminate a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management rule that required oil and gas producers in the Gulf of America to submit archaeological reports to the federal government before drilling or laying pipelines.
Essentially, the Biden administration wanted to drive up costs for small energy producers — including many mom-and-pop operations in Louisiana — by forcing them to recreate maps of the ocean floor to identify shipwrecks that we’ve already found. If that sounds wasteful, that’s because it is.
Small and independent operations make up roughly one-third of all oil production in the Gulf, and this rule would have cost them millions of dollars. Fortunately, my colleagues in Congress agreed that this rule was bogus. Last week, Trump signed my CRA into law and rendered that rule void.
Biden made a disgusting mess of America’s energy sector by sticking bad regulations on producers like gum to a park bench. Louisianans can count on us to keep scraping away at these terrible regulations until each one is repealed and America has returned to a position of energy dominance.
