The Long-Term Risk of Trump’s Fuel Economy Rollback

This is Heatmap Daily, a weekday news digest written by our executive editor.

President Trump’s big fuel efficiency rollback is here. This afternoon, the Department of Transportation significantly weakened the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, the federal government’s rules that encourage new cars and trucks to get gradually more fuel-efficient over time. Instead of mandating that new cars and trucks hit a target of more than 50 miles per gallon, as the old Biden-era rules had required, new vehicles sold in the U.S. will now need to average only 34.9 miles per gallon.

That target is below the level that most automakers have already achieved in their vehicle fleet. (For reasons too obscure to recount here, the regulatory standard of 34 miles per gallon aligns to real-world gas mileage in the mid-to-high 20s — something my 15-year-old hatchback manages to achieve without much straining.) The new rules also retroactively rewrite the standard back to 2022, meaning that automakers whose fleets once broke the law may now be in the clear.

These changes, in other words, render the fuel economy law, first enacted in 1975, is now moot. But Republicans in Congress had arguably already achieved this last year, when they zeroed out all of the law’s fines for automakers as part of the president’s tax and spending bill. These two changes, taken together, mean that the Trump administration has successfully neutered the U.S. fuel efficiency rules.

We are digging into the rule-making here at Heatmap, and I hope to have more on the documents in the days to come. But one of the lasting ironies of President Trump’s approach to fuel efficiency will be that his own presidency demonstrates its strategic inadequacy.

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy law, after all, did not originate as an environmental policy — climate change had scarcely emerged as a pressing issue in the mid-1970s — but as a national security and economic sovereignty measure. In the aftermath of the oil embargo, American politicians realized that the U.S. economy was far too dependent on oil for its long-term good. This set off a scramble to find new energy sources, prompting a dash back to coal in the electricity sector and a surge in federal R&D spending on alternative energy. (This funding boost eventually created the modern solar, wind, battery, and fracking industries.)

It also led to a successful push to regulate gas mileage. Crucially, this effort did not limit emissions from any one type of vehicle, as the Environmental Protection Administration’s toxic air pollution rules aim to do. Rather, it targeted the average fuel efficiency of cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States in each model-year. The point was not to regulate any one type of vehicle out of existence, but to increase the country’s overall fuel efficiency over time.

That decades-long effort was never perfect. It created in American statute, for instance, a lasting distinction between cars and trucks, which has bedeviled regulators as SUVs have taken up a larger portion of the new vehicle fleet. But it has also inarguably succeeded: The United States ekes far more value out of every barrel of oil today than it did half a century ago.

Yet the time is ripe to keep making progress. President Trump’s administration has illustrated the persistence of our oil dependence — and the political and strategic problems that it can still engender. Even though the United States has since become the world’s largest producer of oil, the linked and globalized nature of fuel markets means that a supply shock anywhere leads to price hikes everywhere. When an oil crisis arrives — even a largely self-inflicted one, as in the case of the Iran war — then the price of moving things and people rises, the economy suffers, and the president’s popularity falls. Countries can protect themselves from these shocks on a short-term basis by stockpiling oil (as the United States, in fact, does), but they can avoid them only by switching to a far more efficient and electrified transportation system.

President Trump, in other words, may regret the current oil and refining crisis. But by gutting the fuel economy standards — and waging war on electric vehicle incentives more broadly — he is increasing the likelihood that America will face many more crises like it in future years. Consider it his particular gift to his successors.