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The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.
Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”
This has caused some irritation on the right, as you might imagine. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for “nothing more than campaign yard signs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave her monthly “squeal award” to Biden in June for lack of transparency over how much the signs have cost and demanded disclosure from the OMB. (Signs erected to credit President Obama’s construction projects cost an estimated $300 million adjusted for inflation, though the Biden administration, likely aiming to skirt a similar scandal, specifies that the “signs should not be produced or displayed if doing so results in unreasonable cost, expense, or recipient burden.” Ernst’s office did not reply to a request from Heatmap about whether or not she ever got the numbers she was seeking from the OMB, and the White House never returned a request from Heatmap to supply the same.)
Democrats aren’t the only politicians who sign their names to their big accomplishments, however. Donald Trump took credit for COVID-19 stimulus checks, and George W. Bush’s Internal Revenue Service sent mailers to let the American people know who they could thank for their income tax refunds. But suppose America were to elect a president who happened to be especially petty and vindictive? In that case — this is, of course, hypothetical — would it be possible for the incoming president to order the removal of signs touting his predecessor’s achievements?
I ran the question by a Department of Transportation spokesperson, who told me such things are simply not done. “There has never been a request to remove project signs from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we hope to see signage remain in communities for the lifecycle of BIL-funded projects,” the DOT spokesperson said.
Their answer implies that while such a thing would be unprecedented, it is also theoretically possible.
It’s unclear how many such signs there are, although the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded more than 66,000 projects, all of which are at least eligible for a sign. Whatever the exact number is, it’d be a big and expensive hassle to remove them all. Given that much of the IRA and BIL funding has already been allocated, as well, it seems like such a demand ought to be very low on an incoming president of the United States’ list of priorities.
At least, one would think.
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Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.
America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.
While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.
“In response to recent commodity price volatility, Matador has decided to adjust its drilling and completion activity for 2025 to provide for more optionality,” the company said in its earnings release.
In February, Matador was projecting that its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $1.4 and $1.65 billion.This week, it lowered that outlook to $1.3 to $1.55 billion. “We’re very open to and want to have reason to grow again,” Matador’s chief executive Joseph Foran said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “This is primarily a timing matter. Is this a temporary thing on oil prices? Or is this a new world we live in?”
Mizuho Securities analyst William Janela wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning that, as the first oil exploration and production company to report its earnings this go-round, Matador would be “somewhat of a litmus test for the sector: we don't believe the market was expecting E&Ps to announce activity reductions this soon, but MTDR's update could signal more cuts to come from peers over the next few weeks.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices are currently sitting at just below $63, up from around $60 in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. While the current price is off its lows, it’s still well short of the almost $84 a barrel crude prices were at around this time last year.
The price decline could be attributable to any number of factors — macroeconomic uncertainty due to the trade war, production hikes by foreign producers — but whatever the cause, it has made an awkward situation for the Trump administration’s energy strategy.
The iShares U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF, which tracks the American oil and gas exploration industry, is down 9% for the year and more than 13% since “Liberation Day,” while the rest of the market has almost recovered as the Trump administration has indicated it may ease up on some of his more drastic tariff policies.
If other drillers follow Matador’s investment slowdown, it could imperil Trump’s broader energy policy goals.
Trump has both encouraged other countries to produce more oil (and bragged about lower oil prices) while also exhorting American drillers to “drill, baby, drill,”with enticements ranging from kneecapping emissions standards to a reduced regulatory burden.
As Heatmap has written, these goals sit in conflict with each other. Energy executives told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that they need oil prices ranging from $61 to $70 a barrelin order to profitably drill new wells. If prices fall further, “what would happen is ‘Delay, baby, delay,’”Wood Mackenzie analyst Fraser McKay wrote Wednesday. “We now expect global upstream development spend to fall year-on-year for the first time since 2020.”
A $65 per barrel price “dents” margins for drillers, meaning “growth capex and discretionary spend will be delayed,” McKay wrote.
Matador also announced that it had authorized $400 million worth of buybacks, and itsstock price rose some 4% on the earnings announcement, indicating that Wall Street will reward drillers who pull back on drilling and ramp up shareholder payouts.
“We’ve got the tools in the toolbox, including the share repurchase, to make Matador more value quarter by quarter,” Foran said. Rather than “blindly” pouring capital into growth, Matador would aim for a “measured pace,” he explained. “And if you mean what you say about a measured pace, that means when prices get a little lower, you take a few more moments to think about what you’re doing and don’t rush into things.”
The Department of Justice included a memo in a court filing that tears down the administration’s own case against New York’s congestion pricing.
Secretary Duffy, you have no case.
That was the gist of a memo Department of Justice lawyers sent to the Department of Transportation regarding its attempt to shut down New York City’s congestion pricing program. The letter was uploaded mistakenly on Wednesday into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Duffy’s actions. Oops.
The memo says “there is considerable litigation risk” in defending the letter Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sent on February 19, ordering the termination of New York’s program. “It is very unlikely that Judge Liman or further courts of review will uphold the Secretary’s decision on the legal grounds articulated in the letter.” The memo goes on, however, to advise the DOT of another argument it could make that may be more successful.
The Department of Transportation has since replaced the trio of DOJ lawyers that authored the memo, The New York Times reports, and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington. “Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?” an agency spokeswoman told the Times in a statement.
Dated April 11, the memo was sent to the DOT after Duffy publicly affirmed the department’s demand that New York end the program by April 20, but before the secretary upped the ante of his threats to New York as the deadline passed, announcing Monday that he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.
Duffy had given two reasons that New York’s congestion pricing program, which charges drivers $9 to enter Manhattan’s central business district, violated federal statute. First, he argued that Congress only authorized tolling programs on roads where drivers have the option to take an alternative, free route. Second, he said the state had designed the program to be a revenue raiser for the MTA, New York’s state-run transit agency, rather than a true effort to reduce congestion, and therefore the toll was not set appropriately.
But the Federal Highway Administration had spent years assessing New York’s program before approving it. “Other than the Secretary’s decision itself, there is no other material supporting or explaining the DOT’s change of position,” the DOJ memo says. There’s nothing in statute that disallows a two-fold goal of raising revenue and reducing traffic. Moreover, the lawyers note, the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn a decades-long precedent that gave agencies broad authority to interpret their statutory mandates, will hurt Duffy’s case. They also point out that Judge Liman, the district court judge who is presiding over the case, had previously ruled that the Value Pricing Pilot Program, the federal statute under which congestion pricing was approved, was designed to support these kinds of programs.
The memo warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes. “The thin administrative record may lead plaintiffs to point to these ‘gaps’ in the administrative record as justification for extra-record discovery from DOT,” it says, “including requests for production of emails and depositions of agency officials, including the Secretary in particular.”
If Duffy really wants to win this case, the DOJ advises, he should instead claim he’s revoking approvals due to “changed agency priorities,” rather than saying the program violates statute. There’s precedent for using this argument to terminate “cooperative agreements” between the federal government and third parties, and Duffy could cite the same two reasons that he’s already provided. It’s not a sure thing, the memo suggests, but it’s more defensible than the current path.
New York has refused to comply with Duffy’s demands and confirmed in a court filing on Wednesday that it would not shut down the program unless and until the court tells it to.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the removal of the memo’s authors from the case.
The Esmeralda 7 project is another sign that Trump’s solar freeze is over.
The Esmeralda 7 solar project, a collection of proposed solar farms and batteries that would encompass tens of thousands of acres of federal public lands in western Nevada, appears to be moving towards the end of its federal permitting process.
The farms developed by NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and others together would add up to 6,200 megawatts of solar generation capacity, making it the largest solar project in already solar-rich Nevada.
To get a sense of the massive scale of the project, the two newly installed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are about 1,000 megawatts each and the Empire Wind offshore wind project that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered a halt to this week had a planned capacity of just over 800 megawatts.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management updated its website for the project, indicating that the final Environmental Impact Statement for the project would be published on April 25 and the record of decision would be published on July 18.
A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told me that the Bureau wouldn’t have anything new to share until the publication of the final environmental impact statement “in the coming days or week or so.”
Still, the fact that the BLM is making progress on a decision at all is yet another sign that the “freeze” on renewables projects put in place in the early days of the Trump administration has begun to thaw, at least for solar and transmission projects.
The new decision date is also consistent with the freeze being over. A timeline presented at a BLM meeting in September envisioned the final Environmental Impact Statement being issued sometime between the fall of last year and spring of this year, with a record of decision in April. The listed July date would roughly match with the project’s permitting being delayed by two months.
The 60-day renewable permitting pause was one of Trump’s first actions in office and the offshore wind industry especially has continued to bear the brunt of the administration’s anti-renewable wrath.
But solar and transmission appear to be a different story: a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told Heatmap in March that “there is currently no freeze on processing renewable applications for solar” or for “making authorization decisions.” Earlier that month, BLM had approved a transmission line for a solar project in Southern California saying that the project would “Unleash American Energy.”
Like many large scale Nevada solar projects, the Esmeralda 7 has attracted some opposition from some area residents and conservation groups. The transmission line necessary for the project, Greenlink West, was approved in September.