After the Biden administration announced the latest sale of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to put a damper on pump prices last week, Republican lawmakers called the move a stunt to mollify gasoline price-sensitive voters before the election in November.
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was built for a national energy crisis — not for a Democrat election crisis,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said after the sale was announced.
But while lower gas prices may help Democrats at the polls, the latest sale is one in a series first announced in March to soften an oil price spike following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s also the case, oil market analysts said, that the law that created the reserve allows presidents broad discretion to direct sales from the stockpile, the U.S. remains in line to meet international oil reserve requirements, and the country is far less reliant on oil imports than it was when the reserve was created in the 1970s.
