Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Sunday called on President Trump to release oil from the national stockpile to counter soaring gas prices — an idea that Republicans have been slow to embrace.
Why it matters: Tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) could deprive Republicans of a talking point: That then-President Biden's move to do so in 2022 was done for purely political reasons.
- Republicans' message — as outlined on Sunday's political talk shows — is that the uptick in prices following last week's attacks on Iran is motivated largely by market fears and won't last long.
Driving the news: "Due to Donald Trump's reckless war of choice, gas prices have surged to their highest levels in years," Schumer said in an X post. "His response? 'If they rise, they rise.' He couldn't care less.
- "Today, I demanded Trump release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve IMMEDIATELY to bring relief to Americans at the pump."
- The reserve holds hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil in underground salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Biden in 2022 ordered an historic release from the reserve to halt soaring gas prices.
Flashback: Energy Secretary Chris Wright told lawmakers last year that more than $100 million of repairs were needed to bring the storage facilities back to full capacity and that nearly filling it back up could cost billions of dollars.
The other side: In response to a reporter's question this weekend about about tapping the reserve, Trump criticized Biden for depleting it.
- "Biden used them so that he can get some extra votes in the elections ... He brought it down to the lowest level it has ever been," Trump said.
Zoom in: Wright said Sunday that the administration has other short-term options.
- "We have been deploying it during a period of low oil prices to put some oil back into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve," Wright said on "Fox News Sunday."
- "But yes, it shouldn't have been deleted — depleted for the 2022 midterm elections as the Biden administration did. But, again, we've done many other moves that allow the world to remain fully supplied with oil during this relatively brief conflict."
- Wright maintained that higher prices are "a small price to pay to get to a world where energy prices are returned back to where they were, and I'm talking weeks, certainly not months."
What we're watching: How much more of a political football the reserve becomes.
