Critics slam Trump for using wartime power to boost energy production — but Biden did the same thing in 2022, and for the same reason

“I find that ensuring resilient domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity is central to United States defense readiness,” Trump said (2).

While the administration says shortfalls in those sectors “threaten national defense,” critics say it's a rescue package for fossil fuel companies — presented as a national emergency.

Many add that it is a political move as November midterms approach and voters are fed up with high gas prices.

Still, it isn't the first time a president has used the DPA to boost domestic energy production.

President Joe Biden did so in 2022, when gas prices were exploding after Russia invaded Ukraine (3). He invoked the law to speed up production of clean energy — like solar panels, heat pumps, electric grid transformers and clean hydrogen equipment (4).

Then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm justified Biden's decision by saying “for too long, the nation's clean energy supply chain has been over-reliant on foreign sources and adversarial nations.”

The power and money that comes with the Defense Production Act

Dating back to the Korean War (5) in 1950, the DPA gives U.S. presidents power to direct private companies to speed up production of materials deemed critical to national security — supporting them with federal loan guarantees, purchase commitments and financial support.

Biden also invoked the DPA in 2021 during the COVID pandemic to speed up production of vaccines, masks and other supplies.

Trump's new directives allow the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to purchase energy, invest directly in energy production and eliminate market and regulatory hurdles to production and distribution, as reported by Bloomberg (6).

Such DOE funding could go toward coal-fired power plants, gas turbine manufacturing, petroleum refining facilities and transformer manufacturing.

Trump added that the country's “aging and constrained electric grid infrastructure” poses a “threat to national defense” (7).

Testing the limits of a wartime law

Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, called it a giveaway.

“President Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects at the expense of energy affordability and common sense,” he said (8).

Public Citizen dubbed the move “a wish list for the oil, gas, and coal industries, who are already enjoying record profits under Trump's Energy Unaffordability Agenda.”

The broader critique, according to Newsweek (9), is that invoking national defense powers “blurs the line between emergency authority and routine energy policymaking.”

Using a wartime statute to support industries during a period of high prices (rather than a genuine supply emergency) tests the limits of what the law was designed to do.

However, the Council on Foreign Relations (1) notes this is consistent with how the law has evolved.