Biden And McConnell Have Left Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve In Worse Shape Than You Think

Over the past few months, a great deal of attention has been focused on the Biden administration’s decision to draw down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a blatant attempt to manipulate the price of oil to desperately drive down gasoline prices at the pump.

This decision was purely political, and it represents a new low in American politics — the blatant use of publicly owned, strategic resources to sway votes in this year’s midterm elections. Although gasoline prices have declined modestly since this policy was enacted in March, this decision, in conjunction with other legislation passed by this administration, has left the United States oil reserve in an extremely precarious position.

When President Joe Biden was sworn into office in late January 2021, SPR inventories stood at 638,086,000 barrels. In the most recent U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) report dated Nov. 11, 2022, SPR inventories have declined to 392,119,000 barrels, a drop of 245.97 million barrels (-38.55 percent).

With this decline to fewer than 400 million barrels, SPR reserves now stand at their lowest level since late March 1984. However, these headlines fail to tell the truth about Biden’s effort to deplete the SPR — which now essentially stands at about 100 million barrels, some 75 percent less than the “official” EIA inventory number. Let me explain.

In August 2022, Biden, in collaboration with House Democrats and feckless Republican Senate leadership, passed and signed into law HR 3684, otherwise known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This bill passed the House of Representatives on a 228-205 vote, with all 220 Democrats and 8 Republicans voting in favor. In the Senate, this bill passed on a 69-30 vote (Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota did not vote), with support from all 50 Democrats and 20 Republicans, including support from the entire Senate Republican leadership (Sens. Mitch McConnell, John Thune, and Mike Crapo).

Tucked away in this monstrous bill (see page 914) was authorization mandating that the secretary of energy, “shall draw down and sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve 87,600,000 barrels of crude oil during the period of fiscal years 2028 and 2031.” The bill further added, “Amounts received from the sale … shall be deposited in the general fund of the Treasury during the fiscal year in which the sale occurs.”

In other words, in order to pay for a portion of this $1 trillion in new spending, this law requires the additional sale of oil from the SPR. And by legislating this “trick,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “score” improved, giving the appearance that the infrastructure bill would be less costly to the American taxpayer. However, this was not the first time Biden has used the sale of oil from the SPR to offset a portion of his profligate spending during his tenure as president or vice president.

The genesis for this budget chicanery began in the late stages of the Obama administration. In October 2015, the Obama-Biden administration worked with the same Senate Republican leadership to

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