The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that, for now at least, it was abandoning plans to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve after the president drained the emergency supply to its lowest levels since the 1980s in a transparently political move to artificially push gas prices down.
In a realization that Americans have been making regularly since Biden and his failed "build back better"-turned-"Bidenomics" agenda came to power, the White House has seemingly realized prices are just too darn high to fill the government's emergency supply.
In its report on the Biden administration's decision, Bloomberg quoted the U.S. Department of Energy as saying the plans to refill the SPR were abandoned because it was "keeping the taxpayer's interest at the forefront," which would be a first for the Biden administration. Biden and his band of climate alarmists had planned to "purchase as many as 3 million barrels of oil for a Strategic Petroleum Reserve site in Louisiana" slated for delivery later this summer, Bloomberg added.
More from Fox News Channel on Biden's reckoning with oil prices that are simply "too expensive" below:
🚨 Biden drained the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level in 40 years.
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 3, 2024
Now, the Biden administration is CANCELLING their plans to refill it because oil is "way too expensive." pic.twitter.com/NYqEZ2Aosa
America's energy situation rumbled off the rails on day one of the Biden administration as the president began implementing his campaign pledge to "end" fossil fuels in the U.S. by forcing a "green" (read: not green) energy transition, American consumers be damned.
After ending America's energy independence, Biden then had to deal with the natural consequences as his energy and other economic policies eventually sent the national average cost-per-gallon of regular unleaded and diesel to their all-time highs by June 2022.
Biden's embarrassing attempts to get OPEC to increase oil production as costs rose — a plea that would not have been necessary if America had remained energy independent — proved fruitless, as did his attempts to pin all blame for spiking costs at the gas pump on "Putin's Price Hike."
Looking ahead at the looming midterm elections that November, Biden decided to deplete America's emergency reserves — created as a way to insulate the U.S. gasoline supply from the impacts of foreign wars and domestic natural disasters — in response to an emergency of his own creation.
After seeking to avoid blame for the high price of fuel and then responding by tapping the SPR, Biden said in October 2022 that he had "a plan" to eventually refill the SPR "in the years ahead at a profit for taxpayers."
"The United States government is going to purchase oil to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when prices fall to $70 a barrel," Biden pledged. "And that means oil companies can invest to ramp up production now, with confidence they'll be able to sell their oil to us at that price in the future: $70."
Well, the price-per-barrel did eventually fall to Biden's target last summer, but the SPR currently holds 363,050,000 barrels, barely more than the lowest point the Biden administration drained it to in July 2023 — when it was supposed to be refilled — the least in the reserve pre-Biden since October 1983.
After not refilling the reserve as he said he would, Biden watched as prices again surged in 2024, and now he's saying his administration is pulling back on his previous pledge to top off the emergency supply. With wars raging in Ukraine and Israel and China nipping at Taiwan, this is hardly the time for the U.S. to have its emergency supply of oil sitting more than half-empty.