Although fuel prices have gone down slightly since President Donald Trump took office, his “drill, baby, drill” agenda has not translated into an era of prosperity for American oil and gas workers.

The price of oil dropped about 20 percent last year, the steepest decline since 2020, and thousands of workers lost their jobs in layoffs. Companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP all announced they were laying off thousands of workers last year, continuing a decade-long decline in industry jobs.

Since Trump took office, gasoline prices have declined slightly, with average retail prices dropping from about $3.20 per gallon in January 2025 to $3.02 at the end of December. But that is a 6 percent decrease, far short of Trump’s repeated campaign pledges to cut energy prices in half. 

“Energy is going to bring us back,” Trump said at a Aug. 17, 2024, campaign rally in Pennsylvania. “That means we’re going down and getting gasoline below $2 per gallon.”

That prediction of $2 gasoline turned out to be off by a buck a gallon. Electricity prices for consumers also rose 6.7 percent in 2025 compared to a year earlier, with home gas bills up by 5.2 percent, according to an analysis by The Guardian.

The rising electricity prices over the last year are part of a trend in more than half the country.  Over the last six years, electricity prices have risen faster than the rate of inflation in 26 states, spiking in places like California (up 34 percent), Maine (up 23 percent), New York (up 13 percent) and West Virginia (up 10 percent), with Trump’s cancellation of clean energy projects playing a role in some of the recent increases, according to The New York Times.

Relatively low gasoline prices have little to do with Trump’s actions in office, said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future and lecturer at the University of Michigan. “The administration might claim victory on that front, but I don't think their policies are a huge contributor to the low gasoline prices that we are seeing right now,” Raimi said.

Trump’s twin goals of “unleashing energy dominance” – including producing more oil and gas – and lowering energy costs conflict with each other, Raimi said.

“Oil and gas companies are primarily driven by the price of the product that they produce,” Raimi said. “And so when prices go up, companies drill more. When prices go down, companies drill less.”

The persistent low oil prices are a result of high global oil production and relatively flat demand, industry experts say. After reaching highs under the Biden Administration, U.S. crude oil production kept pushing higher in 2025, setting a new monthly record of nearly 430 million barrels in October. Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), made up of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, also increased their production last year compared to 2024.

Overall, the global oil supply rose by 2 percent last year, compared to a modest 1.2 percent rise in demand for oil, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“The fundamental picture for crude globally worsened in 2025,” said Trey Cowan, oil and gas analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). “Oversupplied conditions have been the main driver of lowered oil prices.”

Those low oil prices help to explain why, despite Trump’s efforts to “unleash” American energy, oil and gas jobs are rarer than they were a decade ago. The industry employed 252,000 fewer workers in 2025 than it did 10 years ago, a 20 percent decline, according to IEEFA. Increased use of technology, such as hydraulic fracturing, has also allowed oil companies to produce more petroleum with fewer workers over time.

Trump has followed through on one major campaign promise: opening more federal lands and waters for drilling. In 2025, federal authorities approved 5,802 drilling permits on federal land, a 54 percent increase compared to 2024, when they approved 3,771 drilling permits, according to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) data.

But receiving a permit to drill on public land does not mean a company will actually use it. As of Jan. 2, there were 8,949 such drilling permits sitting unused, 1,769 more than on March 3, 2025, according to BLM data.  

The biggest factor in whether a company decided to use a permit on federal land is profitability, said Anthony Kovscek, professor of petroleum engineering at Stanford University. Oil and gas companies make “cold and methodical” decisions based on factors like seismic data that show how rich a deposit might be or whether the area is remote and expensive to drill in.

“All the prospects a company has compete for whatever the capital budget is going to be for that year,” Kovscek said. “With current oil prices and current production being fairly steady, I don’t think I’ve heard a lot of companies saying their budget’s going to be a lot larger.”

Whether the administration’s efforts to increase offshore petroleum production is also unclear. In November, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management proposed a five-year leasing program that includes opening areas off the California coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico that have been closed to drilling for decades. The bureau also proposed leasing in parts of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska that have never seen large-scale oil production.

Unlike oil, natural gas prices rose last year after dropping to record lows in 2024. Average prices of natural gas at a pipeline crossroads in Louisiana where gas prices are used as a national benchmark went up by 56 percent in 2025 compared to numbers the previous year, according to Energy Information Administration (EIA) data for the “Henry Hub” benchmark.

The agency attributed the price increase to a relatively cold winter, with natural gas used as both a heating source and as the dominant fuel for electricity generation. Prices are also going up because of an increase in U.S. gas flowing to other countries via the growing number of liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals in the U.S. as well as increased demand from data centers.

In January 2025, Trump removed a pause on the construction of new LNG facilities the Biden Administration had tried to impose, though courts blocked Biden’s pause from actually taking effect. Trump’s Department of Energy has authorized export permits for at least six LNG terminals since he took office in January 2025.

LNG exports grew by at least 24 percent from January to October last year, the latest figures available from the EIA, compared to the same period in the previous year. In October, exports reached a record high of more than 503 million cubic feet, nearly 20 times more LNG than the U.S. was exporting a decade ago.

The explosive growth in LNG will end up costing U.S. households that are increasingly competing with international buyers for American natural gas, according to a December 2024 report by the Department of Energy. The rapid growth of LNG exports would end up adding as much as $122 per year to household energy costs, on average, according to the report.

Lead photo: Attendees listen as President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at Alro Steel, Aug. 29, 2024, in Potterville, Mich. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)