As oil prices fall, some Texas-based oil and gas company leaders are beginning to criticize the president’s energy policies.
At a West Texas golf tournament this week, multiple oil and gas industry leaders spoke out publicly against President Donald Trump’s cheering of oil prices falling below $60 per barrel, Bloomberg reported. That price is well below the threshold many say will be needed to keep production high.
“I don’t know an industry that was more supportive of Trump than the oil and gas industry,” Kirk Edwards, former chairman of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, told Bloomberg. “People are in shock at how quickly he can get the price of oil down.”
At a White House press briefing Monday, Trump told reporters that “we’re really doing amazing” on gasoline prices, which he claimed are headed for $2.50 per gallon. Gasoline prices across the U.S. averaged $3.24 per gallon on Monday, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Crude oil prices dipped to a four-year low this week, with West Texas Intermediate, an industry benchmark, hitting just below $60 per barrel on Tuesday.
Leaders of the oil and gas industry, who were among Trump’s biggest campaign supporters, are now lamenting his cheering on price drops. Bryan Sheffield, managing partner of Texas-based Formentera Partners, told Bloomberg that Trump is a “Yankee” and that he is “not sure he’s as close to our industry that we think he is.”
Multiple executives criticized Trump’s “chaos” and “uncertainty” anonymously in a survey by the Dallas Federal Reserve last month. And in an April 6 post on the social platform X, Diamondback Energy president Kaes Van’t Hof said “this administration better have a plan,” later describing oil and gas as “only industry that actually built itself in the US, manufactures in the U.S., grew jobs in the U.S. and improved the trade deficit … in the last decade.”