by Tristan Abbey
If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. While the terrain is familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.
Witness the liquefied natural gas export fiasco, in which the White House, by “pausing” most up-to-date permits, catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies right into the heart of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be allowed is compact.) The Department of Energy says a multi-factor impact study, due in early 2025, is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.
With a certain conception of executive power, a second-term Trump administration should easily end this national embarrassment by pressing the “Resume” button on the authorization process. However, as analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggest, simply putting the study aside may constitute a basis, however questionable, for future legal proceedings. In the up-to-date administrative state, it is easier to open the procedural door to delays than to close them.
Previous administrations have already published macroeconomic impact analyzes on U.S. LNG exports. The Obama administration, for example, paused permitting until the first study was released in December 2012—curious timing, given the election the previous month and the actual end of the study in July of that year. Virtually every scenario in every study, including additional analysis conducted in 2015 and 2018, showed net benefits.
It’s possible that reopening Obama’s playbook was Team Biden’s plan all along. After all, Secretary Granholm did not order a up-to-date study in 2021, nor in 2022, nor in 2023. By waiting this long, DOE can now claim that its cumulative authorization volume is approaching the upper end of the range that the 2018 study examined . Under the duplicity theory, approvals resume for Biden’s second term as soon as the study is released and the election is over.
But maybe the administration doesn’t even have a plan. It may be elementary incompetence. Gas exports offend the sensitivities of the Democratic base, but Appalachian swing states reap the economic benefits and European allies desperately want to distance themselves from Russian energy. Political operators will try in vain to triangulate, even if it is impossible. We can imagine them now, hunched over the asphalt between the West Wing and the Eisenhower Building, desperately chalking angles with a compass and a ruler.
More ominously, Energy Secretary Granholm may be laying the groundwork for a Kafkaesque application process designed to punish an industry that this administration has only pretended to tolerate. The fact that DOE’s approval authority is now housed in the Office of Sustainable Resources is suggestive, as is the FY 2025 budget request to triple programmatic funding for export permits, primarily in the form of “projected environmental studies and reviews.”
In any case, undoing what the Biden team has done will require diligent work by the presumptive second-term Trump administration. A eternal end to the matter will require legislative action, primarily an amendment to the Natural Gas Act signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. Meanwhile, “death by science” cuts both ways.
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Tristan Abbey is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analysis. Previously, he worked as a staffer at the White House and the US Senate.
“Joe Biden” photo by President Joe Biden. Cover photo “Power Plant” by Steven Baltakatei Sandoval CC BY-SA 4.0.
