On the campaign trail, President Trump promised to cut Americans' energy bills in half — cheaper gasoline, cheaper electricity. He also said he'd "unleash" American energy production, often repeating the catchphrase "Drill, baby, drill."
One year in, the price of gasoline is down about 20%. But the U.S. oil industry is definitely not drilling, baby, drilling. The price of oil is just too low to justify more of it — although within the last year, companies have won major lobbying victories that soothe that sting. Meanwhile, electricity costs are rising and expected to rise more.
Cheap gasoline: check
The U.S. benchmark price for oil is down about 20% from where it was a year ago, and the average retail gasoline price — the price drivers pay at the pump — is down nearly 10%.
Now, presidents — whoever they are — do not get to decide the price of gasoline. The price of crude oil is the biggest factor, and crude prices are set in a complex global marketplace that responds to a number of factors.
In the past year, cheaper crude has been largely driven by a global oversupply of oil, which in turn was largely driven by a series of decisions by the oil cartel OPEC+. The cartel repeatedly put more barrels on the market, depressing global prices but seizing more market share for its members.
However, Dan Pickering, the chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners, says the president also put significant pressure on OPEC to bring down global crude prices. As a result, he gives Trump partial credit for today's low prices.
"I think if we look at oil down 20% in 2025, that you have to say that political dynamics drove at least half of that," he says. "And as we go into 2026, I think those dynamics will still be at play."
Moving forward, the president's push to produce more oil from Venezuela could also help keep global crude prices lower for longer — if he persuades companies to invest.
Analysts with the gas prices app GasBuddy found that U.S. households spent, on average, $177 less on gasoline in 2025 than 2024, thanks to lower prices, and they predict that expenditures will continue to fall in 2026, saving Americans a collective $11 billion next year.
Drill, baby, drill? Not so much.
Those lower oil prices are exactly why "Drill, baby, drill" didn't happen.
The number of active drilling rigs in the U.S., the largest oil producer in the world, has dropped by more than 6% year-over-year, at last count. That means fewer new wells are being drilled. And that's true even as the Trump administration has made it easier for companies to start new projects, including by making more federal lands and waters available for leases.
With U.S. oil prices under $60 a barrel and the global market generally oversupplied with crude, it's just not profitable for companies to drill a bunch of new wells right now.
The Trump administration has many close allies in the U.S. oil industry. But this is a perennial point of disagreement between them: The president loves cheap oil, while companies would prefer prices to be higher than they are today.
This disagreement was actually called out by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — a former fracking executive. Speaking to CBS News' Face the Nation this month, he called President Trump "no helper to the oil and gas industry" because "he's driven down the price of oil."
It's true that many U.S. oil workers wince every time the president talks about $50 crude or pushes for more production from OPEC. But it's not quite fair to call the administration "no helper."
The American Petroleum Institute, or API, is the most powerful lobbying arm of the U.S. oil and gas industry. Before Trump was reelected, the group laid out a dozen different policy priorities — a wish list. Tax policy changes that would help oil companies; more access to drilling in the Gulf; a boost in exports of liquefied natural gas; the repeal of requirements for cleaner and more efficient cars, which would have pushed down oil demand over time; the elimination of a fee for releasing planet-warming methane.
"By our count, every single one of them was completed in 2025, with the exception of legislative permitting reform," Mike Sommers, the president and CEO of API, said on a recent call with reporters. ("Permitting reform" refers to a series of changes to federal laws that would make it easier for companies to build things like pipelines and other large projects that often face local opposition. It's been a hot topic in Congress for years.)
Sommers says U.S. companies can weather low oil prices in the short term and make business decisions with an eye toward the future.
And in the long term, the administration's policy changes support higher oil demand for years to come by doing things like slowing down the shift toward electric vehicles, while also cutting the costs of oil production, including by easing environmental rules.
Electricity costs are rising
Electricity prices have been increasing for years now, and 2025 was more of the same.
"Across most states and in most markets, what we see is that prices have gone up," says Helen Kou, an analyst with BloombergNEF.
Based on trends in wholesale power markets — where your local electric company buys its power, an expense they pass on to you — that's likely to continue. Kou said that in New York and New England, wholesale prices are up more than 60%, and in the mid-Atlantic they're up 45%.
"Almost 1 in 3 households, or over 80 million Americans, are struggling to pay their utility bills," says Charles Hua, who runs Powerlines, a national energy consumer education nonprofit that encourages people to get more involved in their public utility commissions.
Why are costs going up? Hua points to three primary reasons: an aging power grid, the cost of natural disasters, and higher fuel costs, especially natural gas.
Kou says that for 2025, natural gas prices were the clear driver of increases. While oil and gasoline are cheap, natural gas — which is used for home heating and power plants — has gone up more than 50% from last year's annual average. U.S. exports of natural gas have increased (one of API's requests), and sending more natural gas overseas means less is available domestically.
Natural gas prices have been up and down over the past few years. They spiked in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. And they were unusually cheap in 2024 before rising again in 2025. While they're far from record highs, the increase has been enough to significantly shift electricity markets.
These causes are complex and date back years before Trump's return to office. But experts say the Trump administration's electricity policy has not focused on lowering natural gas costs, improving the grid or mitigating the effects of natural disasters. Instead, it has aligned with his goal of reversing Biden-era climate policies. The White House has ordered coal-powered power plants to stay open for longer. Those power plants are typically expensive to operate, raising concerns about prices. Kou says keeping them online could hypothetically help meet rising demand, but only if those plants are located where demand is growing.
The administration is also investing in nuclear power — that, too, could potentially help with costs, but only in the long term, Kou says, because nuclear plants take so long to approve and build.
Some of the administration's moves could actually increase electricity bills in the future.
Large solar and wind projects provide more cost-competitive energy than natural gas, nuclear and coal projects, according to financial services firm Lazard. But the Trump administration has ended federal tax credits for solar and wind projects early, and canceled more than $13 billion in funds for green energy projects
Trump has also said he won't permit any new wind projects, and the administration has attempted to stop offshore wind projects that are already under construction, leading to court battles. That's been criticized not just by renewable energy advocates, but by many business groups, because it creates uncertainty and discourages investments in projects that could be supplying more energy into the grid.
"As a general matter, the thing that you can do that most clearly helps reduce prices is to remove barriers to new energy investment," says James Coleman, a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "And the thing that basically just increases prices is increasing uncertainty or barriers to energy."
The administration is also rolling back efficiency standards for appliances. Those standards actually cut consumer bills by reducing energy use, Hua notes.
Meanwhile, some things that could meaningfully cut costs have simply not been prioritized by this administration. "There are solutions that are available today that can be put on the grid that would meaningfully resolve a lot of these solutions," Hua says, pointing to technologies that allow more power to be moved on the existing grid, or better match supply and demand. "It doesn't solve everything, but it provides some immediate relief … and that just has not been as much of a focus" for the Trump administration, he says.
Lately, President Trump has been talking about making sure that AI data centers pay their fair share for electricity costs. Hua says there is a genuine opportunity to cut energy bills for ordinary Americans as data center demand for electricity goes up, depending on how costs are spread out.
But for now, the Trump administration's pledge to cut utility bills remains an unmet promise.
NPR's Michael Copley and Julia Simon contributed to this report.
Copyright 2026 NPR
