A top Senate Republican wants answers on why the Biden administration drained the nation’s oil stockpile but did little to replenish it.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., charged that decisions under President Joe Biden to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) could have a ripple effect as the U.S. continues its war with Iran and as the Iranian government continues its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
Cotton, in a letter first obtained by Fox News Digital to Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, charged that the Biden administration released 180 million barrels from the nation’s reserves in 2022 ‘to suppress gas prices ahead of the midterm elections.’
‘That decision drained the reserve to a 40-year low,’ Cotton wrote. ‘The decision to drain the SPR was not a response to a supply emergency; it was a deliberate political act designed to protect Democrats from the consequences of their own failed energy policies.’
Biden tapped the reserve twice — once in 2021 to relieve soaring fuel prices as the nation still grappled with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and again the following year to combat increased energy costs at the onset of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The SPR has capacity for over 700 million barrels of crude oil, but currently, the reserve has far less following the drawdown under the previous administration.
At the end of Biden’s term, the reserve had about 415 million barrels of crude on hand, according to data from the Department of Energy.
Cotton said that it wasn’t ‘the first time Democrats undermined the reserve’ and noted that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and congressional Democrats blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to refill the SPR in 2020, when barrels were cheap, with $3 billion from a colossal COVID-19 stimulus package moving through Congress.
He also said that in 2021, Biden signed an executive order that halted new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore, which Cotton charged ‘constrained domestic production while the administration was draining the reserve.’
Cotton demanded that Wright answer how blocking the $3 billion oil purchase and halting oil and gas leases impacted the nation’s overall domestic supplies that could have been used to replenish the SPR.
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are demanding that Trump tap into the SPR after oil prices spiked to four-year highs over the weekend as the war in Iran intensifies.
Schumer said that the reserve ‘exists for moments exactly like this.’
‘The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most important oil transit choke point, with roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption moving through it in recent years,’ Cotton said. ‘That is precisely why the SPR must be treated as a strategic national security asset, not a political tool.’