Trump Wields the Defense Production Act to Promote Fossil Fuels. It Could Instead Be Used to Promote All-of-the-Above Energy Abundance.
March 24, 2026
By Joel Dodge and Todd N. Tucker
On March 13, the Department of Energy (DOE) invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to order Sable Offshore Corporation, a Houston-based offshore oil and gas operation, to immediately resume pumping and transportation in California, overriding state regulators who had kept the pipeline offline after a 2015 oil spill. That order came days after the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion providing legal backing for the government to require the oilfield’s corporate lessee to operate and override state law.
The DPA is one of the federal government’s most powerful and flexible industrial policy tools. Together and separately we have written about the law, including how it could be used to fight COVID-19, unstick broken supply chains, preempt state right-to-work laws that keep workers from unionizing, bolster US competitiveness with China, build publicly owned cloud computing, reduce inflation, and promote geographic resilience. Trump’s use of the DPA appears to be a handout to a longtime campaign donor in an attempt to lessen the blow of an energy shock his administration created by attacking Iran. In light of these actions, reasonable people might think the DPA is no longer serving its purpose and should be abandoned. We argue this would be a short-sighted mistake, given the likely severity of the crises the US will soon face, including but not limited to energy costs and securing energy independence.
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