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The top Senate Democrat wants President Donald Trump to tap the nation’s oil stockpile as fuel prices skyrocket, years after blocking his attempt to replenish the supply when prices were low.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called on Trump to unleash reserve barrels of oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as oil prices spike amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Schumer argued in a statement that the reserve “exists for moments exactly like this.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., during a news conference following Senate Democrat policy luncheons at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 3, 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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“When wars and global crises disrupt energy markets, the United States has the ability to act, but President Trump and his administration are refusing to do so,” Schumer said. “Trump should release oil from the SPR now to stabilize markets, bring prices down, and stop the price shock that American families are already feeling thanks to his reckless war.”
During his first term, Trump wanted to use about $3 billion from a colossal COVID-19 stimulus package making its way through Congress to fill the reserve, but the move was promptly rejected by Schumer and congressional Democrats, who panned it as a “bailout” for the oil industry.
The price per barrel at the time was roughly $29, according to WTI Crude Oil. Now, oil has eclipsed $110 per barrel over the weekend for the first time since 2022.
Though the SPR has capacity for over 700 million barrels of crude oil, the reserve currently has far less.
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President Joe Biden speaks during the Greek Independence Day in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 4, 2024. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)
That’s because under former President Joe Biden, it was tapped twice — once to relieve soaring fuel prices as the nation still grappled with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, and another time to combat increased energy costs at the onset of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
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. Schumer supported both instances when Biden opened the nation’s oil reserves but, years prior, blocked Trump from building up the stockpile toward the end of his first term.
“Senator Schumer championed Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, which raised energy costs, threatened our national security, and stifled American energy independence,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Digital in a statement. “President Trump has been unleashing American energy dominance since day one, and now, American oil and gas production is at record highs.”
GAS PRICES COULD JUMP AS MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS THREATEN GLOBAL OIL SUPPLY
A timelapse video shows marine traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz. (Kpler/Marine Traffic)
Schumer lauded Biden’s first move to tap into the SPR in 2021, arguing that it provided “much-needed temporary relief at the pump.”
“Of course, the only long-term solution to rising gas prices is to continue our march to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels and create a robust green energy economy,” he said at the time.
And toward the end of Biden’s presidency, his administration did buy back barrels of oil to refill the reserves, which Schumer did not object to.
Fast-forward, and the price per barrel of oil has launched into the stratosphere since Trump’s Operation Epic Fury and Iran’s response to put the Strait of Hormuz — a key route ferrying barrels around the globe — into a chokehold.
For now, the administration has no public plans to tap into the reserve as Americans undergo sticker shock at the pump.
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Energy Secretary Chris Wright argued that the best way to lower prices was to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by neutralizing Iran’s ability to target oil tankers.
Wright told over the weekend that the disruption would last for “weeks, certainly not months.”
“We believe this is a small price to pay to get to a world where energy prices will return back to where they were,” Wright said. “Iran will finally be defanged, and now you can see more investment, more free flow of trade, and less ability to threaten energy supplies.”
