GOP Energy Bills Are Geared Towards Personal Enrichment

Republican lawmakers who wrote bills that were wrapped into the H.R. 1 energy package own stock in Marathon Oil, Chevron, and family-held oil and gas drilling operations.

by David Moore, Sludge

Several Republican House members who sponsored energy deregulation bills that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has included in his debt ceiling bill could personally profit if McCarthy’s package is signed into law.

McCarthy has included H.R. 1, titled the Lower Energy Costs Act, in his debt ceiling proposal, which is expected to be voted on by the House later this week. The bill consists of dozens of measures put forth by House Republicans that would expand oil and gas drilling on public lands, repeal clean energy investments passed into law last year, undo a methane fee set to apply to energy facilities, and speed up exports of liquid natural gas, among other things.

Front view, Capitol dome building at night, Washington DC, USA. Illuminated Home of Congress and Capitol Hill. Forex graph hologram.

Nearly a dozen of the House GOP members who introduced legislation that is now in H.R. 1 and McCarthy’s debt ceiling bill own fossil fuel industry assets in their household portfolios, with several of the bills’ authors holding hundreds of thousands of dollars worth and one holding millions of dollars in oil wells.

If provisions of H.R. 1 are signed into law as part of a debt ceiling agreement, fossil fuel companies could benefit through limited environmental reviews, waivers issued for energy facilities, and more. As the House Energy and Commerce Committee was developing the bill, the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, the American Petroleum Association (API), sent a letter to the committee’s leaders expressing its support for the individual bills that were being rolled into it, and the group applauded the House in March for passing the bill. API represents many of the companies in whose stocks the H.R. 1 bill sponsors are invested.