President Biden will announce on Wednesday that he is releasing 15 million more barrels of fuel from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The move is aimed at easing gas prices three weeks before voters anxious over rising costs head to the polls as Democrats have been battered by GOP attacks on the economy.
Biden and the Democrats face strong headwinds in the upcoming midterm elections, and Republicans have zeroed in on inflation and rising costs as they try to persuade voters that Biden’s economic policies are hurting their pocketbooks.
Polls regularly show that the economy and the cost of living are at the top of voters’ concerns by a wide margin.
Biden has largely tried to pin those cost increases on Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and the fuel shortages and supply disruptions that followed.
The president has repeatedly called the cost increases “Putin’s price hike,” while working on other measures to bring down prices at the pump.
Prominent among those has been the release of batches of oil from the strategic reserve, which was created to protect the United States from oil shortages that affect its national security.
The White House has released roughly 165 million barrels of oil from the reserve since announcing a spring drawdown of as many as 180 million barrels, the largest-ever release from the reserve.
This month, OPEC Plus, a coalition of oil-producing nations led by Russia and Saudi Arabia, announced that it will slash oil production by 2 million barrels per day, threatening further price increases in countries already grappling with high costs.
The move was especially frustrating to the White House since Biden made a controversial visit to Saudi Arabia in July in an effort to bolster relations.
Biden has also lashed out at energy companies that he said have not lowered prices at the pump as oil prices have gone down.
An administration official who spoke to reporters on background ahead of Biden’s announcement said those corporations’ actions are “adding 60 cents to the average gallon of gas, and have kept pump prices higher than they would be otherwise.”
