Soon after President Joe Biden was pictured visiting former President Jimmy Carter, he began fielding charges that his administration had resurrected the worst of the Georgia Democrat’s time in office.
Not only were there inflation concerns in the wake of massive government spending, but a ransomware attack on a major fuel pipeline delivered Biden’s opponents their latest Carter-themed salvo as drivers spooked by a potential fuel shortage saw prices quickly rise — before filling stations up and down the East Coast went dry.
“The administration has to look like they’re doing something so no one gets on the narrative that they abandoned a company and a pipeline to pirates,” a former senior Trump White House official told the Washington Examiner.
It would be several days before the Biden administration moved to lift a controversial shipping rule used to alleviate fuel shortages in the past, allowing non-U.S. flagged ships to transport fuel between American ports by way of a “temporary and targeted” Jones Act waiver. Past administrations have lifted the rule during natural disasters, using it to supply fuel to Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria or to the Atlantic coast as Hurricane Sandy battered the Northeast.
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Biden delivered remarks on the issue Thursday, seven days into a crisis that has seen gas prices spike to a seven-year high and fuel shortages across the East Coast. He warned that people would not immediately feel the results of a major oil pipeline’s return online.
“Don’t panic,” Biden said, speaking from the White House’s Roosevelt Room before telling drivers to “not get more gas than you need.” To gas stations, Biden warned: “Do not, I repeat do not, try to take advantage of consumers.”
Through its 5,500-mile network that connects Gulf Coast refiners to terminals up the Atlantic coast, Colonial Pipeline supplies nearly half of the East Coast’s fuel needs. Drivers concerned by the outage sat in line for hours at the pump as gas stations across the East Coast began to run dry. It would take nearly a week for the pipeline to restart operations, with the White House using its daily press briefing for days in a row to address the crisis.
“We expect to see a region-by-region return to normalcy beginning this weekend and continuing into next week,” Biden added.
By Friday, Biden had twice narrowly lifted the rule.
The first waiver was narrowly applied to a company’s single tanker, according to Bloomberg. The second, awarded to oil refiner Citgo Petroleum, with the company intending to ship approximately 200,000 barrels of petroleum from Louisiana, according to reports.
Lifting of the rule, which came nearly a week after Colonial alerted the public to its outage, came too late, according to a former senior Trump administration official, the process hamstrung by a legislative change that made more burdensome the process of waiving the rule.
Calling the initial waiver a “political ruse,” this former official said it was so narrowly crafted as to have only minimal effect.
“Politically engineering the waiver so that it checks the box while being so infinitesimally narrow that the maritime special interests are not incensed was quite the Kabuki theater move,” the source said.
Waivers in recent years have typically covered a period of time, a broader application than the waivers issued last week.
The former Trump administration official said doing so allowed the Biden administration to make a high-visibility move without forfeiting political capital.
Colonial said it had begun the process of restarting its operations hours before the waiver had been publicly declared.
The former Trump-era official said Colonial’s announcement appeared to have been made “under crushing political pressure” and that the company’s pronouncement of “resumed operations” said little about actual pipeline flow.
Biden’s political opponents seized on the opening.
“Six months ago, America was energy-independent. Now we have gas lines,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted Wednesday. “President Biden is well on his way to creating another Jimmy Carter economy.”
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, also a Republican, joined the fray, billing the Democratic chief executive as “the new Jimmy Carter.”
But the former senior official said that Congress holds responsibility for restricting the powers of the Defense Department chief to issue a waiver in an emergency.
“Previously, a waiver could have been issued immediately with a single signature,” the defense secretary’s, but this ended when the U.S. Senate voted in January to override former President Donald Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021, this person said.
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Not everyone views the change as a burdensome obstruction, however.
“If there’s sufficient capacity, nothing really changes,” said Charlie Papavizas, chairman of the Winston & Strawn law firm’s maritime practice group. “Why would you go to the foreign capacity? It’s a more express check in the system that the government is supposed to double check the U.S. market.”
By midday Monday, shortages had begun to ease. In North Carolina, which recorded 74.9% of gas stations out of fuel at the peak of the outage, the total had shrunk to 50.1%, according to GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan. In the Washington area Monday, 69% of stations were dry, up 2% from an earlier tally but down from the 88% total recorded Sunday.
