Trump Pumps Up the Gas

National Review Online

Thursday, December 04, 2025

 

Gas-powered cars are okay again.

 

On Wednesday, President Trump announced that his administration is ditching fuel-efficiency rules on new automobiles imposed by Joe Biden that sought to drive gas-powered cars off the road over the next several years. Carmakers will now be free to make the vehicles that consumers wish to purchase, not merely the electric ones the previous administration tried to foist upon them.

 

As a famous admirer of institutions, Biden elected not to go to Congress to put his electric-vehicle mandate into law, knowing it could never pass the representative branch of government because phasing out gas-powered cars by force was never a winning proposition among the U.S. electorate. Instead, Biden exploited a little-known regulatory power enacted a full two decades before the first commercial EV was released.

 

The tool Biden landed on was the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, commonly referred to as CAFE standards, which establish minimum fuel-efficiency thresholds for new automobiles. Created by Congress during the energy crisis of the 1970s, CAFE standards were designed to decrease gasoline usage over time. Unfortunately, the statute delegated the power to set the specific mileage standards to the Transportation Department for future presidents to abuse.

 

The standards for vehicles remained flat for decades at 27.5 miles per gallon for passenger cars and just over 20 MPG for light trucks, which include extremely popular car models such as pickups and SUVs. The Obama administration began upping the standards in the early 2010s, truncating consumer choice but keeping requirements reasonable enough for most automakers to comply.

 

In 2024, however, the Biden administration issued a rule to radically increase CAFE standards so that, by 2031, the government would mandate a fuel economy of 65.1 MPG for passenger cars and 45.2 for light trucks. As the administration fully recognized, there was no feasible way for any gas-powered cars to comply with these dictates.

 

CAFE standards apply fleetwide, however, so automakers needed only to meet the fuel economy standards on average across all their new vehicle sales. They could continue to produce gas-powered cars so long as they also produced enough EVs with near-infinite fuel economy to balance them out.

 

In practice, this meant that carmakers would be compelled to sell a certain (very high) number of EVs as a percentage of their total sales. By the same token, only a much lower percentage of their sales could be of gas-powered cars.

 

This regulatory sleight of hand gave both the Biden administration and the media leeway to pretend the tightened CAFE standards weren’t an EV mandate in disguise. Americans would be free to purchase any car they pleased — but only if most of them chose to buy electric ones. Otherwise, the gas-powered vehicles they sought could never be manufactured. As Henry Ford once said of the Model T, “The customer can have any color he wants, as long as it’s black.”

 

Biden paired his preposterous fuel economy rules with an even more draconian requirement, directing the EPA to force two-thirds of cars to have zero tailpipe emissions by 2032. The only way for that to happen was for two-thirds of cars to be EVs. Thankfully, Trump announced on Wednesday that he plans to cancel this rule as well.

 

As for the CAFE standards, the reversal of Biden-era rules should be considered a step toward total abolition. The rationale for their creation — a worldwide energy shortage — no longer exists. Defenders point to continued consumer savings from higher fuel economies, allowing drivers to purchase less gasoline. But Americans are more than capable of assessing the mileage of new cars when they buy them, while weighing it against other factors such as vehicle size and price. Car buyers need not be protected from their own decisions by a government that thinks it knows what’s better for them.

 

One of the best under-covered provisions of this year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the elimination of financial penalties for automakers that fail to meet CAFE standards. Congress should finish the job by repealing the standards entirely, granting them the same fate as the ill-conceived $7,500 EV subsidy. If not, Trump might get just as creative as Biden was by setting the standards at zero.

 

Get whatever car you want, whether it be gas-powered or electric. At long last, the federal government doesn’t care.