What It Means When Trump Declares a National Energy Emergency – Energy News, Top Headlines, Commentaries, Features & Events
January 27, 2025
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Donald Trump made liberal use of emergency powers during his first stint as US president and is employing the same playbook this time around. Just hours after being
Donald Trump made liberal use of emergency powers during his first stint as US president and is employing the same playbook this time around. Just hours after being sworn into office for a second term, he declared that the domestic energy landscape and situation at the border with Mexico constitute national emergencies.
By designating something a “national emergency,” the president can enhance his authority and resources to deal with a crisis, harnessing the special powers written into federal laws and regulations for such situations. The idea is to enable a faster response than Congress can mobilize through legislation — even when, as in Trump’s case, his political party controls both the House of Representatives and Senate.
These emergency powers offer Trump an opportunity to get a head start on his new agenda, sidestepping potential delays resulting from divisions among Republican lawmakers and lengthy federal rulemaking processes.
US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, 2025.Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg
How is Trump using his national emergency powers?
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to use presidential emergency powers to address a variety of issues, notably immigration. Amid the flurry of executive orders he issued on day one of his second term, Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, describing US sovereignty as “under attack” and paving the way for additional troops to be deployed to the region.
This was followed by a declaration of a national energy emergency – a first for the country. President Jimmy Carter only went as far as announcing regional energy crises in response to fossil-fuel shortages in the 1970s, empowering governors in states including Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky to temporarily suspend air pollution controls.
Trump said the emergency was driven by previous US policy creating “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid.” He aims to spur a boom in domestic energy production, which he has said will lower electricity costs and inflation, while enabling the US to better compete with China in developing artificial intelligence, by supplying electricity to power-hungry data centers.
Expanded fossil fuel output is at the heart of these ambitions. Trump has promised the US will “drill, baby, drill” on his watch, even as the country’s crude production is already at a record high and companies are unlikely to boost supply in a global market facing a surplus in 2025. Still, hoping to ramp up output, Trump has invoked emergency powers that can swiftly enable the production of more oil and gas, as well as the construction of pipelines to transport them.
US Oil Production Is Booming
Monthly domestic crude output is already at record levels
Source: US Energy Information Administration
Can Trump use his emergency powers to impose tariffs?
While the Constitution empowers Congress to set import tariffs, lawmakers have partially delegated this authority to the president. Under Section 203 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, the president can implement import tariffs in a time of war or emergency. It offers a faster route than the various trade laws that first require government departments to investigate the competitive and national security landscape.
Prior to Trump’s second term, IEEPA had only been used to impose sanctions on countries, companies and individuals since it went into effect in 1977; no president had tapped the law to impose tariffs.
But it wouldn’t be totally unprecedented to do so. President Richard Nixon applied the predecessor to IEEPA, the Trading with the Enemy Act, to briefly impose an additional 10% tariff on all imports in 1971. The move was designed to force a renegotiation of fixed currency exchange rates established at the end of the Second World War.
Trump did threaten to use IEEPA to place tariffs on imports from Mexico during his first term but ultimately opted not to. At the start of his second term, he once again flirted with these powers. In week one, he cited IEEPA as the basis for a now-nixed 25% tariff on all incoming goods from Colombia, after the Colombian government initially refused to allow US planes carrying deportees to land, potentially complicating Trump’s plan to massively scale up deportations of unauthorized immigrants. It was a preview of how Trump could employ this legal tool to apply tariffs to imports from other countries.
What’s the basis for the president’s emergency powers?
Presidents have long been able to declare national emergencies to access special, temporary powers to handle a crisis, exercising the authority granted to them by either the Constitution or an act of Congress.
Congress set out to check the growth of these emergency executive powers following the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and formalize how they’re invoked. This culminated in the National Emergencies Act of 1976. Under this law, a president can declare a state of emergency by signing a written proclamation — typically in the form of an executive order — transmitting it to Congress and publishing it in the Federal Register, the official journal of the government. Crucially, the president must specify the statutory basis for each of the special powers he plans to use to deal with the crisis.
Declaring a national emergency in this manner allows a president to tap as many as 150 special powers, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, an institute studying law and public policy. These include the ability to seize property, take control of all transportation and communication, and suspend the Clean Air Act, which regulates air pollution.
Beyond the National Emergencies Act, there are other federal laws and regulations that grant the president special powers to respond to crises. The Defense Production Act, for example, passed in 1950, gives the president significant authority to control domestic industries and resources in the interest of national defense.
Who decides what qualifies as an emergency?
There’s a case to be made that it’s entirely up to the president – the National Emergencies Act doesn’t define the term. While an emergency may typically be interpreted as a natural disaster, terrorist attack or other such unforeseen event, it can actually stem from almost any arena, including defense, trade, public health and agriculture.
Presidents have declared emergencies during large crises — including the American Civil War, Great Depression and aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks — as well as smaller-scale ones, such as the 1970 strike by federal postal workers, which crippled national mail delivery.
Most of the emergency declarations have revolved around foreign affairs and have involved such matters as prosecuting a war or imposing economic sanctions against foreign entities deemed to pose a security threat. International concerns explain most of the currently active national emergencies, such as the danger from the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, originally announced by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
On a few occasions, however, presidents have used their emergency powers to further their domestic policy goals, such as Trump’s focus on slashing unauthorized border crossings from Mexico.
How long can an emergency be declared for?
A state of emergency can be terminated by the president at any time. It will naturally expire after a year, unless he chooses to renew it.
Such renewals are common. The national emergency declared by President George W. Bush in 2001 in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks has been continuously extended and remains in place to this day.
Can Congress stop Trump from declaring a national emergency?
During his first term, Trump leaned on an expansive definition of “emergency” to bypass Congress when he wanted something done. But as co-equal branches of the federal government, both the judiciary and legislature can, in theory, restrain the executive when it comes to emergency powers.
Congress can vote to terminate a national emergency. It did so in 2023 to immediately end the emergency declared in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was initiated by the first Trump administration and continued into the presidency of Joe Biden. While Biden opposed a premature termination, he nonetheless signed the bill.
Consensus in Congress is no guarantee of success in ending an emergency. Lawmakers also sought to pull the plug on the national emergency Trump declared at the US-Mexico border back in 2019 — the shortcut through which his administration sought to divert about $7 billion in federal funds toward the construction of a border wall. That marked the first time Congress had voted on a resolution to overturn an emergency declaration since passing the 1976 law that formalized the president’s powers. The bipartisan effort failed because Trump overruled Congress’ vote using his presidential veto.
To avoid such an outcome and be able to overturn an emergency declaration, lawmakers now require a so-called supermajority: support from two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, which can nullify the president’s ability to override a bill. That’s a tall order in today’s hyperpartisan political environment.
Have the courts been able to halt national emergencies?
Litigation is common in response to presidents’ use of emergency powers but has been a mixed bag too. In Trump’s first term, the use of presidential authority to redirect federal funds to build a border wall was initially deemed unlawful by a federal court, before the decision was stayed by the Supreme Court. As the legal appeals and reviews dragged on, the state of emergency was only terminated when President Biden rescinded the order in 2021.
Biden himself was less successful with the Supreme Court when it came to his student loan forgiveness plan. In 2023, a majority of Justices ruled he had overstepped his presidential authority by attempting to use the powers enshrined in the Heroes Act, a law that allows the federal government to provide loan relief to students impacted by a national emergency. The Biden administration had argued this extended to the Covid-19 pandemic, which at the time was still categorized as an emergency.
In that legal case, Biden v. Nebraska, the conservative Justices highlighted concerns around the limits of presidential emergency powers. “Some of the biggest mistakes in the court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive emergency power,” Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh said during the proceedings. “Some of the finest moments in the court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency powers.”
That skepticism could be put to the test if Trump probes the bounds of his executive authority during his second term and legal challenges follow.