Joe Biden has been out of office for 18 months but our country is continuing to experience the negative effects of his failed presidency. Like our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for instance.
The reserve exists for one reason: national emergencies. Not midterm elections. Not polling numbers. Not gas price optics in October. Emergencies. The kind where supply chains collapse, conflict cuts off oil flows, and America needs a buffer between normal life and a genuine crisis.
Joe Biden used it as a campaign tool. Then left it broken.
The SPR is now at a 43-year low. Biden drained 180 million barrels before the 2022 midterms — a decision his own energy officials privately acknowledged was designed to “buy down political risk,” not respond to any actual supply emergency. Then he never refilled it. And now it gets worse.
Kyle Haustveit, the Trump administration’s current Undersecretary of Energy now overseeing the SPR, just revealed something that should make every American furious: the Biden administration left one of the four SPR sites completely inoperable. Not just depleted. Not just undermaintained. Non-functional.
? WTF?! It's been exposed that the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been DESTROYED by the Biden admin, with one site left "INOPERABLE," forcing President Trump to clean up the mess and surge investments to fix everything
"The previous administration also left one of the four… pic.twitter.com/DZba0zLd2n
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 20, 2026
Here’s how they managed it. The Biden team bought equipment specifically to repair that site. Then they left the equipment sitting on the surface, uninstalled, exposed to the elements. By the time Trump’s team arrived, the weather had degraded the equipment to the point where it can no longer be used. Completely wasted taxpayer dollars on repair equipment they never bothered to install — for a national security asset they were simultaneously draining for political purposes.
“They also failed to maintain some of the sites,” Haustveit added. His assessment: the Biden administration had no long-term maintenance plan whatsoever. No strategy for keeping the reserve functional. No system for ensuring that what was being depleted could be restored. Just political calculations about gas prices and election cycles, dressed up as emergency management.
Let’s be direct about what this means in the current moment. The Trump administration is now releasing oil from the SPR as part of a coordinated IEA response to stabilize global energy markets disrupted by the Iran conflict — which is exactly the kind of legitimate emergency the reserve was designed for. But the reserve is already at a 43-year low because Biden drew it down for illegitimate reasons. And one of four sites can’t even operate because Biden’s team bought the repair equipment, left it outside, and walked away.
Trump’s team is doing this right — replacing every barrel released with more through a swap program, ensuring the reserve doesn’t deplete further. They’re managing the asset responsibly because they understand it’s a national security tool, not a polling instrument.
Biden understood it as the latter. The consequences of that misunderstanding are now sitting in the energy department’s damage assessment, one inoperable site at a time.
The reserve exists to protect America when things go wrong. Biden weakened it when things were going wrong for him politically. Now Trump is managing an active military conflict with a depleted, partially broken emergency buffer that should be full.
That is the Biden energy legacy. In full.
