Trump Rolls Back Fuel Economy Standards His Own Analysis Says Will Burn 2 Billion More Barrels Of Oil, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That American Cars Were Becoming Too Efficient

WASHINGTON. Citing a deep national hunger for fuel inefficiency, the Trump administration on Tuesday finalized the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule, a sweeping rollback of Obama-era standards that will require new cars and trucks to improve their mileage by roughly 1.5 percent each year rather than the previous 5 percent, resolving a long-standing concern that the nation's automobiles were heading toward an emergency surplus of efficiency.

The rule, jointly issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, covers model years 2021 through 2026 and is expected, according to the government's own analysis, to result in Americans burning approximately 2 billion additional barrels of oil and releasing hundreds of millions of additional tons of carbon dioxide, figures the administration presented not as a warning but as a deliverable.

"These cars are going to be safer, and they're going to cost a lot less money," said the President, who has long maintained that lighter regulation produces heavier savings, and who declined to specify which of the rule's documented outcomes (more gasoline purchased, more carbon emitted, or more money spent at the pump) constituted the savings in question.

Officials acknowledged that an earlier draft of the rollback had contained mathematical errors flagged by outside economists, but stressed that the corrected version still arrived at the desired conclusion through what one source within the administration described as "a process of working backward from the answer the President wanted." The same source noted that the rule carried the additional benefit of nullifying California's authority to set stricter standards, ensuring that no state could unilaterally protect its own air.

Environmental groups and several major automakers, who had already struck a separate agreement with California to maintain tougher targets, warned that the rule would raise lifetime fuel costs for consumers and worsen air quality, criticism the administration characterized as the predictable complaint of people who had not yet accepted how much oil there was left to burn.

At press time, the President was admiring a row of new pickup trucks at a dealership lot and noting with satisfaction that, thanks to his administration, none of them would ever again be asked to go quite so far on a single gallon.