“The lawyer will have a live day,” Hathaway said, now serving as a director of Good Government Lawyers, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy.

It is obvious that these new rules are just gifts for extraction industries such as drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects (both governments repeatedly attacked, withdrawing offshore wind leases and ordering construction to be stopped in projects already underway – obviously no list of projects allowed to accelerate the schedule. But ironically, these orders only contribute to the increasingly uncertain environment for fossil fuel producers provided by the new Trump administration.

Even before the chaos caused by Liberation Day, Big Oil faced potential valuations that could help the election of the president. Although the shale oil boom in the early 2010s allowed executives to increase production, the strategy led to too much supply, with prices per barrel falling during the first Trump administration. Investors have become more cautious about unrestrained production after prices have dropped during the pandemic.

"It's not government regulations that limit U.S. production growth. It's Wall Street," said Clayton Seigle, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The industry was fueled by the global energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the early 2020s, but investors have been paying attention to prices. Despite President Joe Biden's climate focus, the U.S. oil and gas industry became the world's largest crude oil producer in 2023, reaching a record 13.4 million barrels per day at the end of last year. The challenges faced by the Trump administration will be the president's goal to unlock his "energy advantage." After all, Trump said he hopes oil will drop to $50 a barrel, a price that is too low to make a profit for the industry.

Each quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas releases regional reports on the state of the oil and gas industry in Texas and Louisiana, including anonymous survey responses from executives. Analysts were shocked by these comments that were first investigated this year, which was sulfuric acid to the White House.

"The keywords that describe 2025 so far are 'uncertainty', and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty," said an anonymous executive. "This uncertainty is caused by a contradictory message from the new government. It is impossible to have 'U.S. energy advantages' and $50 per barrel of oil; these two statements are contradictory."

Another wrote: "'Diamond, baby, diamond' is not just a mythical and populist rally crying."

Trump continues to distribute suspicious gifts to the industry. On Thursday, the Interior Department announced it had changed some policies around offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which could increase production in the Gulf by as much as 100,000 barrels per day, according to the agency. Meanwhile, the Ministry of the Interior has also reportedly put together a list of fossil fuel deposits planned to be opened for production on public land.