Remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before the Petroleum Club of Houston | U.S. Department of the Treasury
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Remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before the Petroleum Club of Houston
June 12, 2026
Good morning. Thank you to the Petroleum Club of Houston for welcoming me today.
One of the great privileges of my role as Treasury Secretary is the chance to visit different parts of the country. Whenever I travel, one of my priorities is meeting with local community leaders like all of you. But I also value the chance to take measure of the economic conditions in which you operate. And there are few places where policy outcomes are more pronounced than in the two states I’ve visited in recent weeks.
In California, I saw firsthand what years of failed governance looks like: a tax system that is hostile to ambition. A regulatory state that smothers enterprise. An economic climate indifferent to consequence.
Here in Texas, meanwhile, the contrast is so striking that it begins to feel like a tale of two states.
Every five minutes, a taxpayer moves here as two flee from California.
Last year, California led the nation in layoffs as Texas led in job gains.
And last week, you claimed its crown as home to the most Fortune 500 companies in America.
Now, when capital, companies, and residents all move in the same direction, I believe that is less a trend than a verdict. Texas has become America’s center of gravity because it is fostering the conditions for families and businesses to flourish. Your prosperity is the natural result of your principles. And, in many ways, Texas embodies the best of what President Trump is building nationally as we place American workers, manufacturers, and families back at the core of our policies where they belong.
For the third consecutive month, job growth has shattered expectations. Private sector employment is now up more than 900,000 since Inauguration Day. Real GDP has risen 2.6 percent over the past four quarters as companies invest trillions of dollars to build, expand, and hire here at home.
I often describe this Administration’s economic strategy as resting on three distinct but mutually reinforcing pillars: tax, trade, and deregulation. Already, this agenda is bearing fruit.
But beneath each of our priorities, indeed every dimension of our economic life, is a base layer that binds each of them: energy dominance. And here, too, we see a tale of two states.
For much of the twentieth century, California was a cornerstone of our nation’s energy supply. But through a series of deleterious policy decisions, the state has engineered its own scarcity. Unlike most of America, California now depends on foreign oil. In fact, its foreign oil imports have tripled over the last twenty years. Its output has plummeted by more than 75 percent. Half of its refineries have vanished. And California now produces less than 5 percent as much as Texas as it works to phase out its oil extraction entirely.
Of course, both states were endowed with a bounty of energy resources. But one chose to develop those resources while the other chose to restrict them. If California is a lesson in the costs of constraint, then Texas is a reminder that prosperity follows production. And that is precisely why President Trump led an energy revolution in his first term—and then picked up right where he left off on his first day.
This Administration has opened hundreds of millions of acres to oil and gas production. We’ve approved 6,000 new drilling permits. Withdrawn from restrictive global agreements. And slashed trillions in regulatory costs.
The previous administration spent four years lecturing America’s energy producers about what you shouldn’t do. Over the past sixteen months, you have shown the country what you can.
The United States is now the world’s largest producer and exporter of petroleum. In fact, we’ve never produced or exported so much energy. And we expect natural gas production to continue reaching record highs this year and next as President Trump delivers on his promise to “Drill, baby, drill!”—and now “Build, baby, build!” by reducing the federal approval timeline for new energy and construction projects from years to months. Under this President, no other country can provide the tax certainty, regulatory certainty, and, most of all, the energy certainty that the United States can.
Now, each of these gains matter on their own merit. But taken together, they are transformative, because the strength of America’s energy sector extends well beyond it.
As I alluded to earlier, energy is more than one input among many. It is the base layer of all economic activity and the fuel of human flourishing.
Perhaps that is why, long before the first drop of oil flowed from the Permian Basin, Daniel Webster described the duty to “develop the resources of our land” and to “call forth its powers.”
The weight of history then affirmed that America’s natural resources are not incidental to our prosperity, but integral to its expansion.
Today, energy-intensive industries contribute trillions to our GDP. And the sectors that are poised to define our future will depend on it no less than those that built our past. By 2040, the AI boom is expected to increase energy demand in the United States by fifty percent. Meanwhile, as manufacturing roars back amid the greatest reshoring wave in modern history, our industrial power consumption may grow by as much as three percent annually.
That is why the doctrine of energy dominance occupies a place of primacy in the Trump economic agenda.
The AI race may be accelerated by the elegance of our code, but it will be won by the abundance of our energy. Likewise, the factory activity sparked by the trade actions we’ve taken to reshore producers from abroad must be sustained by the resources we unleash here at home.
In short, under President Trump, the United States will no longer be forced to choose between our industrial and technological might and the resources required to maintain it. We are bringing both back into alignment.
Of course, more than strengthen an economy, energy abundance also secures a nation. Economic security is national security.
For years, we watched adherents of misguided climate orthodoxy wage a regulatory war on our natural resources. All the while, hostile actors worked to weaponize our reliance on foreign energy.
Whereas Biden dressed American dependence in the dogma of sustainability, President Trump recognizes that energy security is an increasingly crucial theater of global competition, and in that theater, dominance begets resilience. As I stated recently at the Reagan Library, the nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship, or refine its needs gradually cedes its strength—and its sovereignty—to others. Indeed, the nation that cannot reliably produce its energy places itself at the mercy of those that can. That is a dangerous dependency for any country. It is an unacceptable one for the United States.
As President Trump corrects vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront, we have seen how his pro-energy agenda is helping the United States to withstand recent shocks from Iran. As the Boston Fed affirmed last week, our domestic production has significantly blunted the economic impact of energy-price fluctuations. No foreign power can now so fundamentally disrupt our economy with the stroke of a pen.
Every barrel we produce diminishes the leverage that our adversaries once derived from our dependence. And every acre we unleash demonstrates the value that we bring to allies who seek to source their energy from a reliable supply.
For example, under the previous administration, Europe was stuck in a terribly recursive loop in which they financed a war against themselves by buying Russian oil. In President Trump’s first year back in office, the EU imported a record fifty-seven percent of its LNG from the United States and Asian nations signed over $56 billion in new energy deals. As it turns out, the demand for American energy was there all along. We just needed an administration willing to meet it.
And that, to its core, is what the doctrine of energy dominance represents. Policy decisions like those that have decimated California’s economy and energy sector show decline to be a choice. But here in Texas, you have demonstrated that abundance can be one, too.
For 250 years, Americans have believed that the wealth—and sovereignty—of a nation begins in the ground beneath it.
Now, the question before us is whether we will summon that spirit anew.
Whether we will rebuild capacity where constraint took hold.
Whether we will restore resilience where dependence took root.
Whether America will lead as we always have.
President Trump’s agenda reflects the abiding truth that no nation that relinquishes command of its resources will long retain command of its future.
And today, after years in which that truth was ignored by those who should have known better, energy dominance is back. The age of managed decline is over. We are choosing abundance over scarcity. And as we work to unleash American energy, Texas will go from holding the line to leading the charge.
Thank you all. I now look forward to discussing these issues further with you in conversation.
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