Eighteen point four cents. That’s the federal excise tax on a gallon of gasoline — and the sum total of President Trump’s latest answer to a nationwide fuel crisis.

In a phone interview with CBS News on Monday, Trump said he plans to suspend the federal gas tax “for a period of time,” promising to “let it phase back in” when prices fall. The announcement came the same weekend his Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, went on national television and admitted he cannot predict where energy prices are headed — a striking concession from the Cabinet official responsible for American energy policy.

The national average for regular unleaded hit $4.52 per gallon on Sunday, according to AAA — a rise of more than 50 percent since the Iran war began on February 28. Crude oil futures sit above $95 a barrel. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supply remains bottled up behind Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Against that backdrop, 18.4 cents per gallon is a rounding error.

The Math Doesn’t Move the Needle

At current prices, the federal gas tax accounts for roughly 4 percent of what drivers pay at the pump. Even if the full suspension were passed through to consumers — and that assumes retailers don’t pocket the difference — a driver filling a 15-gallon tank would save about $2.76 per fill-up.

The price of gasoline, by contrast, has surged more than 50 percent since the war began.

The structural driver of the crisis is the Hormuz disruption, not taxation. Iran’s continued blockade has choked off the primary shipping lane for Middle Eastern crude, and analysts see no near-term resolution. Trump told CBS that Iran’s latest ceasefire proposal was “a stupid proposal, actually […] done by people that have no clue as to the danger they’re in.” Iranian leadership, according to the Associated Press, wants any deal to address Israel’s strikes on Lebanon and secure safe shipping for its own vessels.

Pressed across multiple Sunday shows about whether prices could reach $5 per gallon, Wright offered no prediction. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” he said simply: “I don’t know the future of gas prices.”

This is the same Cabinet secretary who told CNN’s Jake Tapper in April that “prices have likely peaked and they’ll start going down.” According to the US Energy Information Administration, regular gas has climbed more than 40 cents per gallon since that statement.

Congress Holds the Purse Strings

Suspending the gas tax requires an act of Congress, not an executive order. Republican Senator Josh Hawley said Monday he would introduce legislation to enact the pause, and GOP Representative Anna Paulina Luna plans a House bill this week. Democratic lawmakers had already introduced bills in March to suspend or lower the tax.

Getting anything through Congress takes time — time during which prices could climb further.

Who Pays for the Holiday

The bulk of the federal gas tax — 18.3 cents per gallon — flows into the Highway Trust Fund, which finances road construction, bridge repair, and transit projects nationwide. An additional 0.1 cent per gallon is allocated to the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund. Suspending the tax would drain roughly half a billion dollars per week from that fund, according to CBS News.

That shortfall doesn’t vanish. It either adds to the federal deficit, gets offset by spending cuts elsewhere, or translates into deferred infrastructure maintenance — a cost that compounds over time.

Three states — Utah, Indiana, and Georgia — have already partially or fully suspended their own state-level gas taxes. In Michigan, where combined federal and state motor fuel taxes approach 71 cents per gallon, residents were paying an average of $4.72 on Monday, among the highest in the country.

A Gesture in Search of a Strategy

The gas tax suspension is, at its core, a signal — an attempt to demonstrate that the administration is acting on prices that have become a dominant political liability ahead of midterm elections. Trump separately rejected the idea of an airline bailout despite the collapse of Spirit Airlines earlier this month, telling CBS that “the airlines are doing not badly” and that no formal bailout proposal had been presented.

Energy Secretary Wright’s Sunday media tour offered no new mechanisms for bringing prices down beyond a general commitment to “all measures that can be taken” and a promise that prices will eventually fall once the Strait of Hormuz reopens. He offered no timeline for that.

When the person in charge of American energy policy says he cannot predict the price of energy, voters are left to draw their own conclusions about whether an 18-cent tax holiday is a plan or a press release.

Sources