Biden’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve down sharply after Dems shut down Trump refill effort

US emergency oil stock dropped from over 638 million barrels to about 416 million, as Biden released reserves to ease gas prices

Tyler Olson / FOXBusiness

Former President Donald Trump tried to add 77 million barrels of oil to the nation's emergency cache in early 2020 — when prices were under $20 per barrel — but was blocked by congressional Democrats. 

Two years later, President Biden has drained more than a third of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to help quell gas prices, raising concerns about U.S. readiness for a disaster or a war. That's leading some experts to say that preventing Trump's planned oil purchase, when oil was as low as $15 to $20, may have been a mistake. 

"It would have meant we would have almost 100 million barrels extra in the reserve at a price $50-$60 less a barrel that we could have sold," Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital. Mills also works at the Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. 

"We would have made billions of dollars and not degraded our strategic position," Mills continued. "We would have been over-strategically...Read more and see video here.