The Republican party’s seizure of the Senate and House of Representatives has ended a congressional investigation into big oil just when it is needed most, according to the leader of the inquiry.
“The fossil fuel industry is running perhaps the biggest campaign of disinformation and political interference in American history and they’re backing it up with immense amounts of political spending,” said the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “The consequences in the White House are enormous and having a huge effect … but people aren’t aware.”
Fossil fuel interests poured a historic $96m into the re-election campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated political action committees in 2023 and 2024, and spent another $243m lobbying Congress. During his first weeks in office, Trump rolled out a spate of pro-fossil fuel policies, while congressional Republicans attacked regulations on the oil and gas industry.
It’s the kind of potential industry influence that demands more scrutiny on Capitol Hill but is unlikely to receive it anytime soon, Whitehouse said.
Until Republicans took control of the Senate in January, the Democratic senator chaired the budget committee, devoting more than a dozen hearings over two years to the climate crisis. Under his leadership, the committee also helmed an investigation into the oil and gas industry’s history of disinformation alongside the House oversight committee, which launched the inquiry in 2021.
The probe uncovered hundreds of documents from energy giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP, as well as the lobbying groups the American Petroleum Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce, demonstrating that big oil has privately acknowledged its efforts to downplay the dangers of burning fossil fuels and providing what one expert, who testified on the subject before Congress, called an unprecedented look at the industry’s recent “duplicity”.
Even as energy interests voiced support for climate policies, they privately fought to preserve their fossil fuel-heavy business models by lobbying against regulations, the tranche showed. The investigation came as an increasing number of cities and states sued big oil for allegedly lying about the dangers of using fossil fuels. Its findings may have provided new material evidence for the cases.
These revelations were only possible because majority parties in the House and Senate have the power to subpoena documents, Whitehouse said.
“I don’t think we would have seen any cooperation from the fossil fuel industry without subpoena power,” he said. “When we asked for documents, we in the Senate were told that fossil fuel companies have a constitutional right to conspire with each other.”
The Guardian has contacted the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce for comment.
With Republicans in control of both chambers, Congress is not likely to push for more evidence of oil industry misinformation or political collusion. Whitehouse and other Democratic leaders had also been calling on Biden’s justice department to investigate the fossil fuel industry’s climate disinformation campaign – something not likely to happen under Trump.
Reached for comment, the White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said: “President Trump is rooting out corruption and fraud backed by radical [D]emocrats in the name of climate change and is unleashing our natural resources.”
As head of the budget committee, Whitehouse was also looking into Trump’s relationship with the oil sector amid concerns about potential ethics violations. He said that a Republican-led Senate is less likely press for this information.
“There is massive corruption within the Trump administration,” said Whitehouse. “It goes right from the White House itself to the cabinet nominees.”
The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chris Wright, the head of Trump’s energy department, is a former fracking CEO. His interior department secretary, Doug Burgum, is a promoter of oil and gas. And his pick to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, was a key architect of the rightwing policy blueprint Project 2025 and “has been a fossil fuel front group stooge for as long as I’ve known of him”, Whitehouse said.
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“We can see the consequences of climate disinformation in Congress’s delay with regulations,” Whitehouse said. “And we can see it right in the White House itself.”
Fields, the White House spokesperson, said: “Secretary Burgum and Secretary Wright were selected to restore America’s energy dominance because of their expertise in the field.” The OMB did not respond to a request for comment.
The oil and gas industry donated to the Democratic presidential campaign in 2024, too, though it received only one-tenth of the support Trump did. Under Joe Biden’s presidential administration, climate-related spending increased, though oil and gas production also reached record levels.
Congressional Democrats may hold “shadow” off-the-books hearings to shine a light on energy interests’ “deception and political collusion”, Whitehouse noted, but their power will be highly limited.
A lack of federal leadership, however, doesn’t mean all hope is lost to uncover new findings about the oil industry, he said. State legislatures “have the authority to undertake investigations and hold hearings and issue subpoenas”, he said. Some climate accountability lawsuits are also progressing toward a trial, raising the possibility that more information about industry deception could be unveiled, he said.
In the meantime, Whitehouse said he will continue to speak out about climate deception and dangerous pro-fossil fuel policies.
“We’ve got to keep the focus on the corruption,” he said.
