Gas at $4.50 a gallon. Oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve draining at the fastest pace on record. Sanctions eased. Shipping rules waived. And still, prices keep climbing. The Trump administration has pulled nearly every domestic lever available to bring relief at the pump, and one energy strategist says none of it will be enough without reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
That is the blunt assessment laid out in a CNN Business analysis by Matt Egan, published May 18, which frames the narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula as the single variable that matters most for American drivers this summer.
Jan Stuart, global energy strategist at Piper Sandler, offered a grim forecast. He expects gas to hit $5 a gallon as soon as this month, with Brent crude futures averaging $130 a barrel next quarter before settling near $100 next year. His summary of the administration's options was succinct:
"There's precious little the administration can do."
That line should focus minds in Washington. The question is not whether the White House is trying. It plainly is. The question is whether anything short of restored traffic through the Strait of Hormuz can deliver the price relief American families need before summer driving season turns into a full-blown household budget crisis.
Give the White House credit for speed. The administration moved on multiple fronts at once: draining oil from America's strategic stockpile at a record clip, waiving shipping restrictions including a 60-day waiver to the Jones Act, and easing some sanctions on both Russia and Venezuela to free up global supply.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers framed the disruptions as temporary and pointed to the administration's track record of pushing energy prices to multi-year lows before the current crisis:
"President Trump has always been clear that these are short-term, temporary disruptions. The President brought oil and gas prices down to multi-year lows at record speed, and as traffic in the Strait of Hormuz normalizes, these energy prices will plummet once again."
That statement is revealing in what it concedes. Even the White House ties the timeline for price relief to the Strait of Hormuz, not to domestic production, not to reserve releases, not to a tax holiday. The administration's own spokeswoman is telling Americans that the path back to affordable gas runs through a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf.
The AP reported that roughly 20 million barrels of oil normally move through the Strait of Hormuz each day, but many tankers are now avoiding it. That avoidance is driving volatile oil prices and squeezing global supply in ways no single country, even the world's largest oil producer, can offset on its own.
The administration has also moved to lift summer gasoline restrictions as part of a broader effort to ease fuel costs heading into the peak driving months.
President Trump recently endorsed pausing the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax for the summer driving season. On its face, the idea has populist appeal. Who doesn't want to pay less at the pump?
But the numbers tell a different story. An analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that a gas tax holiday covering the 122-day summer driving season would cost the Highway Trust Fund $11.5 billion in lost revenue. The payoff for drivers? Filling up a 15-gallon tank once a week would save a grand total of $35 over the entire pause.
Thirty-five dollars. That's the price of a modest dinner out, spread across four months.
Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, warned that a tax holiday could actually make things worse by working to "boost fuel demand at a time of low supply." When supply is already tight, stimulating demand is the opposite of what markets need.
The idea is not new, and it has drawn skeptics from both parties over the years. In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama dismissed a gas tax holiday as a "gimmick" even as Hillary Clinton and John McCain endorsed the concept. House Republicans used the same word in 2022.
Trump himself framed the proposal as temporary. Newsmax reported that the president said he wants to suspend the tax "for a period of time" until prices fall, then phase it back in. Energy Secretary Chris Wright backed the broader effort, stating that "all measures that can be taken to lower the price at the pump and lower the prices for Americans, this administration is in support of."
The federal excise tax adds 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel. With diesel averaging $5.66 per gallon and gas at $4.51, those pennies are a rounding error against the real driver of pain: the disruption of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz.
As we have previously reported, the administration's push to suspend the federal gas tax reflects the political urgency of the moment, even if the policy itself delivers modest savings.
The AP reported that the national average gas price rose from about $2.30 a gallon to $3.60 after the war with Iran began. Newsmax placed the current average at $4.52, representing a rise of more than 50 percent since the conflict started on February 28. Those are not numbers any tax holiday can fix.
Analysts at Oxford Economics, cited by the AP, captured the market's anxiety plainly: the swings in Brent crude prices are "eye-catching," and volatility will persist "because of the absence of a timeline for when the conflict will deescalate and when the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed, will see traffic begin to recover."
That phrase, "effectively closed", is the heart of the matter. The Strait of Hormuz is the world's most important oil transit chokepoint. When it is open, global markets function. When it is not, no amount of reserve releases or regulatory waivers can fully compensate.
Lawmakers on both sides recognize this. Fox News reported that Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said plainly: "He's got to bring this war to an end if he wants these gas prices to come down." Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., offered a more measured take: "I mean, we want to keep costs low."
The political divide over the gas tax holiday is real, but it obscures the larger consensus: the war is the problem, and the Strait is the bottleneck.
The toll on household budgets has been severe. Summer driving costs have surged as gas prices jumped roughly 40 percent and repair bills hit record highs, squeezing families who depend on their vehicles to get to work, school, and the grocery store.
Trump built part of his political brand on delivering cheap energy. Before the Iran conflict, the administration had pushed oil and gas prices to multi-year lows. That record is now colliding with a geopolitical crisis that no president can control with executive orders alone.
The White House's own messaging acknowledges this. Rogers did not promise that domestic measures would fix the problem. She promised that prices would "plummet once again" when traffic in the Strait of Hormuz normalizes. That is an honest assessment, and it carries a risk. If normalization takes months, the political cost will compound.
Trump himself has shifted his public framing. The AP noted that the president, who once bragged about low gas prices, argued on social media that higher oil prices can benefit the United States as the world's largest producer: "The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money."
That argument may be economically defensible in the aggregate. It is not the message a family in Portland, Oregon, where gas station prices were photographed on May 6, wants to hear when they are budgeting an extra $80 or $100 a month just to get to work.
The political fallout is already visible, with the president's economic approval under pressure as fuel inflation tests Republican resolve heading into the midterm cycle.
Stuart's forecast is sobering. He expects the energy crisis to worsen this spring and summer before eventually easing. If Brent crude averages $130 next quarter, $5 gas will not be a worst-case scenario, it will be the baseline.
The administration has done what it can with the tools at hand. Reserve releases buy time. Jones Act waivers reduce shipping costs at the margins. Sanction relief on Russian and Venezuelan oil adds barrels to the global market. A gas tax pause, if enacted, would deliver a few dollars of savings per tank.
None of it addresses the root cause. The Strait of Hormuz remains, as Oxford Economics put it, "effectively closed." Until that changes, American drivers will keep paying the price for a conflict half a world away.
The administration has also signaled confidence that relief could come faster than some forecasters expect. As we have previously noted, the president has publicly rejected longer timelines for $3 gas, insisting prices will drop sooner.
Several questions remain unanswered. What specific event or escalation caused the Strait to close to normal traffic? What is the realistic timeline for reopening it? And how long can the Strategic Petroleum Reserve sustain record-pace withdrawals before the stockpile itself becomes a vulnerability?
These are not academic questions. They are the questions that determine whether American families pay $4.50 this summer or $5.50.
The White House has the right instinct, pull every lever, move fast, signal resolve. But instinct is not a substitute for resolution. The lever that matters most is the one that sits in the Strait of Hormuz, and no executive order signed in Washington can open it.