Oil company executives are expected to sit down with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, and cutting gasoline prices is expected to be on the table, according to MarketWatch.
The gathering fits into a pattern of action by the White House and GOP lawmakers who are working to show voters they take kitchen-table economic issues seriously before November, according to MarketWatch.
Gas prices have remained a persistent pressure point for the administration. The national average for regular unleaded hit a record seasonal high of $4.03 a gallon on August 13, a level that GasBuddy's head of petroleum research Patrick De Haan noted had never been reached after August 12 in any prior year, according to Yahoo Finance. So far in 2026, the national average has been at or above $4 a gallon for 103 days.
The Trump administration last Friday also announced an agreement with Venezuela to develop a portion of that country's oil reserves, with the U.S. government taking a 55% stake in a joint venture with a private Venezuelan company — equivalent to roughly 65 billion barrels of oil still in the ground. Trump called it the "biggest oil deal in the world" on Truth Social and wrote that the agreement would "substantially lower gas prices" for American taxpayers. Energy experts are skeptical of that claim.
Gerald Kepes, president of energy consultancy Competitive Energy Strategies, called the idea of the deal affecting gas prices now "absurd," according to NPR. The bulk of the oil fields included in the agreement have yet to be developed at any significant scale, so meaningful output from them is not expected for several years at minimum. Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University's Center for Energy Studies, said "a significant increase in production is highly unlikely" in the near term.
The deal faces other hurdles as well. Because the U.S. does not own a national oil company, questions remain about who would operate the venture on the ground, according to NPR. Paasha Mahdavi, associate professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara, said that the "at-cost" arrangement gives investors no way to benefit when market prices surge well beyond what it costs to pull oil out of the ground, making the deal a poor proposition for the private sector.
Trump's effort to pressure the oil industry on pump prices predates the Venezuela deal. He directed the Justice Department in June to investigate oil companies for not lowering retail prices in step with falling crude costs, accusing the industry of "gouging" customers. Then in early August, after ExxonMobil and Chevron reported combined quarterly profits of $29 billion tied to the war in Iran, Trump demanded the two companies cut retail prices and pass their windfall earnings on to drivers.