Congress Looks Underground for Cash

In its quest to spend more without raising taxes, Congress has found a new piggy bank. It’s buried deep underground, protected by armed guards, and filled with a valuable commodity worth billions of dollars. It’s not a gold vault—it’s the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the country’s emergency stockpile of crude oil. Created in 1975 after Arab oil producers cut off exports to the U.S., causing gasoline prices to spike, the SPR was designed to immunize the country against supply shocks. Today it stores about 695 million barrels of crude in salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana.

While it’s supposed to buttress America’s national security, the SPR has begun to look to Congress like a source of cash. In the past month, lawmakers have proposed a pair of bills that call for the sale of 180 million barrels of oil, to raise almost $15 billion. “Congress is starting to look at the SPR like it’s free money,” says Robert McNally, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush who now runs the Rapidan Group, a consulting firm in Bethesda, Md. “And there’s a race to see who can grab it first.”