From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Ireland Owens

President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill” in his upcoming administration appears to have American energy firms eagerly awaiting his return, according to a new survey.

On numerous occasions, Trump vowed to unleash American oil and made achieving “energy dominance” a key aspect of his next administration’s agenda. Responding to an anonymous survey conducted by the Dallas Federal Reserve, several energy executives said that they are optimistically awaiting the former president’s return to office, with many citing “positive regulatory changes” in their responses.

The survey noted a dramatic decline in its “outlook uncertainty index” with one respondent explaining, “The outcome of the 2024 presidential election removes the risk of the unknown.”

“There is more optimism looking at first quarter 2025 than first quarter 2024,” one respondent wrote. “Much of 2024 felt like a waiting game … We think the election results will be good for activity even if it’s just because operators and service companies have a clear direction for planning.”

“We are encouraged that the new administration in Washington, D.C., will enact some positive regulatory changes for offshore drilling in the U.S.,” another wrote.

President Joe Biden and Trump have had vastly different approaches to domestic energy policies, though one survey respondent claiming that the shifting political landscape is “helpful insofar as regulations,” considering Trump is likely to reduce the regulatory burden on oil firms. For this reason, many energy executives have in the past criticized Biden’s energy policy.

From his very first day in office, Biden has led a massive push to curb greenhouse gas emissions as part of his signature climate agenda. Biden introduced the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize various green energy projects. Trump has vowed to redirect unspent funding from the IRA, and previously dubbed the climate law “the green new scam.”

More recently, reports have surfaced claiming that Biden is considering a permanent ban on additional offshore drilling in some federal waters ahead of Trump’s return to office, potentially aiming to hamstring the incoming president’s energy plans.

“The recent election result is changing outlooks,” one respondent wrote. “The new administration will lift regulations, stop subsiding [subsidizing] green energy and seek LNG build-outs to place more demand on natural gas.”

While on the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 election, Trump pledged to revamp the U.S. energy sector, and repeatedly promised to “drill, baby drill” in a bid to increase domestic oil and gas production.

“We’re assuming that the new administration will encourage more development of oil and gas projects,” one survey respondent wrote.

In November, Trump nominated North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to head the Department of the Interior and Chairman of a new National Energy Council. The president-elect praised Burgum in a post on Truth Social, stating that he would play a key role in overseeing the “path to U.S. energy dominance.”

Additionally, Trump announced in November 2024 the nomination of Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy and as a member of the new energy council. The president-elect said in a Truth Social post that Wright is a “bold advocate who brings rational thought to the energy dialogue.”

The Dallas Federal Reserve’s survey data was collected from Dec. 11–19, and included 134 energy firm respondents.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Katelynn Richardson

The Trump administration has a major opportunity to deal a blow to the sprawling censorship industry, both inside the government and in the private sector.

Trump promised in a campaign video from Dec. 2022 to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” by, among other proposals, signing an executive order banning agencies from collaborating with private platforms to suppress speech and ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate parties involved in censorship.

“If Trump takes the steps that he has indicated he will, one focus of anti-censorship efforts I anticipate is nonprofits like the Atlantic Council and Stanford Internet Observatory [SIO] that operate as middlemen between the government and the tech companies,” New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney Jenin Younes told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As President, Trump should ensure that the White House and his executive agencies do not work with these groups to censor ‘mis’ or ‘disinformation.’ In fact, all government efforts in the MDM [misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation] sphere should end, since this clearly results in suppressing First Amendment protected speech.”

Under the Biden administration, White House staff made explicit requests for platforms to restrict COVID-19 related speech. Other agencies participated in speech suppression, with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) flagging posts for removal and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) forwarding misinformation reports from local election officials to platforms, a practice they called “switchboarding.”

CISA likewise helped create of the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, which the SIO played a key role in running, to monitor “misinformation” and report it to platforms during the 2020 election. A federal judge declined last week to dismiss a lawsuit against the SIO, along with several other groups, over their alleged targeting of conservative speech.

“Private entities cannot be permitted to partner with the government to censor Americans’ speech,” Nicholas R. Barry, America First Legal Senior Counsel, said in a statement.

Younes told the DCNF she would like to see “punishment for government actors who have violated Americans’ First Amendment rights.”

“At this time, such individuals manage to escape accountability for their actions because of doctrines like qualified immunity,” she said. “However, there can be exceptions to qualified immunity when government officials knowingly flout people’s civil rights, and those exceptions should be applied in the First Amendment context.”

Trump’s other suggestions included firing bureaucrats who have engaged in censorship, ensuring federal dollars do not go towards nonprofits and universities labeling domestic speech as misinformation and asking Congress to revise Section 230 to “get big online platforms out of censorship.”

The Biden administration has issued $267 million in grant funding for projects including the term “misinformation,” including $127 million specifically relating to COVID-19, according to a November Open The Books report. The DCNF reported in 2023 on several projects funded by the NSF to develop censorship tools, including a dashboard to forecast misinformation “trends” and another studying how misinformation influences online networks.

Great Discussion Between @AFergusonFTC And @nataliegwinters On The Censorship Regime And How The Trump Administration Can Combat It

Two Key Parts Of The Censorship Problem:

-Private companies colluding to censor speech they don't like. Advertiser Cartels being one of their… pic.twitter.com/i89sWWF9nQ

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) November 30, 2024

‘Smash This Censorship Cartel’

Many Trump nominees have been vocal about their commitment to promoting free speech.

Andrew Ferguson, who Trump selected as the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, said on War Room in late November that Trump can cut off some censorship outright, ordering officials to stop communicating with platforms and ending government funding for entities participating in speech suppression. But private censorship would likely move to “new fronts,” he noted, making it important for the FTC to take “investigative steps.”

Ferguson said “advertiser cartels” could violate antitrust laws by agreeing to boycott certain shows, podcasts and platforms.

“If the government is going to get out of the business here in the states of cooperating and colluding with the platforms to suppress the speech that they don’t like, then it’s up to the FTC to make sure that that sort of cooperation and collusion doesn’t move into the private sector,” Ferguson said.

Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brennan Carr likewise said in a NewsNation interview that one of his top priorities would be to “smash this censorship cartel.”

Other appointees took strong stances on censorship. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s choice for National Institute for Health (NIH) head, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration pushing back on COVID-19 lockdowns and responses. United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought his own lawsuit against the Biden administration for alleged First Amendment violations.

Harmeet Dhillon, who is set to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, worked with her firm on a case challenging the California Secretary of State’s Office coordination with Twitter to suppress speech.

Continued Litigation

While the Supreme Court found in June that plaintiffs who challenged the Biden administration’s censorship efforts failed to link their accounts’ restrictions to the government’s communications with platforms, the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit is ongoing. In November, the district court allowed the plaintiffs to pursue more discovery to establish the government’s involvement.

“Depending on the approach the Administration takes, it is conceivable that cases like ours could resolve in a consent decree, in which the government acknowledges its wrongdoing and takes various specific steps to safeguard against future violations of Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights,” Younes told the DCNF regarding the case.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) recently launched a new Center for Free Speech aimed at targeting censorship entities, pointing to the “new opportunity” free speech defenders will have as Trump takes office.

ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler told the DCNF the center is intended to create “substantial pushback on global censorship,” which he said has increased over the past decade by both private and government actors.

Potential targets include state level election laws, like the California laws targeting political satire that ADF already filed a lawsuit against on behalf of the Babylon Bee, along with debanking practices and other censorship by private actors.

“There is a lot of work to be done to dismantle this censorship industrial complex that’s been built up over many years,” Sechler told the DCNF.