The thing bleeding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not a lack of storage capacity. It’s a policy regime that treated a national-security asset like a gas-station rewards card. The people who drained it for electoral cover are now asking you to pay for a bigger tank. In “The U.S. Must Expand Its Strategic Petroleum Reserve”, published by National Review on June 4, 2026, Andrew Follett argues that China’s 1.4‑billion‑barrel oil stockpile gave it a decisive edge during the Iran conflict, that the American reserve is dangerously small, and that the remedy is a massive physical expansion — new salt caverns, a billion‑barrel capacity, and legal handcuffs to stop politicians from treating the SPR as a campaign ATM.
Follett’s piece is a careful catalogue of the plunder. He has receipts: the Biden administration draining the reserve before the 2022 midterms, congressional Democrats blocking purchases at $24 a barrel in 2020, the SPR entering a crisis only 58 percent full while China’s cushion kept prices in check. He is right that China’s strategic stockpile is a tool of state power, not an accident, and that watching a rival exploit your vulnerability concentrates the mind. The instinct to fortify is the right instinct.
Then, having documented exactly how the reserve was looted, he recommends digging a bigger vault for the loot. I keep being told the SPR is a war‑insurance policy. So walk me through the part where you open it six weeks before a midterm to shave twenty cents off a gallon. Norway turned its oil into a two‑trillion‑dollar sovereign wealth fund, and somehow nobody has ever raided it to give a prime minister a bump in the polls. The difference is not geology; the difference is institutional design that makes the raid illegal.
The same political class that used the SPR as an electoral piñata — Democrats and Republicans in alternating cycles — now promises that a larger reserve would be handled with discipline. Why would it? The architecture is the culprit, not the individual. The SPR sits in a democracy as a discretionary pot of oil, and every four years it becomes a temptation. Expanding the tank without changing the structure simply means the next president who needs a good jobs report before an election will have a bigger pot to drain. You don’t need a new tank; you need a lock on the one you have.
The lock already exists, and it lives in a red state. Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established in 1976 after the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. The state constitution dedicates a portion of oil revenue to a public trust, the principal of which cannot be spent without a vote of the people. A dividend — the Permanent Fund Dividend — is paid annually to every Alaskan resident, insulating the fund from legislative raids by tying the self‑interest of citizens directly to its survival. Politicians can scream about budget gaps; they cannot touch the corpus without breaking the constitutional lock and facing the voters. No president has ever siphoned the Permanent Fund for a pre‑election gas‑price fix, because the structure makes it impossible.
The SPR can be rebuilt on the same template. Place the reserve inside a public trust governed by a bipartisan, staggered board, and back it with a congressional charter that allows releases only for a narrow, legally defined set of physical supply emergencies — a verified shutoff of a specific percentage of U.S. imports sustained for a specific duration. Require a supermajority vote to override the trigger, not a presidential signature. Restore the automatic purchase floor that Follett’s own article documents was blocked in 2020: when prices fall below a preset level, the trust buys oil mechanically, without any discretionary sign‑off from the White House. The goal is not to remove politics from the SPR — that is impossible. The goal is to make the political cost of stealing from it higher than the electoral benefit.
Then, once the institutional lock is built and the reserve is filled to its physical capacity, you can talk about digging new caverns. If the math still says a billion barrels buys more security than a transmission line or a child allowance that cuts poverty by half, fine. Dig it. But you don’t dig the cavern before plugging the leak. A bigger tank with the same siphon is not national security. It’s a larger electoral piñata, and the people who handed you the receipts know it.