Bessent warns gas stations that Treasury Dept will keep them ‘honest’ after spike in prices

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a veiled warning to gas stations that jacked up the prices on consumers under the guise of global oil supply concerns: President Donald Trump will be watching.

“We’ll be looking at Treasury to try to keep the retail gas stations honest — that you did this on the way up, better be doing this on the way down,” Bessent told the CNBC Invest in America Forum on Wednesday morning. “And I am sure the president will call out anyone who’s a bad actor.”

What went up, must now come down, Bessent told the CNBC forum host Wednesday when asked if the above was a warning.

“I’m sure that,” Bessent said with a calculated pause, “everyone will be a good actor.”

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Trump had long warned that the rise in American gas prices at the pump was a transitory inflation issue on the expectation that global oil supply was strained due to Iran’s retaliatory choking off of oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump and Bessent have also noted for weeks that the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, has plenty of supply, with only a fraction of oil from the Middle East. So when local gas stations raised prices under the fear of future supply shortages elsewhere around the globe — potential “bad actors,” according to Bessent — they were not only guessing, but expecting something that would never come, they argued.

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The Treasury Department will be watching retail gasoline sales for consumers, according to Bessent.

“I think the gas prices will start coming down pretty quickly,” he said. “We’ve had the big declines in the past two weeks.”

Just this weekend, the U.S. Oil & Gas Association (USOGA) debunked narratives from Democrats in the deep blue state of California about gas prices. Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon noted that gas prices in California on the West Coast were nearly double what they are in Washington, D.C.

“Please let’s be honest,” Dhillon wrote on X in rebuke to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who claimed that gas prices in his district were high due to the conflict with Iran.

Local gas prices are speculative, and not a function of the strikes on Iran, and their retaliatory choking off of oil flows from the Middle East, according to the X account run by USOGA President Tim Stewart.

“High gas prices in your district aren’t ‘Trump’s war’ — they’re Sacramento’s doing,” Stewart wrote in a direct response to Khanna.