Following Trump’s lead, Van Drew proposes suspending federal gas tax

President Donald Trump said this morning that he wants to suspend the federal gas tax amid high gas prices stemming from the Iran War, and one of his most loyal New Jersey allies, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), is proposing a new bill to do exactly that.

Van Drew’s bill would eliminate current federal taxes on gasoline, which stand at 18.3 cents per gallon (higher for diesel and aviation fuel), for a period of 18 months. After that year-and-a-half span is over, the gas tax would “slowly phase back in,” Van Drew said.

“Americans are paying too much for gas right now, and the federal government can help relieve some of that pressure,” Van Drew said in a statement. “My bill would completely suspend the federal fuel taxes for 18 months, so people are no longer paying those extra taxes per gallon every time they fill up their tank.”

The South Jersey congressman, Congress’s most vocal critic of the Democratic-run New Jersey state government, also said that Gov. Mikie Sherrill should suspend New Jersey’s 49-cents-per-gallon gas tax.

The conflict between the United States and Iran, which has been underway for more than two months without a clear end date, has caused gas prices around the country to soar, especially after Iran began blocking the Strait of Hormuz. A year ago, the average price of a gallon of gas in New Jersey was $2.98, per AAA’s fuel price tracker; it’s now $4.53, approaching the $5.06 high-point of the early Biden era.

Those persistently high prices have caused officials within the Trump administration to mull a gas tax pause, and Trump confirmed this morning that it’s something he plans on pursuing: “We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” he told CBS News.

Doing so would require action from Congress and would cost the federal government several billion dollars a month, funds that would normally go towards road construction and repair projects.

Democrats have made high gas prices a cornerstone of their argument for why the Iran conflict needs to end, and have put forward repeated resolutions in Congress to reassert congressional authority over the war. (Van Drew, alongside nearly all of his fellow Republicans, has voted against those resolutions.)

“One woman was telling me about her family’s struggles, and she’s hearing about all the different things going on with this war, and she turned to me and she said, ‘What about us? What are we supposed to do?’,” Senator Andy Kim said last week. “40% of Americans can’t handle a $400 emergency right now, yet they’re seeing gas prices go up and up and up.”