WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Sam Raus: What Trump’s 2031 Fuel-Economy Reset Really Means for America

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

The Trump administration’s newly unveiled plan to slash federal CAFE standards through 2031 has ignited a national fight over fuel costs, emissions, EV adoption, and the future of American auto manufacturing. Sam Raus, the David Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices, a political analyst, and public relations professional, offers nonpartisan analysis that explains how these overlapping policies reshape consumer costs, industry incentives, and the path of U.S. energy innovation. He joins Mattie Grace Watson on WRFH to discuss.

You are listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Maddie Grace Watson, and today I am bringing you an interview with Sam Rouse. Sam is the David Bowes resident writing fellow at Young Voices, a political analyst and a public relations professional. His work covers the past, present, and future of free society, and has appeared in outlets such as USA Today, Newsweek, and the Hill. Rouse is a native of the Philadelphia metro area and a graduate from the University of Miami School of Communications. Now, he is coming to us today to discuss some different government standards that have been rolling out or being rolled back. So the Trump administration's newly unveiled planned to slash federal cafe standards through 2013 has ignited a lot of conversations over,

fuel costs, emissions, EV adoption, and the future of American auto manufacturing, with MPG targets dropping from 50.4 to just 34.5 in major uncertainty brewing around the evolving renewable fuel standard. We all need some clarity pretty fast. And Sam is going to bring us a unique analysis that cuts through this noise and explain how these overlapping policies may reshape consumer costs. industry incentives and the path of U.S. energy innovation. And this is a story that is accelerating all of the time. If you guys are anything like me, I don't understand half the concepts that I just mentioned. So I am excited to have Sam come join us today, at least just for my personal benefit of understanding some of these concepts better, concepts that relate to all

of us as we look at the auto market, at the auto industry, whether we're currently interested in buying a car or that's something that we're interested in years down the road or that, you know, our kids will be interested in years down the road. This is an ever-shaping market that, you know, really affects all of us. So I'm excited to have Sam come join us today. Okay, so first off, a lot of our listeners may not be familiar with the corporate average fuel economy mandates. Can you kind of give a little bit of a brief rundown on what those are to give them a little bit of context as we dive into this discussion? Yeah, absolutely. So there's both the CAFE standard, corporate fuel economy, something or another, and then the renewable fuel standard.

Cafe is setting efficiency rules for cars, any kind of road vehicle, you know, and the renewable fuel standard is a requirement set on our fuel supply, the gasoline that you buy, you know, a Sonoka or Wawa or something, that requires it to have a certain amount of ethanol in it. So both of these are the government intervening in the free market, deciding what kind of products we're allowed to buy, what we're allowed to do when it comes to, you know, our cars and driving them around, essentially. And how will this, I guess, change the way automakers are engineering vehicles and what that, I guess, effect essentially looks like for the consumer? Yeah. So CAFE has been really impactful on the kind of cars that are being developed and sold. Under the Biden administration, they made the standards even stricter essentially a higher percentage of efficiency upgrades expected. That was essentially they're trying to push towards where gasoline is no longer considered an acceptable fuel source. They were, you know, it was not. You know, the kind of gas that you burn in a regular car is not quite as efficient, quote, unquote, as some of these newer energy standards. And what that, as de facto did, was really make all companies have to start focusing most of their production on electric vehicles. Cars that we know can't go very far, take a long time to charge up. Look, they're great.

Everybody wants a Tesla. But it has to be an option. It can't be the government interfering and trying to push the market. a certain direction. It has to come about through consumer demand and great innovation. And that really has made cars become so much more expensive as so many of them are electric, really probably before the technology is there before the mass production is able to be done at a scale that makes them affordable. And then the renewable fuel standard has inflated the price of gasoline for decades. It forces us to include a certain amount of ethanol, which is essentially made out of corn, to be mixed into our fuel.

And that's artificially propped up this sector of farmers and ethanol producers and not allowed us to really focus on buying the fuel internationally that we need. you know, prices are a signal. And when we distort the prices of things and force things to include certain amounts of things, it doesn't allow us the focus on affordability. It makes us focus on other things that are aligned with, you know, an ideology and a predisposition around energy. So, you know, you're making all these good points and things like that. But who, I guess, what is the motivation behind them? doing these mandates? Because, you know, you're saying all these certain things about how it's kind of negatively affecting some people, but what's the motivation? Who is benefiting from these

new mandates rolling out? Yeah. So the cafe standard was really benefiting the electric vehicle companies, the companies that were already making cars that would meet those standards because that really let them grab more of the market, right? While other companies are figuring out how to readjust, they were already there. and able to start selling their vehicles. And we saw that. I mean, Tesla and some of those other companies became very, very big under the Biden administration as electric vehicles were pushed so heavily using this law that's been around much longer than that.

The renewable fuel standard really benefits corn farmers, people in the ethanol industry, a lot of people in the middle of the country that run those kind of businesses. but what they don't do is consider the everyday consumer. And really, yeah, it's a form of corporate favoritism, specifically to electric vehicle companies and to ethanol producers over the regular voter. If you're just now joining us, we have Sam Rouse on the air right now. He's giving us a little bit of an insight to some cafe mandates that President Trump recently rolled back, as well as.

just some other fuel standards and things affecting the auto industry right now. So thank you for joining us here on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Maddie Grice Watson and this is Sam Rouse. So getting right back on into those questions. Now, kind of looking forward, looking at both the cafe changes and the RFS rules, what do you see kind of as the long-term effect or direction of, I mean, I guess, evolving U.S. energy policy or just what the market will look like down the road if this continues? Well, the president is unleashing energy dominance in this country has rolled back the CAFE standards that will allow us to be able to buy cars with a more current level of efficiency.

Let us have more freedom of choice in that marketplace. And I think that there will be considerations around RFS and some other things to help bring down the cost of gas. gasoline and allow us to, you know, when it comes to our finances, you know, as a country, as communities, as governments, a lot more is going probably going to need to be spent on all levels to go towards some of the energy needs for new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and some other fields. So allowing us to spend as little as possible on our cars, on our, you know, motorcycles and stuff so that people can spend elsewhere.

Really, you know, we think about financial resources. I think that there's a lot of consideration of we need to make sure the energy is cheap and abundant as possible. We're not going to try to predict which one is the best. Try to preset, you know, well, we should use this for this kind of source because of these concerns. No, we're going to let that be driven by the marketplace. And I think the president's aligned with, I think the vice presidents aligned with that.

Hopefully that turns out to be the case in the long run. I think there's still a lot of activism among the left that will try to push back and essentially revert to the cafe standards and to continuing a push towards ethanol and electric vehicles. But I think that the right is very aligned against that and very much understands economic considerations of this issue. what do you think about these cafe standards that we had what do you think is probably the biggest misunderstood thing about it from the american people's point of view something that they can be looking out for if we ever do get another administration that wants to advocate for this what is i guess one of the big things the american people need to know that maybe they typically misunderstand or don't fully understand the depth of when looking at these cafe mandates

Yeah, I think that the way it's framed, specifically in the acronym and in the legislation, talking about efficiency sounds good, right? Everybody wants things to be more efficient. I think we recognize efficiency usually comes with benefits to the marketplace, to government, to other things. But it's really a misconstrued label because it's not efficiency coming through these companies innovating. and achieving breakthroughs in their technology to give us things that are, you know, let you go further on a certain amount of gasoline. You know, that's really what it is with cars. It's a government mandate. It's as a form of regulation interfering in what kind of vehicles you can have a choice in buying. It's not how you achieve efficiency in, you know, free market economy with innovation. It's a top-down regulation.

and I think that it's been perceived as, you know, kind of putting our thumb on the scale of accelerating towards electric vehicles. I think there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with electric vehicles, but it's not letting it be achieved in a way that comes naturally and that's going to lead to the best results. It's a form of government intervention that is trying to steal one of our words in a lot of ways to sell it. You know, speaking of government intervention, we've talked a lot about how, you know, the Biden administration took this one direction, and now the Trump administration's kind of rolling that back. So in your opinion, what do you think is the proper balance of government intervention in the auto industry, if any at all? I mean, I think we already have a lot of the standards that need to be set around, you know, safety,

rules, making sure that we minimize the number of traffic deaths. And I think that that's going to continue to be prevalent as we see self-driving cars. Teslas already have a lot of technology to prevent crashes. I think, you know, life or death considerations, that's really where the government needs to play a place, less so than, you know, trying to dictate what kind of stuff we have, what kind of energy it's using. I understand there's environmental considerations to be had more broadly about our footprint on the planet,

but I think that needs to come through a broader lens look at us as a nation and how we can incentivize certain forms of industry to succeed through deregulation, succeed through less taxation, not through, yeah, I think that just it's become rather convoluted.

And they're using a form of intervention to try to push what this says, quote unquote, good technology. And that's just not really their place. That's not what the government should be doing. It should not be favoring certain market competitors in any kind of way. It should be, you know, setting baseline standards to protect consumer welfare and not really play any role beyond that. And I think that a lot of that has already been achieved. So I think that's a pretty minor consideration for them to get involved in

and that they don't really need to be too heavily in that industry. Awesome. Well, if there is one thing about everything we've talked about today that our listeners should take away, what would you sum that up as? I think that there needs to be renewed focus on ending the renewable fuel standard. I think that the right needs to come to terms with we cannot allow for corporate subsidies and crony capitalism to continue. And that's field, even if it may benefit industries and places that are more favorable to our politics in terms of their voting patterns and donation behavior. because it's simply distorting the marketplace and making life more unaffordable for all of us

and not leading to the economic results that we champion so heavily. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Sam, and bringing an enlightenment to this topic that's going on right now. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining us here on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM to discuss some different rollback of cafe standards and then the renewable fuel standard as well with Sam Rouse. Now, Sam is the David Bowes resident writing fellow at Young Voices. He's a political analyst, a public relations professional, and his work has been published in the Washington

Examinor, National Interest, Real Clear Policy. He's made guest appearances on outlets including Fox News, CBN's The Global Lane, Sirius XM Patriot. tons of high heart radio affiliates nationwide and now here on radio free hillsdale as well so you can catch this interview on our website radio freehillsdale dot com or tune in later for more interviews and shows as well my name is mattie grace watson this has been the interview with sam rouse thank you so much for listening to radio free hillsdale 101.7 fm I'm going to be able to be.