President DeSantis vs. President Cruz on Energy

Hero photo: Oil pumpjack in the Permian Basin — Quintin Soloviev, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

01 The records and the scenario

Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz agree on the direction of Republican energy policy — fossil-fuel expansion, climate-policy rollback, regulatory retrenchment — but they built their records with different instruments on different terrain. DeSantis, as governor, signed HB 1645 in May 2024, striking climate change from Florida's state energy policy, banning offshore wind turbines in state waters, weakening natural-gas pipeline regulation, and blocking local gas-appliance restrictions; he paired it with HB 7071 and HB 1331 (“keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks and China out of our state”). In 2026 he signed HB 1217, preempting local net-zero policies. Yet on one point DeSantis has never followed the national party: he opposes offshore oil drilling off Florida's coast, a position every Florida governor since Jeb Bush has held and the reason his climate-rollback record has a petroleum-shaped exception.

Cruz, as senator, has legislated the maximalist federal version: the Energy Freedom Act (mandated lease sales, LNG export licenses in 60 days, interstate pipeline permits in a year), the Natural Gas Tax Repeal Act (repealing the IRA methane fee, introduced January 2025 with Marshall, Sheehy, Tuberville, Schmitt and Britt), and the Protect LNG Act (courts cannot vacate authorized LNG permits) — while also having worked across the aisle on the Energy Act of 2020, which funded renewables and carbon capture alongside oil and gas.

This is scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement. As of September 18, 2026, AP reports Republican discussion around both figures and neither has formally entered a presidential race; no one is predicted to win anything here. The question is comparative mechanics: two presidencies aimed at the same destination would take materially different routes through the first 100 days — and diverge on exactly one coastline.

02 Day 1: executive orders

President DeSantis' Day 1 would look like a governor's bill-signing season compressed into executive action: a national energy-security order directing agencies to treat affordability and reliability — his exact statutory language from Florida — as the sole energy-policy priorities, with climate considerations formally subordinated; a federal preemption order targeting state-level net-zero and appliance policies (his HB 1217 logic aimed at California and New York); an offshore wind siting directive restricting federal waters leases, mirroring his state ban; and an appliance-choice order blocking any federal efficiency rule that bans a product category — the gas-stove fight he legislated in Florida, now via DOE.

President Cruz's Day 1 would be statutory in spirit even when executive in form: an order ending every remaining leasing pause and directing immediate offshore and onshore sales (the Energy Freedom Act's first section, enacted by direction); a 60-day LNG export-license directive to DOE and FERC (his bill's own deadline); a pipeline-permitting order giving the Army Corps a one-year clock; and rescission of the Biden-era methane, WOTUS, and NEPA rules — the exact rule list his bill would put into statute. Where DeSantis' orders read like state preemption, Cruz's read like a bill schedule.

The one Day 1 order neither would sign identically: offshore oil. Cruz would expand Florida-adjacent leasing on Day 1; DeSantis — whose entire record includes protecting Florida's coastline and whose military service was at Naval Station Mayport — would not. A president can pause leasing; a president cannot easily pause it only for one state without inviting the equal-protection and coastal-state litigation that killed every attempted Florida carve-out since 2017.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

Both administrations would install parallel personnel: DeSantis would staff DOE, EPA, and Interior with the Florida model — his DEP secretary and utility-regulator alumni — and order agency rule reviews under his affordability-and-reliability standard, plus a 50-state preemption memo warning state AGs that federal law occupies the field. Cruz would staff with the Senate energy-committee apparatus and Texas industry regulators, and his 30-day deliverables would be procedural: FERC directed to open LNG dockets, Interior's leasing calendar republished, EPA's methane and vehicle rules formally proposed for rescission (the 2020 rules his bill would codify).

The rulemaking reality check: notice-and-comment takes 6-18 months. Cruz knows this — his bills exist precisely because rules get unwound and rewound by each administration, which is why Protect LNG would statutorily shield permits from vacatur. DeSantis knows it too; his Florida statutes will outlast his governorship. In the first 30 days, both presidents would discover that the agency-state resists direction at the speed of the Administrative Procedure Act.

04 The first budget

A DeSantis first budget would cut IRA energy-tax-credit administration while funding coastal resilience — the same governor who scrubbed climate from Florida statutes then signed a nature-based coastal-resiliency bill for the state's 1,300-mile coastline, because Florida floods regardless of statutory language. Expect a resiliency-and-grid-hardening account paid for with fossil-lease revenue — a politically painless first-budget trade.

A Cruz first budget would be the Natural Gas Tax Repeal and IRA energy-credit rescissions, scored through reconciliation. Cruz has introduced the repeal twice (May 2024, January 2025) and endorsed by API, IPAA, NOIA and the Permian Basin Petroleum Association; budget reconciliation — needing only 50 votes plus the tiebreaker — is the vehicle Congress' own 2025 practice has proven. Leasing revenue projections would fund the deficit math; CBO would disagree about how much.

The first budget is where the two records genuinely conflict: DeSantis' budgets assumed no state carbon pricing and heavy resilience spending; Cruz's assume repeal of federal pricing entirely. Both are arithmetically compatible with a first-100-days budget — but the resilience line is where a Florida-shaped bill and a Texas-shaped bill fight over the same appropriations pen.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

The legislation each would send first is their existing homework, stamped with the presidency. Cruz: the Energy Freedom Act and Natural Gas Tax Repeal Act become the administration's first reconciliation package (revenue provisions qualify), with Protect LNG and permitting reform as the 60-vote asks — where Cruz's decade of Senate relationships, for whatever they are worth in a chamber he may have just left, matter most. He would also re-file the 2020-rules codification — putting WOTUS, the 2020 methane rule, and the Trump-era NEPA framework into statute so no future president can rescind them by order. That is the entire Cruz theory: convert executive action into law before the executive changes.

DeSantis would send a state-model bill: national preemption of sub-federal climate policy (the federal mirror of HB 1217), an appliance-choice statute, and a leasing bill — with the Florida carve-out his record requires, written by the White House and challenged by his own party's oil-state senators in committee. His second ask would be regulatory: a REINS-style statute requiring congressional approval of major rules, the permanent version of what he did with Florida statutes.

What neither can do without Congress: repeal the IRA's methane fee by order (Cruz knows — his bill exists because it requires statute), preempt state utility law where existing federal statutes do not reach, or alter the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act's leasing framework. The first 100 days' legislative fight would be reconciliation for the taxes, and everything else waits for 60.

06 The Republican energy debate, both sides

The comparative section for this piece is the internal Republican argument. The oil-and-gas wing (Cruz's) treats energy dominance as national security: exports as leverage over Russia and Iran, which Cruz has argued in his own press releases, and the 2024 mandate as permission to codify. The state-preemption wing (DeSantis's) treats energy as the next front in the federalism fight — winning by stopping the other side's states from doing what his own state stopped doing. The two wings agree on the target and disagree on whether Washington or the states should hold the gun.

There is a realist critique of both: DeSantis' Florida model has not lowered his own state's utility rates — Florida power prices rose with gas regardless of climate language — and Cruz's dominance model assumes courts and markets hold still; the Protect LNG Act exists because they have not. The first 100 days of either presidency would test whether rollback-of-climate-policy and expansion-of-production are the same policy. Florida's 2024-2026 record suggests they are not: you can strike every mention of climate change from statute and still order your cities to brace for rising seas.

07 What courts could constrain

Both presidencies would inherit the same 2025-2026 litigation landscape, which constrains them asymmetrically. President Cruz's Day 1 orders — mandated lease sales, 60-day LNG approvals — would run into the procedural-injury and APA-adequacy litigation that has slowed every recent leasing program; his own Protect LNG Act is a confession that vacatur risk is the binding constraint. His statutory codifications, once passed, are lawsuit-proof by design: that is the bill's purpose.

President DeSantis' orders would face a different wall: preemption. National preemption of state climate policy via executive order is a major-questions problem — OCSLA, the Clean Air Act, and FERC's natural-gas statutes occupy specific fields, and a general order declaring federal law to bar state net-zero policy would be enjoined in the Ninth Circuit within weeks. His Florida record was possible because Florida's legislature passed his bills; Washington's version requires Congress, and his offshore-drilling exception would collide with OCSLA's leasing schedule, which courts have repeatedly held an agency must follow — including when the schedule includes waters off Florida.

The deepest constraint on both is the one Cruz named in his own bill text: presidents have imposed more restrictions on U.S. oil companies than on Russian oil, and each restriction, once litigated, becomes precedent the next president inherits. Two energy-maximalist presidencies would discover that the authority to stop leasing is the same authority the other party used — and that courts review both identically.