Tucked into the infrastructure bill that was passed last year was a provision requiring the Department of Energy to produce a report within 90 days, detailing the number of American jobs that were lost as a result of Joe Biden’s decision to halt construction on the Keystone XL pipeline via executive order. It was one of the few compromises that Democrats offered to the GOP during the negotiations. Joe Biden signed that bill into law, so the report became a legal requirement for his administration to fulfill. And yet last week the deadline came and went, with no sign of the report being delivered or even completed. The Washington Times poses the correct question this week, wondering how often the Biden administration is going to create rules and then simply ignore them if it seems politically expedient to do so.

The Biden administration is flouting a law that requires it to produce a report on the number of jobs lost by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, in addition to describing how its action may have affected energy costs.

The roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in November included a provision mandating the Department of Energy to produce a report to Congress detailing the impact to American jobs and energy as a result of Mr. Biden’s decision to end the pipeline.

The legislation allowed Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm 90 days to provide the information to Congress. But that Feb. 13 deadline came and went last week with no response from Ms. Granholm, according to several Republican lawmakers who have since pressed for answers.

This isn’t the first time that the Biden administration has ignored congressional mandates for the public release of reports. In January, the deadline for a report from ICE on illegal immigration numbers came and went. The report was eventually released weeks later when the news cycle had safely moved on to other stories.

The number of new jobs we missed out on creating by finishing the pipeline, along with all of the secondary, positive impact that work would have on local economies is alarming enough on its own. But the situation around the world has changed considerably since then. (If we had only known then what we know now.) We’re no longer simply talking about lost domestic jobs. The Keystone XL pipeline would have carried millions of barrels of oil per day to refineries along the Gulf Coast.

Why is that suddenly even more important? Because we were exporting some of those petroleum products by the end of the Trump administration, including to various countries in Europe. Now the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has suddenly gone into the deep freeze because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That’s going to lead to a significant spike in demand in Germany and other parts of Europe. Given the global nature of the energy market, when demand spikes in one region, other suppliers have to fill the void and prices rise across the board.

So what does this mean to the average consumer? We learned yesterday that oil prices are already rushing toward near-seasonal records of more than $100 per barrel. As NPR reported last night, Russian production accounts for 17% of the world’s natural gas supply and 14% of all oil. The other pipelines they currently utilize all run through Ukraine, and we all know what’s happening there currently.

And do you know where that Russian oil is being exported to? Increasingly, it’s been going to the United States. In fact, our oil imports from Russia more than tripled between 2019 and 2021, with a large portion of the increase coming after Keystone XL was canceled.

So what happens if we reduce our own production and throttle back the exports from a major supplier simultaneously? Anyone who has had to fill up their gas tank in the past month already knows the answer to that question, and people are not happy about it. I sure hope Joe Biden won himself a lot of votes from his base on the day of his inauguration by canceling the permit for Keystone XL. But there’s probably going to be a reckoning coming fairly soon.