An energy watchdog group wants to know whether eight of President Joe Biden’s far-left executive orders related to energy were signed by autopen.
Power the Future argues that Biden never mentioned the orders publicly, which raises the corollary question of whether the mentally addled president even knew about them, and whether his radical underlings wrote and signed them.
The questions are important because of the autopen scandal that surfaced in March. It raised the question of whether autopenned orders — including presidential pardons — are valid.
Power The Future’s also invites a look at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that Biden didn’t know that he signed an order that ended liquid natural gas exports.
The Orders
An energy information clearinghouse with a focus on the industry’s workers, Power the Future reported that scrutinizing Biden’s far-left energy agenda invited a “troubling question: did President Joe Biden ever even know about some of the sweeping actions taken in his name?”
The outfit asked the question in light of a not-insignificant fact. Having reviewed eight executive actions, the group “found no evidence that President Biden ever personally spoke about any of them. Not in a press conference. Not in a speech. Not even a video statement.”
Biden’s orders included:
- Clean AI Data Centers EO (Jan. 14, 2025): Gave the Departments of Defense and Energy the green light to lease public land for AI data centers, provided they’re powered by “clean energy.”…
- Offshore Drilling Ban (Jan. 6, 2025): Pulled over 625 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf out of future oil and gas leasing.…
- EO 14143 (Jan. 16, 2025): A last-days-of-the-administration decree making AmeriCorps alumni eligible for preferential federal hiring, potentially reshaping the makeup of the federal workforce without public debate and allowing eco-leftists to insert themselves in the administration.
- Arctic Drilling Ban (March 13, 2023): Prohibited oil and gas leasing in sensitive areas of the Arctic.…
- Defense Production Act Invocation (June 6, 2022): Used Cold War-era emergency powers to push solar panels and heat pumps….
- EO 14027 (May 7, 2021): Created a “Climate Change Support Office” buried in bureaucracy, giving climate staffers yet another taxpayer-funded silo of influence.
- EO 14030 (May 20, 2021): Ordered all federal agencies to assess “climate-related financial risk,” laying the groundwork for ESG-style investing mandates across the government.
- EO 14057 (Dec. 8, 2021): Committed the entire federal government to net-zero emissions by 2050 and required 100% carbon-free electricity by 2030 — one of the most expansive decarbonization orders in history.
Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner wonders who signed those documents, given that Biden was silent about them. “Americans deserve to know which unelected staffers or radical unnamed activists implemented sweeping change through an autopen,” Turner said:
The Biden energy agenda destroyed livelihoods of energy workers and fueled the record-high inflation that broke the budgets of millions of Americans. The question is simple, and deserves an immediate answer: what did Joe Biden know, and when did he know it?
Autopen Scandal
Power the Future’s speculation is warranted given what the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project revealed in March, along with House Speaker Johnson’s revelations about Biden’s mental capacity.
The Oversight Project disclosed that Biden’s autopen “pardoned six criminals (with the exact same autopen signature) while Joe Biden was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” And all those signatures were “signed at the city of Washington.”
While the documents might truly have been “signed at Washington,” Biden obviously couldn’t have signed them there. As the Daily Mail revealed, the elderly president was catching some rays on the isle of St. Croix in the Caribbean Sea.
Given that Biden vacationed for 577 days of his presidency — some 40 percent — some of the orders gathered by Power the Future might well be autopenned.
Just before the autopen scandal surfaced, GOP Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to find out who was running the country when Biden was mentally incapacitated.
“It appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them,” Bailey wrote:
That would explain why the Biden administration’s orders were aggressively much farther to the left than any previous President. If in fact Biden’s staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void.
Johnson’s Story
Bailey wrote to DOJ two months after House Speaker Johnson told Bari Weiss of The Free Press that Biden was out of it.
“It’s public now because The Wall Street Journal got it, and put it on the front page,” he told Weiss. But Johnson witnessed what the Journal called Biden’s “diminished” capacity. The newspaper disclosed that “aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted.”
During a private meeting, which occurred only because Biden shooed anxious aides out of the Oval Office, Johnson asked the octogenarian president why he paused liquid natural gas exports to Europe, a major concern for Johnson’s constituents. LNG is a major export from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.
“I didn’t do that,” a “stunned” Biden said.
I said, Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order, like you know, three weeks ago. And he goes, “No I didn’t do that.” He’s arguing with me. I said, Mr. President, respectfully, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out and we’ll read it together? You definitely did that.
Biden told Johnson that he signed an order to study the effects of LNG.
Not so, Johnson recalled. “You paused it,” he told Biden. “I know. I have the terminal, the export terminal, in my state. I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.”
Biden “genuinely did not know what he had signed,” Johnson told Weiss.
That story, and the autopen scandal, mean Power the Future has every reason to suspect Biden knew nothing about the orders he “signed.” They would include the LNG order that so disturbed Johnson.
H/T: Fox News
