This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part two in a four-part series. Read part one here.
President Trump and Texas lawmakers are pushing to loosen the laws and liabilities governing the state’s oil and gas industry and give companies a freer hand to “drill, baby, drill,” drawing mixed reactions from the heart of oil country.
On his first day back in office, the president declared a “national energy emergency.” With demand for electricity rising, the U.S. would now be able to “do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem,” he said.
His administration has moved quickly to strip away a number of regulations and liabilities that impacted the oil and gas industry, lifting endangered species protections in the Permian Basin, instructing the Army Corps to fast-track pipeline construction under the Clean Water Act and laying the groundwork to overhaul a bedrock law that requires the government to consider environmental consequences before approving infrastructure projects.
Industry executives are hailing the new administration as a breath of fresh air: an end, as oil executive Kirk Edwards of Odessa-based Latigo Petroleum told The Hill shortly before Trump’s inauguration, to “these useless regulations that have been coming our way that we have to battle all the time.”
Energy experts have been widely dismissive of the idea that Trump can increase drilling, however. They say that a rising global price of oil — potentially driven by more upheaval abroad — is the only likely driver of further oil-sector expansion.
In regulatory terms, fossil fuel “investors have a friend in the White House,” Trey Cowan of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told The Hill. But he added that markets, and not the White House, would determine whether there would be more drilling.
And personal injury attorneys, law enforcement and worker safety advocates alike warn that if the sector does expand — particularly in tandem with continued deregulation — it would mean a lot more deaths on the nation’s roads, construction sites and well pads, where some workers already report being pushed past the limits of safety.
The current efforts to limit liability in the oil and gas industry are part of a larger pattern of deregulation that has reshaped trucking and oil field work over the past four decades. In 1980, in the name of fighting inflation, Congress passed the Motor Carriers Act, which ended policies that had sought to protect truckers’ incomes by setting federal standards for rates and driving hours.
That change would eventually reshape life in the Permian Basin, where truckers haul everything from frac sand to toxic waste on narrow county roads ill-equipped for the boom. Over the past 45 years, the region has experienced an economic revival, and the oil and gas industry has recorded booming profits — as wages in the national trucking industry have plummeted by half.
The self-employed truckers who are the backbone of the industry entered a similar state of “debt peonage” to that later experienced by chicken farmers, said sociologist and former truck driver Michael Belzer of Wayne State University. “You ostensibly own the assets and they control the money. They control the freight,” he said. “You know the old song? ‘I owe my soul to the company store’?”
Under this paradigm, he said, truckers were pushed to work longer, harder and with higher risk of accidents. They have “no requirement to record their hours of work,” aside from federal requirements Belzer said can easily be skirted. “That means that the minimum wage doesn’t really apply, and the maximum hours definitely does not apply.”
Truckers described brutal hours, little pay and pressure to ignore safety limits. “Every day, the company demanded more and paid less,” said one driver, Eldys, who was fired after organizing and whose name has been changed in this piece to preserve anonymity.
In 2023, more than 1,000 people died in crashes across Texas’s oil-producing regions — twice as many as in 2010, when the boom began. Despite efforts to cut the toll, deaths rose 3 percent last year.
Local officials point to a regulatory and enforcement environment that hasn’t kept pace with the scale of the boom as a driving force behind the mounting dangers on the region’s roads. Ector County Sheriff Mike Griffis lays a large part of the blame for the deaths on what he describes as negligent hiring by oil companies. “A lot of those truck drivers don’t even have licenses to drive these trucks,” Griffis said.
With business booming, he charged, companies in the region are hiring unqualified drivers “because they’re all about profit. But I can’t imagine the profit overcoming the lawsuits and death and whatever else these people may cause.”
Attorneys argue weak oversight lets unqualified drivers get behind the wheel, fueling the rising casualties. “There’s an enormous amount of violations, and they all contribute to this enormous death toll on the oilfield roads,” attorney Kent Buckingham said. In one lawsuit he’s trying, he said, a driver with a valid commercial driver’s license didn’t know how to handle a manual transmission — which are ubiquitous in tractor trailers — missed a stop sign, and caused severe injuries to a father and daughter.
Buckingham argues that companies paying truckers by the load or working them around the clock creates incentives for speeding and overwork — and that without consistent enforcement, companies have little reason to crack down. Corporations, he said, have “an incentive to not monitor [driving rules], because it keeps the drivers driving and increases the bottom line.”
Industry leaders, meanwhile, argue that “nuclear verdicts” from aggressive attorneys are harming small producers. “In the Permian, you’re seeing these law firms use predatory tactics to recruit clients,” said Tim Tarpley, president of the Energy Workforce & Technology Council.
To rein in these lawsuits, Texas lawmakers passed HB 19 in 2021, limiting what evidence attorneys could present at trial. The law created a two-step system: Attorneys could only introduce evidence about a driver’s negligence, not the company’s broader safety failures, until they proved the driver was at fault.
State Rep. Jeff Leach (R), who sponsored the bill, said lawsuits against trucking companies had risen faster than the number of severe injuries or deaths on Texas roads, and that HB 19 was needed to curb “abuses” in the legal system.
But for industry groups like the Lone Star Economic Alliance (LSEA), that law didn’t go far enough. It left exceptions allowing plaintiffs to argue that a company’s negligence contributed to a crash if a trucking company knowingly hired a driver with multiple DUIs, ignored federal safety standards or failed to maintain its fleet despite known hazards.
A new bill filed by state Sen. Brent Hagenbuch (R) in February, SB 1135, seeks to close those loopholes, further shielding trucking companies from liability in cases involving alleged unsafe hiring, training or maintenance.
And industry groups are pushing for more. In November, an LSEA spokesperson told KXAN, which like The Hill is owned by Nexstar Media Group, that future legislation could cap “pain and suffering” awards and require juries to be instructed not to “punish” companies with large verdicts.
The American Property and Casualty Insurance Association argues such legislation is necessary because rising numbers of lawsuits lead to higher costs for both businesses and consumers. State juries awarded about 10 verdicts of $10 million or more every year between 2013 and 2022 — many from trucking accidents, said Jon Ward, APCIA vice president of public affairs, told The HIll.
HB 1135, Ward said, aimed to “ensure that evidence presented at trial has some reasonable connection to the accident at issue.” He said that lawsuits for trucking accidents had more than doubled over the past decade — a period which corresponds with the doubling of the number of traffic fatalities in Texas’ oil fields.
Consumer advocates characterize these reforms as a corporate giveaway that will worsen safety on Texas roads. “We have the most deadly roads in the nation,” said Ware Wendell of advocacy group Texas Watch, which seeks greater state scrutiny of the insurance industry and is opposed to the loosening of trucking liability. “If we’re reducing liability for dangerous trucking companies, we’re going to have even more people killed.”
Wendell argues that the real winners from tort reform aren’t small businesses — but insurance companies. “They’d love nothing more than to sell policies and not pay out benefits.”
Cutting rates, Wendell argued, would only be possible under the current policies if insurance companies cut the payouts or legal damages paid out after accidents — potentially leaving grievously injured people without resources to pay for their care.
To solve the problem of high payouts after crashes, he said, “let’s make these trucking companies safer.”
Trucking isn’t the only area in which critics say regulatory changes have heightened risks. Trucking deregulation was a harbinger of broader rollbacks in labor and environmental protections across the oil field — changes that safety advocates say left oil and gas workers, and the communities that they worked in, less safe.
In 1983, for example, Occupational Safety and Health Administration exemptions stripped upstream oil and gas workers of safeguards against hazards like benzene exposure. Subsequent decisions further eroded similar regulatory guardrails. In 1988, oil field waste was exempted from hazardous waste rules, and in 2005, the Energy Policy Act allowed thousands of chemicals in fracking fluid to bypass Clean Water Act oversight.
Critics say this risk is compounded by the lack of comprehensive state or federal air and water monitoring in much of the Permian Basin, which they say makes it nearly impossible to track toxic exposures or hold companies accountable for spills. The region has only six stations to monitor air quality across 86,000 square miles of wells, many of which are venting toxic chemicals 24 hours a day, according to a report by Oilfield Witness.
That lack of monitoring could mean, for example, Texas environmental regulators don’t know how much of the region is above safe levels of ozone, which can scar the lungs and damage the heart. The state has “diligently avoided measuring ozone anywhere in the Permian,” said Gunnar Schade, an atmospheric chemist at Texas A&M University.
“That’s pretty straightforward: If they did, monitoring would find that whole region in nonattainment [with federal standards]. If you don’t measure, there’s no legal way to do anything about it.”
A Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spokesperson said the state is “currently meeting the applicable federal air monitoring requirements under the Clean Air Act.”
Criminal enforcement for environmental violations still happens in some areas. Last March, a Biden administration Department of Justice grand jury charged an Odessa oil producer with conspiracy for failing to maintain its machinery after a company worker and his wife died of hydrogen sulfide poisoning on company grounds — a case that now falls to the Trump administration to litigate.
In recent months, West Texas lawsuits have alleged incidents of severe negligence in several other cases. In July, homeowners said a towering pile of waste fuel containers exploded in West Odessa, sending flames 100 feet high and poisoning their well water. Another suit claims an oil worker was caught in a “massive fireball” last October because his employer failed to ground electrical systems. And fuel truck driver Jeffrey Springman, who settled with his former employer last year, said benzene poisoning left him in hospice. “I strongly advise people not to trust any oil company if they tell you they have your back,” he said.
The Hill has reached out to all of the above companies for comment. In other lawsuits alleging similar issues, companies have tended to respond to lawsuits with denials or refusal to comment — often followed by a quiet settlement for an undisclosed amount.
Environmental protection is one area where Texas legislators have proposed some bills that seek to bring a measure of order to the boom. HB 3707, introduced by longtime Texas kingmaker and Permian Basin state Rep. Tom Craddick (R), targets illegal handling of oil field waste.
“Texas has long been a leader in oil and gas, and with that leadership comes the responsibility to ensure that oil and gas resources are managed safely and efficiently,” Craddick told an Odessa TV station, adding that “this legislation is a necessary step to protect Texans from fraudulent or unsafe practices.”
Other legislation that has been proposed on the issue, however, would still leave wide leeway for the industry. Bills this session have been more focused on preventing and prosecuting thefts of oil and equipment from sparsely monitored rig sites than on safety. While a group of state Senate bills do aim to address widespread water pollution from fracking, for example, they contain wide loopholes that would allow treated fracking fluid to be spread aboveground, require abandoned wells to be plugged only after long delays, or make such remediation voluntary.
Overall, the Texas Legislature’s efforts are in keeping with a broad state push against federal enforcement — one that the Trump administration has signaled alignment with. Many of Trump’s executive orders, for example, seek to rollback Biden-era regulations targeted in lawsuits led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
In January, Wayne Christian, one of the heads of the Railroad Commission — the state’s principal oil and gas regulator — expressed confidence that the regulatory landscape would change under the Trump administration. In a letter, Christian called on the state’s environmental regulator to stop any implementation of a Biden-era rule that would have required each state to create a plan to limit releases of methane, a potent planet-heating gas and source of airborne toxins.
Big oil companies like Exxon, Christian conceded, like the rule. But complying with it, he argued, would force smaller ones out of business.
Both the House and Senate passed a resolution to repeal a rule implementing the methane fee in late February, sending it to Trump’s desk. The program itself remains written into law in the Inflation Reduction Act, the massive climate, tax and health care package passed under former President Biden — but congressional Republicans have indicated they plan to take something “between a scalpel and a sledgehammer” to the law as well.
In his letter, Christian signaled that a new day was at hand in the oil patch he regulates. “Elections have consequences, and the American people decided that the Biden administration’s energy and environmental agenda aren’t in their best interest,” Christian wrote the regulator.
“Relief from Washington bureaucrats in the DC swamp is on the way; let’s wait for the cavalry to arrive before surrendering.”
