ROUND UP: Out-of-Touch Trump Pretends Costs Are Going Down As Americans Continue to Face Rate Hikes 

Washington, DC – During last night’s Oval Office address, Donald Trump tried to gaslight the American people by claiming that the country is doing “really well,” but for anyone who has looked at their utility bill lately, it’s a very different picture. Despite Trump’s promise to cut energy costs in half, electricity prices have spiked by 18% nationally as he and Republicans in Congress gut clean energy projects across the country. To make matters worse, oil prices are rising yet again after Trump launched new strikes against Iran. 

A recent report from Climate Power and the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that the average American family is spending $2,000 more on gas, groceries, and other essential goods. According to the report, Americans have spent an additional $213 for their utility bills alone, and more every month. In recent weeks, customers in six states have faced rate hikes. 

Iowa

• MidAmerican Energy proposed a 5% rate increase, which was projected to raise the average residential customer’s monthly natural gas bill by $2.89 to $58.49.
  
• The City of Sioux Center approved a 7% electric rate increase, raising the average residential household bill by roughly $7.

Michigan

• The Lansing Board of Water and Light proposed increasing the typical residential electric customer’s bill by an average of 2.1%, or roughly $2 per month.
  
• SK Siltron announced it was closing its SK Siltron CSS subsidiary, winding down operations at its Bay County manufacturing facility, and laying off all 140 employees there. The company said the closure was due to changes in the EV market. 

Virginia

• Dominion Energy announced it would raise customer electric bills by $8 a month for the following 12 months through a monthly fuel charge to recover more than $1 billion in unrecovered fuel costs.

North Dakota

• Montana-Dakota Utilities filed a 14.5% rate increase proposal with the North Dakota Public Service Commission, resulting in an estimated $19 monthly electric bill increase for a typical household.

Vermont

• The Barton Village of Trustees sought to increase electricity rates by 14.73%.

Washington 

• Alpha Technologies announced it was laying off 75 staff members and closing its operations unit in Bellingham, Washington. The facility manufactured commercial energy equipment. 

New Hampshire

• The Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire announced a 2% rate hike for customers, increasing the basic default electric rate for residential and small commercial customers to 14.949 cents per kilowatt-hour, up from 14.663 cents.

National

• Analysis from Energy Innovation found that the Trump administration’s rollback of clean energy policy would add more than half a trillion dollars to American households’ collective energy costs by 2040.
  • The analysis found that the cumulative impact of the Trump administration’s actions would raise the average household’s energy costs by $460 by 2035, rising to $490 a year by 2040.
• According to a report from PowerLines, in Q2 of 2026, electric and gas utilities asked state regulators to approve $9.2 billion in rate hikes, up 26% from the $7.3 billion in rate increase proposals filed in Q2 of 2025.