Ohio families are paying the price for the government-induced energy crisis

Last month, gas prices hit a record high here in Ohio, and honestly, that tracks: 94% of Ohio voters say energy costs are extremely or somewhat important to them.

Whether it’s the gas pump or the AC bill, Ohioans can’t catch a break. And that’s not bad luck. It’s a choice Republican elected officials keep making.

Let’s call it what it is: a government-induced energy crisis. Trump promised to cut energy costs in half in his first year.

Instead, household electricity costs in Ohio have gone up more than 25% since he took office. And thanks to his war in Iran — with Ohio U.S. Sen. Jon Husted cheering from the sidelines — we’re paying a dollar more per gallon of gas than we were a year ago.

That’s not incidental for Husted, by the way. He’s voted 14 times for Trump’s war and policies that raised costs for Ohio families on gas, electricity, tariff-affected goods, and ACA coverage.

A Center for American Progress analysis found that in just the first half of 2026, Trump’s and Congress’s policies raised costs for Ohio families by $2,175 per household. The Iran war alone has cost Ohio residents an extra $1.77 billion in gasoline — $365 more per household.

Here’s the part that should really make you mad: none of it seems to bother them.

Trump told reporters “I love the inflation”, and that he’ll “never apologize for $4 gas.”

Husted, for his part, has said the Iran war is going “much better” than expected, and that people living in poverty are “not very experienced at navigating the real world.” Try telling that to a family deciding between groceries and the electric bill.

Husted even used the Iran war as an excuse to skip testifying in person in one of Ohio’s biggest corruption scandals — the FirstEnergy scandal that’s already costing Ohio households $663 more a year on their electric bills. He found time for a fundraiser, though.

Meanwhile, Trump and congressional Republicans have been cutting domestic energy production, not expanding it. Last year, Husted voted for the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which repealed made-in-America energy tax credits that even some Republicans asked Speaker Johnson to protect.

Statewide, that vote put an estimated $10.48 billion in investment and 14,304 good-paying clean energy jobs on the chopping block — many of them recruited by Gov. DeWine himself. That law is now expected to raise Ohio families’ annual energy bills by another $190 a year by 2035 and cost the state 34,000 jobs.

This really isn’t complicated. It’s supply and demand. If you want energy costs to come down, you don’t make it harder to produce more clean energy, which Republicans at the state and federal level have done. That’s especially true right now, with data centers driving up demand across the state, which Husted has been a long-time champion of.

Ohioans are the ones paying for all of this, every month, at every gas station and on every electric bill. Trump built this crisis, and Jon Husted has been right there helping him do it. Ohio deserves leaders who’ll own that and actually fix it — not ones who dismiss our struggles while launching ill-advised wars that make them worse.