The deadline arrived this week. On the campaign trail, President Trump pledged that “12 months from January 20, your electric bill… will be 50, 5-0 percent, less,” a Trump promise later stretched to an 18-month window. That window closed on July 20, 2026. Instead of falling by half, electricity prices went up.
According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, residential electricity rates rose 18% from Trump’s January 2025 inauguration through April 2026, the latest month available. In the most recent 12 months alone, rates climbed 7.3%, roughly double the rate of inflation. Energy bills are moving in the opposite direction of the pledge.
The Scorecard: Promise Versus Reality
A 50% cut would have roughly halved the typical household’s power bill. The actual figure, an 18% increase since inauguration, means most Americans are paying meaningfully more.
Pressure is not easing. PJM Interconnection, the largest grid operator in the country, posted a capacity price of $16.4 billion for power delivery in the 2028 to 2029 period, tying the prior record high. Capacity auctions set what utilities pay to guarantee future power supply, and those costs flow to customers. Utilities also filed $9.2 billion in rate-hike requests in the second quarter of 2026 alone, up 26% from the same period a year earlier. The electricity rate hikes already recorded may be a preview rather than a peak.
Why Prices Rose Instead of Fell
The core driver is a supply-and-demand mismatch that predates the administration and has intensified. Data centers powering the AI boom are consuming electricity at a pace the grid was not built for, adding an estimated $6 billion to PJM’s auction costs by themselves. On the supply side, coal and natural gas plants have continued to close, pulling capacity off just as demand surges.
Independent analysts were skeptical from the start. Travis Fisher of the Cato Institute put it plainly: “It was an impossible promise to deliver on because there really isn’t that much federal government involvement in retail rates… It was always going to be a steep uphill climb.” Retail rates are set largely by state regulators and utilities, not the White House.
Policy Choices That Worked Against the Goal
Several documented policy decisions ran counter to the price-cutting goal. Tariffs raised the cost of key grid equipment, including a 147% tariff on Chinese goods that was later struck down, and a 15% tariff still in place on some grid equipment. Because utilities pass hardware costs through to ratepayers, more expensive transformers and electrical steel show up on bills.
The administration also paid developers to cancel offshore wind projects, including nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies (NYSE:TTE | TTE Price Prediction), removing potential capacity from the pipeline at a moment when demand is climbing.
The Response and the Road Ahead
In March 2026, the White House introduced a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” asking data center operators and utilities to front the infrastructure costs their expansion creates. As of the 18-month deadline, it has not moved rates, which continued climbing through the latest available data.
Alternative fixes are on the table, including proposals to let data centers connect directly to independent power plants, a model some call “Consumer Regulated Electricity.”. Even supporters acknowledge such approaches are unlikely to deliver relief on the scale or timeline originally promised.
The bottom line is what the data shows. Eighteen months after a pledge to cut bills in half, residential rates are up 18% since inauguration and 7.3% over the past year, with record capacity-auction costs and a wave of rate-hike requests still working toward customers. The specific promise, cheaper power by mid-2026, was not met.
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