How many new oil wells did you drill this year? Did your oil and gas reserves deplete? Do you operate your pipelines through a Master Limited Partnership?
Those questions likely don’t mean anything to the average person. They’re only relevant to Big Oil companies, which can get tax breaks for such actions.
The questions appear on “Trumpo Tax,” a satire website (a nod to Intuit’s tax-preparation software TurboTax) created by United to End Polluter Handouts (UTEPH), a coalition of climate groups that highlights how Americans’ tax dollars fund oil and gas corporations.
On Tax Day, (Wednesday, April 15), a “Trumpo Tax” kiosk is also on the streets of Washington, DC, with someone dressed as Donald Trump giving out tax advice—for Big Oil companies, that is.
A century-old American tradition
The U.S. has been subsidizing the fossil fuel industry for nearly a century. Oil and gas companies get tax breaks when their reserves deplete, for example, and can write off expenses related to drilling new oil wells.
Under President Trump—who has been a champion for fossil fuel companies—those subsidies have increased: His 2025 reconciliation bill, also called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, granted $40 billion in new subsidies to the oil and gas industry.
“We’re looking at a timeline right where scientists globally have said we have very little time left to drastically change our global economic system and to get off of fossil fuels if we want to have a present and future that is really livable,” says Jamie Minden, executive director of Zero Hour, a global youth climate justice organization and UTEPH coalition member.
“And unfortunately,” she adds, “we have an economic system in this country right now that is extremely beneficial to the industries that are making that future look pretty bad.”
On the Trumpo Tax website, answering the questions like a regular person—by picking responses like “No—I don’t have oil reserves” and “I’m a normal person and I’m confused by all this,”—prompts the page to flash red.
“LIB ALERT!” it reads. “Suspected non-fossil-fuel insider detected.”
You can also answer like a Big Oil company. To the question “When you earn more money, what happens to your taxes?” one optional answer reads “I pay less in taxes, because I pay $445 million for lobbyists.”
Do that, and the site will tally up the industry’s federal subsidies: $35 billion a year, according to Oil Change International and the Congressional Budget Office.
That works out to roughly $280 per American household (and doesn’t include any state or local subsidies).
Occasionally, an animated Trump also appears on the site, holding signs that say things like “They pay at the pump, we pocket billions. It’s not FRAUD. It’s ENERGY DOMINANCE!”
The Trumpo Tax website and the kiosk in Washington are meant to highlight, as Fletcher Harper of GreenFaith says in a statement, that “The Trump tax code has a preferred customer, and it’s not you.”
Those subsidies are keeping the fossil fuel industry running even when it doesn’t make economic sense, climate groups say.
Every new oil company drilling project is “a gamble,” economics and earth system science researchers wrote in 2022. That’s because thousands of oil and gas assets are at risk of becoming stranded, meaning they could become unprofitable or be forced to shut down years earlier than planned because of future policies designed to slow climate change.
It’s also cheaper to build new renewable energy projects like wind and solar than to build natural gas plants.
“These billionaires are profiting off of the backs of struggling Americans,” Minden says. “It’s a really clear example of how the oil and gas industry is really not in anyone’s best interest.”
