President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have laid off tens of thousands of federal employees, but defenders of the current administration are claiming that former President Joe Biden killed thousands of jobs when he canceled a permit for the Keystone pipeline in January 2021.
In an executive order signed the same day he was sworn in as president, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed extension to the existing Keystone oil pipeline that would connect Canada and Nebraska and run through Montana and South Dakota. However, estimates for the number of temporary construction and manufacturing jobs the pipeline project would have created have varied. Social media users have claimed the pipeline would have created 10,000 jobs or more, but studies at the time predicted a lower total.
“6,000 IRS agents will be laid off tomorrow,” Daniel Turner, the founder of the right-of-center energy advocacy group, Power the Future, tweeted on February 19. “Democrats and the mainstream media will pretend to be outraged by this. These are the same people who showed zero sympathy to the 14,000 Keystone XL pipeline workers Joe Biden laid off.” Several Facebook accounts, including the Trump fan account, “Trump Nation,” posted the same message, verbatim. “Did we see 14,000 fired keystone pipeline workers fired [sic] on day one of the Biden admin paraded on 60 Minutes?” the posts state. “Nope, so spare me your tears for the bureaucrats losing their jobs in [Washington] DC right now.” Similar messages posted on Instagram and Threads claim that Biden fired 10,000 pipeline workers.
These claims are partially false and missing context. Thousands of existing workers were not fired as a result of Biden’s decision because construction of the pipeline extension was not fully underway when its permit was pulled. Denying the permit did prevent jobs from being created, but the number of jobs that would have resulted is disputed.
TC Energy—the company that owns the Keystone pipeline and which announced the Keystone XL project in 2008—has in the past cited a study it commissioned, which found that the Keystone XL pipeline project would create 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs. However, separate studies conducted by the State Department and the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (IRL) projected that fewer than 10,000 jobs would be directly created. These estimates represent the predicted number of temporary jobs—such as workers directly assembling the pipeline or manufacturing needed materials, such as steel—and not the number of spin-off jobs, or jobs created by additional economic output from the pipeline.
But the road to completion was a long one and never finished. Former President Barack Obama in February 2015 vetoed a legislative bill granting federal approval for the Keystone XL project, and attempts at a veto override failed in the Senate the next month. President Trump worked to resuscitate the project in his first term before the Biden administration arrived in 2021 and reversed course.
A September 2011 press release from the then-TransCanada Corporation, since renamed TC Energy, claimed that “within days of receiving regulatory approval for Keystone XL, TransCanada would begin to put 20,000 Americans directly to work during the construction phase.” It added: “this includes welders, pipefitters, heavy equipment operators and engineers,” citing the study the company commissioned. Later that year, TransCanada’s energy and oil pipelines president, Alex Pourbaix, cited the 20,000 figure before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. “This project will also create valuable jobs for Americans. Construction of the segment from Cushing, [Oklahoma], to the Gulf Coast would have created over 4,000 construction jobs next year,” Pourbaix said in December 2011. “Construction of the northern segment … would have created an additional 9,000 construction jobs. On top of that,” he added, “there are 7,000 manufacturing jobs associated with this project—20,000 jobs in all.” While the segment connecting Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast in Texas was completed the following year in 2012, TC Energy officially scrapped construction plans for the northern segment in June 2021, months after Biden revoked the pipeline’s permit.
Other studies indicate that the 20,000 jobs figure might be exaggerated. For example, a September 2011 study from Cornell IRL stated that the 20,000 figure is “misleading and erroneous on a number of levels.”
“The claim that KXL will create 20,000 direct construction and manufacturing jobs in the US is unsubstantiated,” the report said. “There is strong evidence to suggest that a large portion of the primary material input for KXL—steel pipe—will not even be produced in the US.” The report argued that “jobs created in Canada—while important to the Canadian economy—should not then be pitched as ‘American jobs’ to the media and the American public.”
The Cornell IRL report also said the Perryman Group, which conducted the company’s commissioned report, overestimated the amount of project funding that would have been spent in the U.S. and that it also included in its estimates spending and employment for an already-completed section of the pipeline in Kansas and Oklahoma. “I’m not sure where 20,000 comes from,” Sean Sweeney, director of Cornell IRL, told NPR in December 2011. “We know the direct construction jobs are nowhere near 20,000. We know the steel, or a portion of it, is not produced in the United States; so where are the jobs?” Instead, Cornell IRL projected the pipeline extension would add “only 5,060-9,250 person-years of employment” for American workers, or about 2,500-4,650 total jobs sustained over two years of construction. These jobs are considered temporary because their labor is not required upon the project’s completion.
An article from PolitiFact in June 2022 addressing similar claims points to another study investigating the impact of the Keystone pipeline extension, from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. That study projected new temporary jobs totals below even the figures Cornell IRL calculated, estimating 3,900 jobs in total, or 1,950 jobs per year over two years of construction.
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