It didn’t take long this year for the Trump administration to remind us about its appetite for government stakes — and Venezuela could be the next frontier in its growing portfolio.

The latest example came from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, one of the top officials taking point in cajoling Western oil executives to invest in Venezuela. During a Sunday interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, he was asked if the U.S. is considering taking stakes in the Venezuelan oil sector. He said it’s “certainly a very real possibility” in the aftermath of the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

That doesn’t come as a big surprise. The Trump administration has been on an acquisition spree much of the past year, taking direct stakes in 14 companies spanning steel, rare earth minerals, semiconductors, and nuclear energy, according to Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. More are surely on the way in 2026, and it’s not hard to imagine Venezuela’s crippled oil sector catching Trump’s eye.

Many Republicans have long been aghast at Trump’s move to make the U.S. government a shareholder in the private sector. They view it as anathema to the free market principles underpinning the party since the 1960s.

“I'm a free market conservative, and I don't see how anybody can argue that is a conservative position,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told Quartz Washington last month. “Does anybody really believe if we take a 10% stake in a company that any other board members vote matters but ours? ... It’s a slippery slope.”

If the Trump administration does take a stake in Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, U.S. officials must contend with the post-Maduro government that’s still led by most of the same socialist, authoritarian officials as before. Venezuela racked up a history of state-backed confiscation that started under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.

In 2010, Chávez once gave the order for several jewelry stores in Caracas to be expropriated, all on a whim during a live TV broadcast. Three years earlier, Chavez’s nationalization spree reached the Venezuelan oil sector. Rather than accept smaller stakes in oil projects without getting compensated, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips left the country. They sued the Venezuela government on their way out.

The uncertainty surrounding Venezuela’s future has chilled enthusiasm among major Western oil executives, most of whom are reluctant to join President Donald Trump in his crusade to reboot Venezuelan oil. It was evident at the White House meeting last week when ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods described current conditions in Venezuela as “uninvestable.”

It probably angered the president, who left empty-handed without the flashy type of business deal he built a political identity on. Two days later, Trump flirted with shutting out ExxonMobil following Woods’ blunt comments. He also issued an executive order walling off Venezuelan oil revenue deposited in U.S. held-accounts from claims by Western creditors.

For now, U.S. oil producers are quelling talk of a federal backstop for possible spending in Venezuela.

“We do not think that it is necessary for there to be financial support for the industry to go into Venezuela,” American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers told me this week. “I think what we're interested in is a stable government, a secure security for an American workforce that would go in there, [for] rule of law and capitalism to flourish.”

The American Petroleum Institute — the chief lobbying group for the U.S. oil sector — hosted its annual State of American Energy in Washington on Tuesday. Sommers and industry executives argued that U.S. prosperity still hinges on the success of the oil and gas sector, with no peak in energy demand anytime soon.

When it comes to Venezuela, they laid out conditions that must be met for hefty investments to be considered, including rule of law, stability, and long-term certainty that workers won’t be endangered or their equipment seized. Sommers dumped cold water on the idea of U.S. government stakes. He later identified Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt as the primary areas that oil firms had interest in redeveloping.

Earlier this week, Trump reposted on social media a meme that referred to him as Venezuela’s “Acting President.” But it might be more accurate to call him the Gatekeeper-in-Chief.

“In my 25 years of covering energy and working in geopolitics, it's kind of hard to find another example of this type of brazen energy statecraft,” said Carolyn Kisseau, an energy professor at New York University. “It's a very bold, almost weaponized resource statecraft, in terms of this idea that not only can we extract the resources, we will control the extraction of the resources.”

—Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Trump wants to implement a one-year cap on credit card interest rates at 10% starting on Jan. 20. The move elicited rare criticism from Wall Street firms, including JPMorgan Chase, which said “everything is on the table” to prevent the policy from kicking in.