Both policy levers are muted. The Henry Hub band is wider than the policy-floor framework predicts.

Policy is supposed to bound the Henry Hub price band. Two specific levers transmit: DOE LNG export approvals (the demand ceiling) and EPA methane fees (the supply floor). Right now, both are muted.

The DOE side reopened. Biden's January 2024 non-FTA pause was lifted in January 2025, when a new energy executive order directed DOE to restart reviews and DOE ended the pause. Commonwealth LNG took the first conditional order in February 2025, CP2 LNG conditional in March 2025, and Plaquemines and Elba Island uprates in March and April 2026. The non-FTA gate — which controls access to most of the global LNG market — is open again. With approvals flowing, the binding constraint shifts downstream to FID and execution. Mexico Pacific's Saguaro filed a seven-year extension on its commercial-operations deadline, pushing it to 2032; when the original deadline arrived in December 2025 undecided, DOE tolled the authorization rather than granting the extension, which is still pending. That's what an approval looks like when it's failing to convert.

The methane side is more decisively muted under the present statute. The Waste Emissions Charge — the per-ton fee structure that would have transmitted into producer breakevens — was statutorily delayed by Public Law 119-21, the July 2025 reconciliation package. The chargeable start year moved from 2024 to 2034. The 2025 CRA repeal of the implementing rule grabbed headlines; the reconciliation statute moving the chargeable year out by a decade did the bigger work. No WEC fee is chargeable through 2033, so the methane floor mechanism is off the board through the rest of the decade under the present statute.

What this leaves: both transmission levers are currently inactive as tightening forces. The Henry Hub band is less policy-constrained than a simple policy-floor framework would predict. Weather, storage, Permian takeaway, and global LNG netbacks still bound the band — but the policy contribution is quiet. 2026 reads as a fundamentals market.

The regime-change signal lives upstream of price: watch the statute and the project slate, not the tape. WEC reinstatement (a statute change, not an EPA rule), a cluster of deadline slips on approved-but-not-built LNG projects, or a global netback shock that pulls FID forward across the permitted slate — any of these reactivates a transmission channel. When the band re-narrows on a step change rather than on fundamentals grinding back to normal, the source is a lever reactivating.

Today, the policy ceiling is open and the policy floor is absent. The trade is in the lever, not the market.