After months of sitting on the sidelines and nodding approvingly while Donald Trump and Elon Musk eviscerate the federal government, congressional Republicans are finally joining in. To offset extending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, Republicans are searching high and low for spending cuts. And that means wiping away any policy initiatives — even, perhaps especially, the successful ones — that were enacted under President Joe Biden.
Republicans particularly have homed in on rolling back the substantial recent progress on fighting climate change. Many Americans are likely unaware that we are in the midst of a green energy revolution, driven not only by market forces but by government at all levels. But the GOP is determined to stop success in its tracks.
It all adds up to a future of more gas-guzzlers and more pollution.
The Trump administration, in its zeal to demolish any government program meant to address climate change, often seems to be violating existing law — for instance, by refusing to spend money that had been appropriated by Congress. As a result, many of those efforts are tied up in court. But the mega bill under consideration in Congress is moved under the budget reconciliation process, which means it can pass with a simple majority. That offers the White House and its GOP allies an opportunity to make just about whatever spending changes they like.
This week, a group of House committees released the text of their portions of the bill, including the Energy and Commerce Committee and the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee; those two are where the assault on climate spending is centered. The fattest target for cuts is the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed in 2022. Widely regarded as the most important climate law in history, the IRA established a panoply of programs for conservation, climate resilience, emissions reduction and green energy development. Yet since many of those programs roll out spending over years or even decades, Republicans can be cut them off just as they’re ramping up.
The highest-profile program may be the IRA’s $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, which the Ways and Means bill looks to repeal (though in a complicated, years-long fashion). Republicans also want to loosen auto emission standards and eliminate funding for new kinds of zero-emission vehicles. It all adds up to a future of more gas-guzzlers and more pollution.
EVs are still a small portion of the American market; the IRA sought to help U.S. manufacturers catch up with the rest of the world, where EVs are taking off in both production and adoption. The Chinese EV industry in particular has left us in the dust. Republicans, however, seem determined to keep us in the last century.
The GOP legislation would also gut the Loan Programs Office, a venture capital operation within the Department of Energy. The LPO, created in 2005 under a law passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush, funds promising companies that banks and private venture capitalists might not back. It has been successful at helping many innovative American firms develop new technologies and bring them to market. In 2010, for example, it provided a $465 million loan to a fledgling car company named Tesla.
No project is too small or unobjectionable to escape the knife.
Republicans are also looking to phase out tax credits for wind and solar development, as well as homeowner credits for things like energy audits and heat pumps. They want to claw back billions of dollars from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a kind of green bank meant to fund local projects promoting conservation and clean energy use. And while they plan to largely preserve a popular advanced manufacturing tax credit the IRA created, they want to phase it out for wind power projects.
No project is too small or unobjectionable to escape the knife; as E&E News summarized, the bills “would repeal a variety of IRA programs designed to reduce air pollution at schools and ports, reduce emissions from diesel engines and construction materials, and promote carbon monitoring initiatives.” In addition, the Ways and Means Committee bill seeks to promote fossil fuels through measures such as expediting permits for liquid natural gas export facilities.
Climate advocates had hoped that since so much of the government’s climate spending benefits Republican districts, from battery production to rural energy conservation, that spending might be spared the cuts the party is eager to make to fund its tax cut for the wealthy (which, we should keep in mind, is the primary justification for all this slashing and burning). That might happen here and there — this process still has far to go, and there may be cases where a member of Congress manages to preserve a program that benefits their district.
But the big picture on climate is grim. Unlike the Republican effort to slash Medicaid spending and kick millions of people off their health coverage, which has divided the party and generated growing controversy, climate policy attracts far less notice. The climate measures put in place under the Biden administration — as well as those that date back much further — comprise a disparate collection of initiatives spread across multiple departments, rather than one big program that millions of people understand they have an interest in preserving.
Under Joe Biden, the U.S. took great strides forward in the fight against climate change. He can legitimately claim to have accomplished more on climate change than any president before him. Republicans can’t undo all of it; some funds have been spent, and some programs are so beneficial to GOP constituencies that they’ll probably be left alone.
But the setback to our efforts to stop the warming of the planet will be severe. Unfortunately, many of these cuts will go unnoticed by most of the public, which means there will be little political cost for those who would undermine efforts to secure a stable future. And we’ll have to try all over again to use government’s power to address climate change — only we’ll be starting from even further back.