House Republicans are proposing a significant rollback of Democrats’ clean energy tax credits— a key step toward fulfilling President Donald Trump’s pledge to eviscerate President Joe Biden’s landmark climate change programs.
The tax-writing Ways and Means Committee is moving to repeal key subsidies for electric vehicles and phase out many other clean energy tax incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act — derided by Trump as the “Green New Scam” — as part of its highly anticipated portion of the GOP’s megabill.
The tax incentives made up the core of the IRA’s clean energy stimulus, and were estimated to cost about $370 billion by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation over the decade until they expired in 2032, though other analyses predicted their costs would exceed $1 trillion. The incentives have sparked hundreds of billions in private sector investment in clean energy since the law was enacted.
As part of the Ways and Means Committee’s contributions to the party-line package intended to enact broad swaths of Trump’s domestic agenda, GOP leaders are seeking to satisfy conservative hardliners who want to eliminate all the energy incentives under the climate law to pay for trillions of dollars in tax cuts. But they are also looking to keep the support of moderates who fear scrapping these credits will jeopardize the jobs associated with manufacturing and power generation projects in their red states and districts.