https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/02/biden-trump-climate-republicans-bill/
Biden’s climate law boosted red states. Their lawmakers are now gutting it.
In a December speech on his economic legacy, President Joe Biden predicted that clean energy investments stemming from his signature climate law were “so deeply rooted in the nation” that it would be “politically costly and economically unsound” for the incoming Trump administration to undo them.
Trump’s priority legislation, which is still being hashed out in Congress, aims to gut much of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, undermining the former president’s wager that he could insulate his economic legacy from a MAGA onslaught by spurring a wave of advanced manufacturing in red states. While Republicans faced a backlash when they tried to overturn former president Barack Obama’s signature health care law in 2017 — ultimately dooming Trump’s first major legislative push — there has been less public pushback as Biden’s climate legislation has advanced toward its demise.
The result has set the stage for a swift and dramatic reversal of economic policy, leaving business leaders, local officials, climate activists and former Biden aides to grapple with the fallout of Trump’s norm-shattering approach to governing.
“We thought we were doing something that would create the maximum political constituency for this program by linking it to jobs, by designing it in a way that a lot of the investment would flow to redder communities,” said Bharat Ramamurti, who helped shepherd Biden’s industrial policy as deputy director of the National Economic Council. “I probably underestimated the extent to which the well-being of both your constituents and your local business community has gone by the wayside in comparison to toeing the ideological line.”
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly denigrated Biden’s signature law as the “Green New Scam” while mocking electric cars and renewable energy sources such as wind. As Biden attempted to seed red states with money for advanced manufacturing, Trump doubled down on the argument that the climate measure was a prime target for cultural warfare and pledged to roll back the 46th president’s initiatives.
As Republicans rush to try to pass Trump’s bill, hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy tax incentives for companies and consumers — created or expanded by Biden’s 2022 law — hang in the balance. Tax credits for wind turbines, solar panels, electric batteries and other forms of renewable energy are slated to be scaled back dramatically, forcing some companies to abandon their manufacturing projects.
While some of the most severe cuts to the tax credits — and a proposed new excise tax for certain solar and wind projects — were ultimately taken out of the bill hours before it cleared the Senate on Tuesday, the legislation still represents a broad repudiation of Biden’s signature clean energy initiative. Its passage would mark a stark contrast to Democrats’ political calculation that the surge of renewable energy developments in heavily Republican areas would deter Trump from undermining what they often referred to as a “green energy manufacturing boom.”
The boom has already started to slow down.
About 400 large factories and other projects across the country were slated to benefit from Biden’s tax credits and other incentives that Trump’s legislation threatens to phase out or repeal, according to E2, a nonprofit that advocates environmentally friendly business. Many of those projects — which account for more than $132 billion in investment and 120,000 jobs — have been halted or are now at risk of stalling, the group said Tuesday after the Senate passed the GOP bill.
Of the 20 congressional districts slated to receive the largest investments from the Inflation Reduction Act’s Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, 17 are represented by Republicans, according to policy and data research firm Atlas Public Policy. Each of those House Republicans voted to support Trump’s bill.
For Republican lawmakers, the prospect of bucking Trump’s first big legislative push to defend a policy passed by his Democratic predecessor is simply a nonstarter, said Republican strategist Doug Heye.
“The political calculation that they’re making is that they’re better off supporting this bill, even if it does impact some jobs” in their districts, he said.
Overall, about three-quarters of the clean energy manufacturing investments announced since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act have been in Republican-controlled districts, Atlas found. Tens of billions of dollars in planned energy investments — representing enough gigawatts to power at least 7 million homes — could be at risk under the latest version of the GOP bill, according to Atlas’s data.
Those investments rely on several business incentives that would be phased out by Trump’s tax bill, which is under consideration in the House. The legislation would also eliminate billions of dollars in consumer tax credits for purchasing energy-saving products, including appliances, solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Even after Trump prevailed in November, Biden argued that Republicans would struggle to translate Trump’s campaign rhetoric into policy, in part because of the impact that would have on their own constituents.
During his Dec. 10 speech at the Brookings Institution, Biden said Trump would “have trouble” reversing his green energy policies and predicted that “red state senators” would stop him from undermining the kinds of projects that brought well-paying manufacturing jobs to their constituents.
“Keep your eye on them. Tell me when they want the programs we voted for them — to cut in their states,” Biden said. “Show me the most conservative Republicans willing to take away the factories that are going to be built in their states. Going to be interesting. Going to be interesting.”
While a few GOP lawmakers wrote letters of concern or spoke out publicly against the effort to strip away tax credits that businesses had been relying on — and some worked privately to soften the most severe cuts — in the end almost all Republicans voted for the bill. The legislation passed by the Senate would phase out most clean energy incentives from Biden’s climate law, eliminating tax credits for any projects that have not begun construction by mid-2026 or become operational by the end of 2027. Lawmakers protected some of the bill’s credits for nuclear, geothermal and battery projects, giving those several years before those phase out.
The Senate-passed bill must pass the House, which had sought a more aggressive timeline for phasing out the incentives, before it can reach Trump’s desk.
Democrats, business leaders and environmental activists have been forced to reexamine their strategy for fighting climate change by boosting investment in Republican areas. That approach, policy analysts say, has run headlong into Trump’s political instincts. As a result, the bill Biden often hailed as the most significant climate law in U.S. history is at risk of being shredded by his predecessor less than three years after it was enacted.
“Every rational tactic that typically works to build support for this stuff was used,” said Frank Maisano, a principal at the public affairs firm Bracewell who is focused on energy. “They all fell short when confronted with Trump’s political machine, which has seemed to have won the day.”
Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas, said that Republicans representing areas benefiting from Biden’s law were stuck “between a rock and a hard place,” but ultimately, they bent to Trump’s will to protect their political standing.
“It is really hard for those lawmakers to be able to defend the credit, defend the benefits of the credit in their community, if that means speaking out against the party and the president,” he said. “And so we’re seeing that tension.”
Trump personally pushed to unravel Biden’s climate law, calling for Republicans to gut the provisions for solar and wind projects.
“I HATE ‘GREEN TAX CREDITS’ IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” he wrote last month on his Truth Social platform. “They are largely a giant SCAM.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who criticized the bill and expressed concerns about Medicaid cuts and energy projects in his state, immediately faced a torrent of public attacks from Trump. Tillis announced Sunday he would not run for reelection. He was one of only three Senate Republicans to vote against the bill Tuesday.
Trump probably would not have gotten such legislation passed during his first term, when he faced more vocal opposition from GOP lawmakers concerned over the impact of his agenda on their constituents, said Jesse Lee, a Democratic political consultant working with the group Climate Power.
“Things have changed. People are not willing to stand up,” he said. “There is nothing that will overcome their fear of Trump and the wrath he could unleash on them. He has taken the position: Do what I say or leave the party.”
Trump even battled with his onetime partner and largest campaign benefactor over the energy provisions in the bill, with Tesla chief executive Elon Musk taking to X on Saturday to brand the legislation “insane and destructive.”
But threats from the world’s richest man to target Republicans who support the bill appeared to have little impact. Just hours after he pledged to support primary challenges against those backing the bill — and suggested creating a new party if the legislation passes — the Senate voted to support the measure.
Democrats were largely powerless to stop the advancement of the legislation, which also makes steeps cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other social programs. They tried a few parliamentary measures — including forcing the entire bill to be read on the Senate floor and introducing a slew of amendments — but ultimately could not persuade enough of their Republican colleagues to buck Trump by blocking the bill.
Outside of Washington, there was little in the way of a public campaign to save Biden’s signature legislation — perhaps because many of the multiyear projects spurred by the bill have yet to break ground. Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which came to be known as Obamacare, Biden’s climate law never achieved broad awareness among everyday voters.
After the election, many Biden aides hoped that Trump would simply try to take credit for the investments spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, rather than overturn it. Now, they are left to ponder how quickly the law they hailed as history’s most sweeping climate legislation has ended up as a cautionary tale about the hazards of policymaking in the Trump era.
“I think it’s a grim sign for the future,” said Ramamurti. “We’ve got a lot going for us as a country that is going to make us attractive to investors, but I think it’s a real disappointment, and it’s a blow to the country that we’re losing out on this.”
Evan Halper contributed to this report.
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