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Now can we talk about the hard stuff?
Today is Methane Day at COP28 in Dubai, and there has been a slew of new commitments to wrangle the highly potent, short-lived greenhouse gas:
➢ The Biden administration finalized the strongest-ever federal regulations in the U.S. covering the methane that leaks from existing oil and gas wells, plus tightened rules for new wells. The Environmental Protection Agency expects to achieve a nearly 80% reduction in emissions compared to a world without the rules.
➢ Canada is also expected to announce new methane regulations.
➢ Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan — home to some of the biggest methane leaks from oil and gas operations in recent years — joined a global pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% this decade. If the pledge is successful, it could eliminate more than 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050.
➢ Nearly 50 oil and gas companies signed onto a “decarbonization charter,” committing to reduce the ratio of methane released to fuels produced to 0.2% by 2030, and to capture the gas instead of flaring it. For reference, the current methane intensity of U.S. oil and gas production is about 2.5%.
➢ A new partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies, the United Nations Environment Program, the Environmental Defense Fund, the International Energy Agency, and RMI will use satellite data and analysis of leaks to hold companies and governments — in particular the oil and gas charter members — to their pledges.
➢ All of this follows a new methane deal from the European Union to reduce methane leaks at home and, by 2030, require companies importing oil and gas to the EU to meet a standard for emissions associated with their product.
➢ China also recently released a methane action plan, and agreed for the first time to include non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases like methane in its emissions targets. The country is a co-host of the Summit on Methane and Other Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gases at COP28 today.
This is not the first time many of these groups have pledged to address methane, which leaks into the atmosphere from oil and gas infrastructure, coal mines, landfills, and farms. But taken together, today’s actions bring more ambition, transparency, and accountability to the task.
During a press briefing on Friday morning, U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry told reporters that reducing methane emissions is the “easiest, quickest, cheapest, simplest” way to fight climate change. There’s two reasons for that. First, since methane begins breaking down in the atmosphere after about a decade (unlike CO2, which can last hundreds of years), cutting methane emissions will reduce warming significantly in the near-term. Second, experts say that reducing leaks from oil and gas infrastructure is both technologically doable and cost-effective. “It’s not complicated technology,” Kerry said. “It’s mostly plumbing.”
But for an issue that’s so easy to address, the scourge on methane has sucked up a lot of oxygen in the climate conversation over the past five years, especially in the U.S. Writing about “the quickest way to slow warming” has become a tired cliché for climate journalists, me included. Ever since scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund reported that methane emissions from oil and gas production were being severely undercounted in 2018, attention to methane by environmental groups, researchers, the U.S. government, and even the oil and gas industry has steadily risen. But so have methane emissions, according to some estimates.
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The Obama administration first tried to regulate emissions from existing wells and tighten standards for new wells in 2016. Then the industry sued. Trump rolled back the rules. The Biden administration tried again in 2021, proposing new rules during COP26 in Glasgow and spearheading the Global Methane Pledge. One year later, during COP27, the Biden administration issued yet another proposal to “update, strengthen, and expand on” the original. Now that the rules are finalized, some won’t even go into effect for another two years so that states have time to develop plans to adhere to the regulations on existing wells.
It does look like this moment is different — that this could be a real turning point. Engineers have made great advances in methane detection technology. Satellites, drones, and handheld detectors have turned up “super-emitters,” astoundingly large leaks from oil and gas operations all over the world that would have otherwise gone unnoticed and unaddressed.
During the Friday morning press briefing, billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, who is putting $40 million toward the new watchdog effort to hold companies accountable, promised this would not be “just another announcement.” He pointed to his Beyond Coal campaign, which successfully shut down 70% of U.S. coal plants over the past five years. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said there will finally be transparency. “Without transparency, all we have is pledges,” she said.
So the world may finally be moving in concert to address methane, this lowest hanging fruit, this bare minimum, this fastest way to slow warming. Well, la-di-da. Now that there’s some consensus on methane, will there be more room to talk about the harder stuff? Like, the root cause of climate change? Like, ending the use of oil and gas, and — god help us — coal?
The U.S. committed today to finally phasing out the dirtiest fossil fuel, but other countries — notably India — are still digging in their heels. Andersen mentioned a report the UNEP released in November, which found that the majority of oil and gas producers plan to increase their production between now and 2030, and some until 2050.
“The addiction to fossil fuels still has its claws deep in many nations,” the report says. “Governments are planning to produce, and the world is planning to consume, over double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with the pathway to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C. These plans throw the global energy transition into question. They throw humanity’s future into question.”
Yes, cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations will stave off worse climate impacts, buying the world some time as it tackles the much harder challenge of phasing out fossil fuels. But it also gives fossil fuel companies a new defensive weapon as we enter this next stage of climate action. They will be able to say their products are cleaner — perhaps even that we should thank them for helping the world avoid 0.2 degrees C of warming while their plans “throw humanity’s future into question.” To make progress beyond methane, we’ll need to get from pledges to action a lot more quickly.
This story has been updated.
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The state quietly refreshed its cap and trade program, revamped how it funds wildfire cleanup, and reorganized its grid governance — plus offered some relief on gas prices.
California is in the trenches. The state has pioneered ambitious climate policy in the United States for more than two decades, and each time the legislature takes up the issue, the question is not whether to expand and refine its strategy, but how to do so in a politically and economically sustainable way.
With cost of living on everyone’s minds — California has some of the highest energy costs in the country — affordability drove this year’s policy negotiations. After a bruising legislative session, however, California emerged in late September with six climate bills signed into law that attempt to balance decarbonization with cost-reduction measures — an outcome that caught many climate advocates off guard.
“It was definitely touch and go whether this was all going to come together,” Victoria Rome, the director of California government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “It was a lot of complicated policy to put forward in a relatively short time frame.”
The package reauthorizes California’s signature cap and trade program, rebranded as “cap and invest,” with a slight tweak that will help lower electricity bills. It clears a major hurdle to creating a more integrated Western electricity market that has the potential to deliver cleaner energy throughout the region at lower cost. It replenishes a rapidly diminishing wildfire fund that ensures utilities don’t go belly-up when they’re found liable for wildfires — and offsets the cost to customers by limiting how much of the cost of transmission upgrades utilities are allowed to pass on. And lastly — and most controversially — in an attempt to stabilize gasoline prices, it streamlines approval of new oil wells in Kern County, California.
Not everyone was happy with the compromise. The Center for Biological Diversity condemned the oil and gas bill, while environmental justice advocates were angry that lawmakers did not do more to protect low-income communities in the reform of cap and trade. It also remains to be seen how much the cost containment measures will help. Some of them, like the new Western electricity market, likely won’t pay off for many years. The cap and trade extension could ultimately exacerbate costs.
A few other groundbreaking climate-related bills are still sitting on Newsom’s desk, such as one that would set a safe maximum indoor temperature, requiring landlords to provide cooling to tenants, and another that would override local zoning rules to allow taller, denser housing to be built near public transit. He has until next Monday to sign them. But even without those, the package illustrates how California Democrats are at least trying to leverage the new politics of affordability to advance their climate goals, and the ways in which the two are difficult to align.
Here’s a breakdown of the major changes.
California’s cap and trade program is the state’s centerpiece climate policy. It puts a price on pollution by requiring dirty industries to buy and retire state-auctioned “allowances” for every ton of carbon they emit, with a declining amount of allowances released into the market each year. Funds raised through allowance sales are funneled into utility bill credits for consumers as well as climate-friendly projects throughout the state.
Prior to last month’s legislation, the program was only authorized to continue through 2030, and the closer that date got, the greater the uncertainty became about whether it would continue. According to one analysis, that uncertainty cost the state $3.6 billion in revenues over the year ending in May 2025 as companies relied on allowances they’d stocked up on in previous years, when they were cheaper and more plentiful. If the program was going to expire in 2030, there was less incentive to collect more — or to invest in emission-reducing solutions like replacing their boilers with industrial heat pumps.
The legislature extended cap and trade through 2045, rebranding as “cap and invest” — a more politically resonant title originating in Washington State that highlights the revenue-raising aspect of the program. It also introduced several key reforms. By 2031, earnings from the program reserved for utility credits will go exclusively toward electric bill savings, i.e. it will no longer subsidize residential gas. “The general idea was that almost every gas customer is an electric customer,” Danny Cullenward, a California-based climate economist and lawyer, told me. “And so if you shift the same total dollars from gas and electric to just electric, you concentrate the benefits on the electric side, which supports building decarbonization, but you don’t take any dollars away from the customer.”
California has the highest electric rates in the continental U.S., and so right now, switching from using natural gas to all-electric appliances is not in everyone’s best interest. Providing more relief on the electric side will help with that — especially as the price of allowances increases in the coming years, translating into more revenue to fund bill credits. The legislation also directs electric utilities to apply the credits over the summer, when bills are highest, rather than on the twice-a-year schedule they used previously.
The other major reform has to do with the way carbon offsets are integrated into the program. Previously, companies could purchase offsets instead of allowances to account for a certain amount of their emissions, giving them a cheaper way to comply. Now, every time a company retires an offset instead of an allowance, the state will also retire an allowance. This is an implicit recognition by lawmakers that carbon offsets haven’t been effective at reducing emissions, Cullenward told me.
While he called the extension of cap and invest a “profound and important accomplishment,” Cullenward also raised major concerns about its future impacts on affordability. The program literally puts a price on carbon, after all, and that price is now set to rise, pervading much of California’s economy, from the pump to the cost of goods and services. “Outside of my hope that this will be a net benefit for electric utility ratepayers, which I think is a very good and positive thing, this is not an affordability bill,” he told me.
Lawmakers have done nothing to mitigate the program’s effect on gasoline and diesel costs, he pointed out. They also haven’t addressed the elephant in the room — a $95 price ceiling on allowances that, if they ever get there, may be politically untenable. (Right now prices are around $30.) State regulators now have a chance to revise the price ceiling, Cullenward said, ideally with an eye toward balancing ambition with consumer cost impacts. “That’s the main part of the work that is completely not yet done,” he said.
Energy nerds throughout the West have been scheming to unite its disparate grids for years. Unlike the entire eastern half of the country, where utilities buy and sell energy across state lines in competitive markets on both a daily and realtime basis, and work together to plan transmission upgrades throughout their territories, most Western states do all of their energy trading through longer-term bilateral contracts.
After years of failed efforts to change that, lawmakers have finally given California’s grid operator their blessing to work with other states in the region on creating such a market. Proponents argue that more competition and coordination between utilities in the West will create efficiencies that save money, improve reliability, and accelerate decarbonization. For example, California, which often produces more solar energy than it can use during the day, would be able to sell more of that power to other states. When there’s a heat wave coming, it’ll have more supply to draw from.
To be clear, California was already working on all this prior to last month’s legislation. The state’s grid operator launched a realtime electricity trading market in 2014, which now has 21 utility participants throughout the West. Next year it will launch an extended day-ahead market, enabling utilities to buy power about a week in advance of when they’ll need it. That will initially have just two participants, PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric, with five others planning to join in later years.
But seven companies does not a competitive market make. To grow to its fullest potential, the day-ahead market will need many more participants. That was always going to be a tough sell so long as California was in charge, Vijay Satyal, the deputy director of regional markets at the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, told me. CAISO, California’s grid operator, is overseen by a governor-appointed board, “which is one reason why the larger West never wanted to be part of CAISO, if the governance and decision making would be controlled by the governor of one state,” he said.
An effort is already underway between state officials, utilities, and other stakeholders, including those from California, to create an independently-governed Western Energy Market called the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative. The new legislation grants CAISO permission to transition governance of its realtime and day-ahead markets to the organization that comes out of that effort — as long as the group meets certain requirements around transparency and engagement with state leadership.
“Now there’s opportunity for all the utilities across the West to come together and for clean energy developers to be part of a larger market and be transparent, independent, and not controlled by one state’s policies,” Satyal told me. The other advantage of having this regional organization is that it can engage in more coordinated transmission planning — another potential cost-saving measure.
Wildfires have been a huge part of California’s electricity affordability crisis. Case in point: Since 2019, Californians have had to pay an extra fee on top of their electric bills that goes into a state Wildfire Fund to help utilities cover post-wildfire loss and damage claims — a sort of insurance mechanism to prevent utility insolvency.
This year, lawmakers were under pressure to add more money to the pot. Experts worried that without another infusion, payments related to January’s Eaton Fire in Los Angeles, which the U.S. Department of Justice alleges was caused by faulty utility equipment, would deplete much of what’s left.
The legislature extended the fee, adding $18 billion to the Wildfire Fund that will be split evenly between ratepayers and utility shareholders over the next decade. But it also passed several measures that will help offset that cost by minimizing future rate increases. First, utilities will be prohibited from earning a profit on the first $6 billion they spend on wildfire mitigation projects, such as burying power lines, starting next year. Companies will be required to finance this spending more cheaply through ratepayer-backed bonds rather than through equity, which commands a higher rate of return.
On top of that, the legislature directed the governor’s office to create a “Transmission Infrastructure Accelerator,” a program that will develop public financing options for new transmission lines, such as low-cost loans, revenue bonds, or even partial public ownership of the projects. The program will have a dedicated “Revolving Fund” that will be replenished each year with a portion of cap and invest revenue.
“It is the largest electricity affordability measure in the whole package,” Sam Uden, the co-founder and managing director for the nonprofit policy shop Net Zero California, told me — to the tune of $3 billion in savings per year once the new lines are constructed, according to an analysis his group commissioned.
Gavin Newsom has not necessarily been a friend to the oil industry. He’s instituted distance requirements for new oil wells barring drilling near homes and schools, and given local jurisdictions more authority over drilling. But gasoline prices — ever a political issue in California — have tested his resolve. The price at the pump in California has averaged around a dollar higher than the rest of the U.S. for the past several years, and that margin has crept up closer to $1.30 this year. After two of the state’s refineries announced they would close this year and next, threatening to drive prices higher, Newsom backed a bill this session to increase oil production in Kern County.
Uden of Net Zero California justified the bill as a “short term measure.” The provisions that streamline drilling permits only apply through 2036. “We are really trying to grapple with what is a very difficult transition,” he told me. “We’ve got to phase down oil, but we can’t do it in a way that just spikes gas prices.”
It’s unclear, however, whether more drilling in Kern County will do much to address the problem — especially if the cap and invest program continues to drive up prices, as Cullenward fears. At least to date, the state’s high gasoline prices have not been caused by a lack of gasoline supply, according to University of California, Berkeley, economist Severin Borenstein. The bigger factors driving price increases are taxes and environmental fees and the special blend of gasoline required by the state’s air quality regulators.
What will drive prices up are refinery closures. Lawmakers are making a bet that increased in-state oil production will prevent further closures by giving refineries access to cheaper crude. But Borenstein notes that the state will continue to rely on crude imports, meaning the price of gasoline will still be tied to the global market. His preferred solution to keep prices in check is to remove barriers to importing more refined gasoline.
“The longer run challenge is to balance refining supply and demand, which oil production doesn’t address,” Borenstein wrote.
Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, agreed on the urgency of opening a new import terminal. He told me he saw the Kern County bill as a way to buy time. “We’ve done the kind of stopgap measure. The increased permits will help stabilize Northern California refineries for probably a couple years,” he said. “But if we don’t use that couple of years in the right way, then we will be in big trouble.”
Wara also wasn’t too worried about the measure creating some kind of oil Renaissance. “Permits are one thing. The decision to actually drill a well is an economic decision that’s going to be driven by oil prices, which are pretty low right now. I don’t think anybody thinks that handing out more permits is going to stem the decline in that industry.”
On stronger uranium, Elon Musk’s big gamble, and Japan’s offshore headwinds
Current conditions: A warm front coming from the Southwest is raising temperatures up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above average across the Upper Midwest • A heat wave nearly 200 miles north of Montreal in La Tuque, Quebec, is sending temperatures to nearly 80 degrees today • Typhoon Matmo has made landfall in southern China, forcing thousands to evacuate amid peak holiday season.
The United States’ beleaguered offshore-wind industry has found a new ally in its effort to fend off President Donald Trump’s assault: Big Oil. On Sunday, the Financial Times published an interview with Shell’s top executive in the U.S., in which she called the administration’s decision to halt permitting on seaborne turbines “very damaging” to investment and warned that a future Democratic president could use the precedent Trump set to attack the oil and gas industry. “However far the pendulum swings one way, it’s likely that it’s going to swing just as far the other way,” Colette Hirstius, president of Shell USA, told the newspaper when asked about the Trump administration’s stop-work orders on offshore wind farms. “I certainly would like to see those projects that have been permitted in the past continue to be developed. Similarly, if you think of the business I run offshore [Gulf of Mexico], that type of permitting uncertainty has been utilized to undermine the permits that we have in the past — and that’s equally as damaging.”
As I reported last month in this newsletter, a federal judge blocked Trump’s stop-work order on the 80% complete wind farm off Rhode Island’s coast. But the administration’s multi-agency onslaught against the offshore wind industry, which Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called a “total war,” is already taking a toll. Danish wind giant Orsted, for example, was forced to raise money via an unusual offering of new shares — which it then sold at a nearly 70% discount.
The Trump administration said Friday it would delay $2.1 billion in funding for transit projects in Chicago amid negotiations with Democrats in Congress to approve a federal budget. The move comes after Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced cuts to major New York City infrastructure projects, in what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin interpreted as Trump’s “seeking retribution from New Yorkers” for the ongoing government shutdown, since Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries both hail from the city.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, meanwhile, is withholding more than $300 million in emergency preparedness grants from states until they can prove that the population estimates used to calculate the funding awards do not include people who have been deported as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown. A group representing state emergency management agencies called the move “a never-before-seen provision” that amounts to “further delaying resources intended to strengthen disaster preparedness and emergency response,” The New York Times reported Friday.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave fuel giant Urenco’s U.S. subsidiary the green light last week to produce reactor pellets enriched with up to double the normal concentration of uranium-235. This past spring, the utility giant Southern Company made history by loading one of the older reactors at the nation’s most powerful nuclear station in Georgia with what’s known as LEU+, a version of low-enriched uranium that goes beyond the roughly 5% enrichment limit regulators typically set for the fuel. Uranium enriched up to 10% with U-235, the fissile isotope that can produce energy through atom-splitting, leaves behind less waste and can keep a reactor going for longer. In a press release, Urenco said the federal permit to produce LEU+ at its Eunice plant in New Mexico “will create new opportunities for the current U.S. reactor fleet by allowing for longer operating cycles and fewer refueling outages.”
Elon Musk will need to spend at least $18 billion to buy roughly 300,000 more Nvidia microchips to complete his sprawling Memphis data center complex, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The project, called Colossus, has a colossal appetite for electricity. In July, Musk bought a former gas plant in Mississippi. In August, green groups accused xAI of violating federal air pollution rules with its use of gas-fired turbines to power its servers. The federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority’s aggressive push to build more nuclear reactors is often discussed as a means of supplying Musk’s demand with cleaner power, but those projects are still years away from producing electrons.
Over the course of one year, Musk’s xAI has surged to become the second-largest taxpayer in the Tennessee county, after FedEx, as the company burns through cash at what the newspaper called “a breakneck clip.” Earlier this year, xAI raised $10 billion through a combination of debt and equity, and its billionaire founder has turned to his privately held SpaceX to chip in $2 billion. “In typical xAI and Elon fashion, the company’s future is highly unpredictable,” Dylan Patel, chief executive of the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research firm SemiAnalysis, told the Journal. “Elon will do everything he can to not lose to Sam Altman.” He’s struggling. On Monday morning, Altman’s OpenAI inked a deal to buy chips from AMD, just weeks after signing a $100 billion agreement with Nvidia, The New York Times reported.
Japan last week “delayed indefinitely” an auction to set government funding levels for offshore wind projects in what Bloomberg called “the latest blow to the country’s push to expand renewable energy supplies.” The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry put the auction, which had been scheduled to start on October 14 and run for two weeks, on hold to give officials time to reassess the effects of higher interest rates and rising material costs. In August, Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi Corp. announced its withdrawal from several projects won via a previous auction, citing escalating construction costs.
Scientists have long wondered when and how otophysans, the supergroup of fish that accounts for two-thirds of all freshwater fish and includes catfish, carps, and tetras, evolved to live outside saltwater oceans. A fossil of a tiny fish found in southwestern Alberta has provided some answers. The four-centimeter specimen from the Late Cretaceous period — between 100.5 million and 66 million years ago, when the iconic Tyrannosaurus Rex lived — showed the distinct first four vertebrae that otophysans evolved to transmit vibrations to the ear from the swim bladder. The discovery of the species, named Acronichthys maccognoi, “fills a gap in our record of the otophysans supergroup,” Neil Banerjee, a Western University scientist and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “It is the oldest North America member of the group and provides incredible data to help document the origin and early evolution of so many freshwater fish living today.”
Republicans have blamed Democrats for unleashing Russ Vought on federal spending. But it doesn’t take much to see a bigger plan at work.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been waiting for this moment his whole adult life — or that’s what President Trump and the Republican Congressional leadership would like you to believe. As they put it, Vought is a fanatical budget cutter who, once unleashed, cannot be controlled. Who knows what he’ll cut if the Democrats continue to keep the government shut down?
Substantial staffing cuts that go beyond the typical shutdown furloughs are “the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Politico on Thursday. “We don’t control what he’s going to do.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Thursday morning that Democrats “have now, effectively, turned off the legislative branch,” and have “turned it over to the executive.”
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
In short, any cuts — even ones some Republicans might find distasteful — are the Democrats’ fault, according to Republican leadership.
This is not the first time we’ve seen an eager budget cutter ascend to power in this administration. Let’s take a moment to flash back to the very first days and months of Trump’s second presidency, when young staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency were marching into government offices, demanding data and deleting programs.
Though he operated at the time with the full support of the president and spurred on by the enthusiasm of his supporters, Musk quickly ran into conflict with the people actually running the departments he had essentially appointed himself to oversee.
Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got into “a heated shouting match in earshot of President Trump and other officials in the White House,” according to Axios, over leadership of the IRS. Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio got into an argument in front of Trump, The New York Times reported, when Musk accused Rubio of not firing enough people. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has gone public with his own account of a dispute with Musk over who had the authority to make staffing decisions in the Transportation Department, during which Duffy insisted that “we are not going to fire air traffic controllers,” he told the New York Post in August.
Musk also stirred up conflict with Vought himself. The Times reported that the OMB director “could barely contain his frustration” when Musk’s team exceeded his own plans for federal staffing cuts.
Bessent, Rubio, Duffy, and Vought are all still around. Musk is not. The cabinet secretaries and congressional leadership wrested back their prerogatives over federal spending and staffing, and some staffers that were let go have been hired back.
But the shutdown threatens to introduce a volatile new dynamic, in which another aggressive budget cutter in the highest echelons of the government — in this case, Vought — gets the upper hand without the intra-party blowback.
That’s because unlike Musk, the space entrepreneur and car manufacturer who had only recently become a Republican, Vought is a career conservative, whose command of the levers of power has been honed over years of experience in government. This may be Vought’s moment to make permanent changes in the size and structure of the federal government — or at least credibly threaten to do so — with particular attention to programs he views as a “cartel” between Congress and the federal bureaucracy, as well as spending programs that tend to advance progressive ends, including mitigating or preventing climate change.
Vought has been teeing up dramatic budget cuts and aggressive defunding maneuvers since the first Trump administration — it was his move to delay aid to Ukraine that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. He then spent his four years in exile from power at a think tank he founded, expanding on his vision of a budgetary process more controlled by the executive branch.
But as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote back in January, during the first Trump administration Vought would regularly draw up budgets that would feature dramatic cuts and then Republicans in Congress would undo them and spending would continue on in a bipartisan manner.
This time, Trump has gotten Voughtier, and Republicans in Congress have gotten more compliant. Vought has already said he wants to take the normally bipartisan appropriations process and turn into a partisan one, in part by letting the president control spending that’s authorized by Congress. Though the president and Republican leadership in Congress might want the public to see a budget director run amok, it’s clear that all of the above relish the prospect of Vought as a kind of wildcard, unleashed with a red pen on the federal budget.
Echoes of Vought’s ideology have made their way into policymaking across branches of government. The White House has already struck some foreign aid programs authorized by Congress, and the Supreme Court recently allowed those cuts to stand. Republicans in Congress passed a rescissions package that cut previously appropriated funding for public broadcasting and other foreign aid. Vought also effectively shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a formerly independent agency, while cuts to the Department of Education have left it a shell of itself.
The cuts Vought has announced so far during the shutdown, including funding for a bunch of clean energy and sustainability projects largely in blue states and transit projects in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, aren’t entirely shutdown-related. It doesn’t take a tremendous leap to arrive at the idea that they might have been planned all along and timed to punish Democrats.
At least some of the cuts seem to be intended to be permanent and would not revert when the shutdown inevitably ends. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told CNN on Thursday that the grant cancellation decisions were made by the Department of Energy, and that “projects will not be restored” once the government is funded again.
It remains unclear the full extent of the cuts Vought will attempt to make, and how the judicial process will ultimately handle them. But the prospect of further major cuts — especially in contrast to the Republican offer of a continuing resolution to resolve the spending standoff — has raised eyebrows among at least a few congressional Republicans.
Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator from North Dakota, told Semafor that Vought is “less politically in tune than the president,” and that by using the shutdown to pursue large cuts, Republicans risk ceding the “moral high ground” in the shutdown fight. Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who chairs the Appropriations Committee, has also criticized some legally aggressive cuts.
But most in the majority, especially in leadership, have expressed no problem with Vought’s prospective cuts, or see them purely as something Democrats are responsible for due to failing to vote yes on their continuing resolution. Which could mean the cuts, if they come, could prove more enduring than Musk’s more slapdash efforts.
The shutdown could cement a shift in the balance of power between Vought and figures in the administration or Congress who are more cautious about the slash and burn approach. This may overwhelm any sense of caution from Cabinet secretaries or congressional leaders defending their turf. They’re all still Republicans at the end of the day.