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Few aspects of Biden’s climate law have spurred more controversy than the “three pillars” — a set of rules proposed by the Treasury Department for how to claim a lucrative new tax credit for producing clean hydrogen. Now, it appears, the pillars may be poised to fall.
The Treasury has been under immense pressure from Congress, energy companies, and even leaders at the Department of Energy to relax the rules since before it even published the proposal in December. The pillars, criteria designed to prevent the program from subsidizing projects that increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduce them, are too expensive and complicated to comply with, detractors argue, and would sink the prospects for a domestic clean hydrogen industry.
But lately, the campaign to dismantle the pillars has gotten both more forceful and more threatening. There’s the politically challenging hurdle that leaders of another federally-funded hydrogen program — the regional clean hydrogen hubs — have spoken out against the rules, arguing they threaten investment in hub projects and therefore job creation and economic development around the country. Then there’s the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn the precedent known as Chevron deference, which weakened agencies’ ability to defend their own rules and thereby emboldens any aggrieved parties to sue the Treasury if it keeps the pillars in place. Last week, 13 Democratic Senators, 11 of whom hail from states involved in the hubs, sent a letter calling on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to dramatically revise the rules or risk having them challenged in court.
The consequences of losing the three pillars can only be guessed at using models, which are built on assumptions and can’t predict the future with certainty. But proponents say the stakes couldn’t be higher. In their view, the pillars don’t just prevent carbon emissions. They mitigate the risks of rising electricity costs for everyday Americans. And without them, one of the most generous energy credits the government offers could become incredibly easy to claim, ballooning the federal budget.
The clean hydrogen tax credit was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, and offers up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced, with the top dollar amount reserved for fuel that is essentially zero-emissions. The hope was that this would be enough to bring down the cost of hydrogen made from electricity to parity with hydrogen made from natural gas. If made cleanly, hydrogen could help decarbonize other carbon-intensive industries, like steelmaking and shipping.
At first, excitement for the tax credit ran high and companies quickly began making plans for new factories. Announcements of new hydrogen production capacity more than tripled from 2 million tons per year in 2021 to 7.7 million by the end of the following year, with another 6 million announced in 2023, according to the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
Then, after the Treasury’s proposal dropped last December, everything stopped. Under the three pillars, hydrogen companies that get electricity from the grid, which is still largely powered by fossil fuels, would be required to buy clean energy credits with specific attributes in order to mitigate their emissions and render their hydrogen “clean.” The credits must come from power plants located in the same region as the hydrogen production — the first pillar — that were built no more than 3 years before the hydrogen plant — the second pillar — and be purchased for every hour the plant is operating — the third pillar.
The three provisions work together to ensure that new clean power plants are brought online to meet hydrogen’s energy demand. But finding clean energy credits with these features is not easy — there aren’t many systems in place to do this yet. The Treasury took more than a year to publish its initial proposal, and leading up to it, companies lobbied aggressively for a more lenient version. There was so much money on the line that some businesses flooded the public with ads in newspapers and on streaming and podcast services delivering a cryptic warning that “additionality” — the requirement to buy energy from new power plants — was threatening to “set America back.”
Until businesses have clarity on whether the three pillars will stay or go, the industry is on ice. Several previously announced projects have been delayed. Few companies have reached offtake agreements, even provisional ones, for their hydrogen. Almost none have received a final investment decision or started construction.
“They’re losing advantage over other parts of the world,” Hector Arreola, a principal analyst for hydrogen and emerging technologies at Wood Mackenzie, told me. Momentum to develop hydrogen projects has started to shift back to Europe, which has already finalized its own definition of what constitutes clean hydrogen, he said.
It’s hard to imagine a path forward for the Treasury to keep the three pillars intact. Last week’s letter outlined the current state of play in stark terms. “Without significant changes to the draft guidance,” it said, “one of the most powerful job creation and emission reduction tools in the IRA will likely be hamstrung by future court challenges, congressional opposition, and unfulfilled private sector investment.”
Indeed, at least one company, Constellation Energy, has already suggested it would draw on the loss of Chevron deference to sue the agency if it didn’t remove the second pillar — the requirement to buy clean energy credits from recently-built power plants. (Constellation owns a fleet of nuclear power plants and is developing hydrogen projects powered by them.) In comments to the Treasury, Constellation wrote that the requirements for purchasing clean electricity “have no basis” in the law.
“People can always sue today to challenge regulations,” Keith Martin, a renewable energy tax lawyer at the firm Norton Rose Fulbright, told me. “It’s just that the odds of success have increased.” The Supreme Court’s ruling undermines regulatory agencies’ authority to interpret federal statute.
Another hydrogen company that has been fighting the three pillars, Plug Power, has already claimed victory: It put out a press release last month declaring that it anticipates receiving the tax credit, despite the fact that the rules are still not final and its projects would likely not qualify under Treasury’s proposal. The CEO, Andy Marsh, told a hydrogen trade publication that he’s “certain” the rules will be loosened. (Plug Power didn’t respond to a request for clarification by publish time.)
In their letter, the 13 Democratic senators propose that hydrogen producers should be able to purchase clean energy from existing power plants that are already supplying the grid if they are located in a state that has a clean energy standard, or as long as the power plant doesn’t reallocate more than 10% of its power to hydrogen production. They recommend losing the hourly matching requirement altogether and replacing it with annual or monthly matching, depending on when plants start construction. The senators also suggest allowing projects built in areas with “insufficient clean energy sources,” meaning places with suboptimal sun, wind, water, or geothermal energy, to source their power from farther outside the region.
Beth Deane, the chief legal officer for Electric Hydrogen, a company that has historically supported the three pillars, told me in an interview she thought these proposals represented a good compromise. “Bottom-line, the effectiveness of green hydrogen as a decarbonization tool is being artificially held back,” she said later in an email. “We need to give up perfection on both sides of the three-pillar debate and find the ‘good enough’ solution that lets early mover projects move forward with less stringent requirements.”
But other proponents told me the letter carves out so many loopholes that the pillars would remain in name only. Rachel Fakhry, the policy director for emerging technologies at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me the letter was “outrageous” and “a giveaway buffet.” Daniel Esposito, a manager in the electricity program at the think tank Energy Innovation, told me he can’t imagine any scenario where these exceptions don’t result in an emissions boost rather than a reduction.
That’s because the electrolyzers used to produce clean hydrogen consume a lot of power and are expected to cause fossil fuel plants — which are more flexible than renewables — to run more often and stay open longer than they otherwise would. Without a requirement to buy power from new clean sources and a prescription to match operations with clean energy throughout the day, there will be no demand signals to bring (often more expensive) clean resources onto the grid that can, for example, produce power at night when solar panels aren’t generating. Power system models from Energy Innovation, Princeton University researchers, the Rhodium Group, and the Electric Power Research Institute have all found that there could be significant emissions consequences if the three pillars were relaxed in ways suggested in the letter.
“This effectively unlocks more than 10 million metric tons of dirty electrolytic hydrogen,” Esposito said, based on some back-of-the-envelope estimates. That would cost something like $30 billion per year. Put another way, he said, every $300 paid out by this program could subsidize one ton of CO2 emissions. Put a third way, he added, it could set the U.S. back two to three percentage points on its commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions 50% to 52% by 2030 — and we’re already off track.
The authors of the letter say they’re “confident” these fears are overblown. They cite a competing analysis published last year by the consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics and paid for by the trade group the American Council on Renewable Energy, which found that requiring companies to match their operations with clean energy on an hourly basis, rather than an annual basis, does not ensure lower greenhouse gas emissions. They also cite research by an energy modeling group at Carnegie Mellon and North Carolina State University, which found that the difference in cumulative emissions between scenarios with less stringent requirements and the full three pillars comes out to less than 1% by 2039.
Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon who worked on that research, told me the three pillars add a level of regulatory complexity to hydrogen production that is not worth the cost in terms of the emissions savings. In general, she said, she saw no need for the rules, and that the Treasury should subsidize electrolytic hydrogen regardless of where the electricity comes from. “We need to deploy this infrastructure,” Jaramillo told me. “We need to deploy it now so it’s available later.”
The other camp of researchers disputed Jaramillo’s group’s findings, chalking them up to a series of differences in assumptions and approach. They also call the industry’s bluff on the claim that the three pillars are too hard and expensive to comply with. Esposito pointed out that a small group of hydrogen companies has already told the Treasury that if the rules were finalized as-is, they planned to build enough capacity to produce more than 6 million tons of hydrogen per year.
Fakhry argued that we are already seeing the risks of losing the three pillars play out in real time as power-hungry industries like bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence grow. Bitcoin mines have driven up emissions and energy costs around the country. Utilities in Pennsylvania are sounding the alarm that an Amazon data center seeking to divert power from an existing nuclear power plant could shift up to $140 million in costs to other electricity customers. As I wrote in Heatmap last year, this debate is not just about hydrogen — think of all the other energy-intensive industries that will have to electrify before we can reach net zero.
Plenty of stakeholders still believe that the Treasury can find a middle ground by making the three pillars more flexible. The American Clean Power Association, which represents a wide range of energy companies, has proposed loosening the hourly matching aspect for projects that start construction before 2028. Fakhry acknowledged the need for flexibility, but her recommendations are much more narrow than the senators’. For example, she would allow hydrogen producers to buy power from existing nuclear plants, but only if they are at risk of retirement and the purchase would help keep them open. Esposito said Energy Innovation would support power procurement from existing clean resources that are curtailed, meaning they produce power that currently goes unutilized.
Both Fakry and Esposito also downplayed the threat of lawsuits, arguing that Treasury did exactly what it was instructed to do by the law. The IRA specifically says that hydrogen emissions should be calculated per a section of the Clean Air Act that says any accounting should include “significant indirect emissions.” Treasury has interpreted this to include the induced emissions caused by a hydrogen plant, and received letters of support from the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy backing this interpretation.
However, as Martin, the tax lawyer, told me, by overturning Chevron deference, the Supreme Court has just given “677 federal district court judges greater latitude to substitute their own judgment for subject matter experts at the federal agencies.”
Asked for comment on the Senators’ letter, a Treasury spokesperson told me the agency is still considering the many thousands of comments the agency received on the proposed rules. “The Biden Administration is committed to ensuring that progress continues and that the IRA’s investments continue to create good-paying jobs, lower energy costs, and strengthen energy security.”
Even if Yellen heeds the Senators’ advice, the department may not be able to avoid a lawsuit. “We will use every tool available to us — including the courts — to either defend a strong final rule or challenge an unlawful one that reflects the asks in the letter,” Fakhry told me.
There’s also a realpolitik argument here that the industry might want this all to be over more than it wants to kill the three pillars. “The number one thing people want is business certainty,” Esposito told me. “I don’t think people want this to drag on for another two years.”
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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is one signature away from becoming law and drastically changing the economics of renewables development in the U.S. That doesn’t mean decarbonization is over, experts told Heatmap, but it certainly doesn’t help.
What do we do now?
That’s the question people across the climate change and clean energy communities are asking themselves now that Congress has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would slash most of the tax credits and subsidies for clean energy established under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Preliminary data from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project (led by Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) forecasts that said bill will have a dramatic effect on the deployment of clean energy in the U.S., including reducing new solar and wind capacity additions by almost over 40 gigawatts over the next five years, and by about 300 gigawatts over the next 10. That would be enough to power 150 of Meta’s largest planned data centers by 2035.
But clean energy development will hardly grind to a halt. While much of the bill’s implementation is in question, the bill as written allows for several more years of tax credit eligibility for wind and solar projects and another year to qualify for them by starting construction. Nuclear, geothermal, and batteries can claim tax credits into the 2030s.
Shares in NextEra, which has one of the largest clean energy development businesses, have risen slightly this year and are down just 6% since the 2024 election. Shares in First Solar, the American solar manufacturer, are up substantially Thursday from a day prior and are about flat for the year, which may be a sign of investors’ belief that buyer demand for solar panels will persist — or optimism that the OBBBA’s punishing foreign entity of concern requirements will drive developers into the company’s arms.
Partisan reversals are hardly new to climate policy. The first Trump administration gleefully pulled the rug from under the Obama administration’s power plant emissions rules, and the second has been thorough so far in its assault on Biden’s attempt to replace them, along with tailpipe emissions standards and mileage standards for vehicles, and of course, the IRA.
Even so, there are ways the U.S. can reduce the volatility for businesses that are caught in the undertow. “Over the past 10 to 20 years, climate advocates have focused very heavily on D.C. as the driver of climate action and, to a lesser extent, California as a back-stop,” Hannah Safford, who was director for transportation and resilience in the Biden White House and is now associate director of climate and environment at the Federation of American Scientists, told Heatmap. “Pursuing a top down approach — some of that has worked, a lot of it hasn’t.”
In today’s environment, especially, where recognition of the need for action on climate change is so politically one-sided, it “makes sense for subnational, non-regulatory forces and market forces to drive progress,” Safford said. As an example, she pointed to the fall in emissions from the power sector since the late 2000s, despite no power plant emissions rule ever actually being in force.
“That tells you something about the capacity to deliver progress on outcomes you want,” she said.
Still, industry groups worry that after the wild swing between the 2022 IRA and the 2025 OBBA, the U.S. has done permanent damage to its reputation as a business-friendly environment. Since continued swings at the federal level may be inevitable, building back that trust and creating certainty is “about finding ballasts,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director for Advanced Energy United’s federal priorities team, told Heatmap.
The first ballast groups like AEU will be looking to shore up is state policy. “States have to step up and take a leadership role,” he said, particularly in the areas that were gutted by Trump’s tax bill — residential energy efficiency and electrification, transportation and electric vehicles, and transmission.
State support could come in the form of tax credits, but that’s not the only tool that would create more certainty for businesses — considering the budget cuts states will face as a result of Trump’s tax bill, it also might not be an option. But a lot can be accomplished through legislative action, executive action, regulatory reform, and utility ratemaking, Godfrey said. He cited new virtual power plant pilot programs in Virginia and Colorado, which will require further regulatory work to “to get that market right.”
A lot of work can be done within states, as well, to make their deployment of clean energy more efficient and faster. Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, pointed to Texas’ “connect and manage” model for connecting renewables to the grid, which allows projects to come online much more quickly than in the rest of the country. That’s because the state’s electricity market, ERCOT, does a much more limited study of what grid upgrades are needed to connect a project to the grid, and is generally more tolerant of curtailing generation (i.e. not letting power get to the grid at certain times) than other markets.
“As Texas continues to outpace other markets in generator and load interconnections, even in the absence of renewable tax credits, it seems increasingly plausible that developers and policymakers may conclude that deeper reform is needed to the non-ERCOT electricity markets,” Norris told Heatmap in an email.
At the federal level, there’s still a chance for, yes, bipartisan permitting reform, which could accelerate the buildout of all kinds of energy projects by shortening their development timelines and helping bring down costs, Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap. “Whether you care about energy and costs and affordability and reliability or you care about emissions, the next priority should be permitting reform,” he said.
And Godfrey hasn’t given up on tax credits as a viable tool at the federal level, either. “If you told me in mid-November what this bill would look like today, while I’d still be like, Ugh, that hurts, and that hurts, and that hurts, I would say I would have expected more rollbacks. I would have expected deeper cuts,” he told Heatmap. Ultimately, many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits will stick around in some form, although we’ve yet to see how hard the new foreign sourcing requirements will hit prospective projects.
While many observers ruefully predicted that the letter-writing moderate Republicans in the House and Senate would fold and support whatever their respective majorities came up with — which they did, with the sole exception of Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick — the bill also evolved over time with input from those in the GOP who are not openly hostile to the clean energy industry.
“You are already seeing people take real risk on the Republican side pushing for clean energy,” Safford said, pointing to Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the new excise tax on wind and solar added to the Senate bill, which earned her vote after it was removed.
Some damage has already been done, however. Canceled clean energy investments adds up to $23 billion so far this year, compared to just $3 billion in all of 2024, according to the decarbonization think tank RMI. And that’s before OBBBA hits Trump’s desk.
The start-and-stop nature of the Inflation Reduction Act may lead some companies, states, local government and nonprofits to become leery of engaging with a big federal government climate policy again.
“People are going to be nervous about it for sure,” Safford said. “The climate policy of the future has to be polycentric. Even if you have the political opportunity to make a big swing again, people will be pretty gun shy. You will need to pursue a polycentric approach.”
But to Godfrey, all the back and forth over the tax credits, plus the fact that Republicans stood up to defend them in the 11th hour, indicates that there is a broader bipartisan consensus emerging around using them as a tool for certain energy and domestic manufacturing goals. A future administration should think about refinements that will create more enduring policy but not set out in a totally new direction, he said.
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Alliance, was similarly optimistic that tax credits or similar incentives could work again in the future — especially as more people gain experience with electric vehicles, batteries, and other advanced clean energy technologies in their daily lives. “The question is, how do you generate sufficient political will to implement that and defend it?” he told Heatmap. “And that depends on how big of an economic impact does it have, and what does it mean to the American people?”
Ultimately, Fishman said, the subsidy on-off switch is the risk that comes with doing major policy on a strictly partisan basis.
“There was a lot of value in these 10-year timelines [for tax credits in the IRA] in terms of business certainty, instead of one- or two- year extensions,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The downside that came with that is that it became affiliated with one party. It was seen as a partisan effort, and it took something that was bipartisan and put a partisan sheen on it.”
The fight for tax credits may also not be over yet. Before passage of the IRA, tax credits for wind and solar were often extended in a herky-jerky bipartisan fashion, where Democrats who supported clean energy in general and Republicans who supported it in their districts could team up to extend them.
“You can see a world where we have more action on clean energy tax credits to enhance, extend and expand them in a future congress,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The starting point for Republican leadership, it seemed, was completely eliminating the tax credits in this bill. That’s not what they ended up doing.”
On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.