GOP Budgets Propose Biggest Blows Yet to the IRA

Current conditions: Eighty of Minnesota’s 87 counties had red flag warnings on Monday, with conditions expected to remain dry and hot through Tuesday • 15 states in the South and Midwest will experience “extreme” humidity this week • It will be 99 degrees Fahrenheit today in Emerson, Manitoba. The municipality hit 100 last weekend — the earliest in the year Canada has ever recorded triple digits.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The Energy and Commerce Committee’s budget would kill clean energy grants ...

Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released their draft budget proposal on Sunday night, and my colleague Matthew Zeitlin dove into its widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs. Among the rescissions — clawbacks of unspent money in existing programs — and other proposals, Matthew highlights:

• that the Loan Programs office would have its IRA-bolstered funding pulled, “vastly reducing its overall ability to lend.”
• rescissions to programs to finance zero-emissions vehicle manufacturing.
• rescinding of unobligated funds to the Advanced Industrial Facilities Deployment Program, “designed to support projects that reduced emissions from industry.”
• “hundreds of millions of dollars of non-IRA rescissions for DOE programs and offices, including the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and State and Community Energy Programs.”

Those are just a few of the cuts, which the Sierra Club estimates would add up to $1.6 billion for programs related to decarbonizing heavy industry alone. You can read Matthew’s whole analysis here.

2. … and the House Ways and Means Committee’s budget would be a death blow to the IRA

Republicans on the Committee on Energy and Commerce weren’t the only ones who’ve been busy. On Monday, the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, proposed overhauling clean energy tax credits. Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo took a look at those proposals, including:

• “Ending the tax credit for new EVs (that is, 30D) on December 31, 2025 — with one exception. The credit would remain in effect for one year, through the end of 2026, for vehicles produced by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 tax credit-qualified cars between 2010 and the end of this year.”
• Moving up the phase-out of “the technology-neutral production and investment tax credits, which subsidize zero-emissions power generation projects including wind, solar, energy storage, advanced nuclear, and geothermal,” from beginning in 2032 to beginning in 2029, among other stipulations for the years that the credits remain in effect.
• Zapping transferability, which allowed developers with “low tax liability to sell their credits to another entity that stood to benefit from them.”

There’s much more, which Emily gets into here.

3. Energy Department moves to roll back water and energy regulations for appliances

In response to President Trump’s executive order last week ordering the Energy Department to “eliminate restrictive water pressure and efficiency rules” for appliances, the DOE published a list of 47 regulations on Monday that it has targeted as “burdensome and costly.” Appliances regulated by the DOE’s list include cook tops, dishwashers, compressors, and microwave ovens, with the agency claiming the deregulation effort would cut 125,000 words from the Code of Federal Regulations and “save the American people an estimated $11 billion,” The New York Times reports. By the government’s own accounting, though, efficiency standards saved the average American household about $576 on energy and gas bills in 2024, and reduced energy spending for households and businesses by $105 billion in total. “If this attack on consumers succeeds, President Trump would be raising costs dramatically for families as manufacturers dump energy- and water-wasting products into the market,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, said in a statement. “Fortunately, it’s patently illegal, so hold your horses.”

4. EPA administrator: ‘We’re fixing’ stop-start tech in cars

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin said Monday that the Trump administration plans to target stop-start technology in cars. According to the EPA’s website, start-stop technology saves fuel “by turning off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop and automatically starting it back up when you step on the accelerator,” improving fuel economy by 4% to 5%, especially in conditions like stop-and-go city driving. Zeldin, though, characterized the technology as when “your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.” Neither Zeldin nor the EPA offered further details on what that might entail.

5. Climate adaptation companies generated $1 trillion in combined revenue last year: report

More than 2,100 climate adaptation companies generated a combined $1 trillion in revenue last year by offering products and services mitigating the risks of climate change, a new study by London Stock Exchange Group found. “One question that we are getting a lot at the moment is: ‘With the Trump administration in office, what does that mean for the green economy?,’” Jaakko Kooroshy, LSEG’s global head of sustainable investment research, told Bloomberg in an interview about the report. The answer is “this thing is now so big and so robust, it’s not going to implode just like that,” he added.

The analysis looked at 20,000 companies worldwide and “found that adaptation-related revenues last year accounted for roughly a fifth of the $5 trillion global green economy,” with green buildings and water-related infrastructure being the most significant contributors, Bloomberg adds. LSEG further noted that if all companies related to the “green economy” were considered their own industry group, they’d have had the best performance of any equity sector over the past decade.

THE KICKER

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