The GOP Megabill Is Playing Right Into China’s Hands

The latest version of Congress’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” claims to be tough on China. Instead, it penalizes American energy developers and hands China the keys to dominate 21st century energy supply chains and energy-intensive industries like AI.

Republicans are on the verge of enacting a convoluted maze of “foreign entity” restrictions and penalties on U.S. manufacturers and energy companies in the name of excising China from U.S. energy supply chains. We share this goal to end U.S. reliance on Chinese minerals and manufacturing. While at the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House, we worked on numerous efforts to combat China’s grip on energy supply chains. That included developing tough, nuanced and, importantly, workable rules to restrict tax credit eligibility for electric vehicles made using materials from China or Chinese entities — rules that quickly began to shift supply chains away from China and toward the U.S. and our allies.

That experience tells us that the rules in the Republican bill will have the opposite effect. In reality, they will make it much more difficult for U.S. companies to move supply chains away from Chinese control. The GOP’s proposed restrictions require every developer of a critical minerals project, advanced manufacturing facility, or clean energy power plant to sift through their supply chains and contracts for any relationship with a Chinese (or Russian, Iranian, or North Korean) entity. Using a Chinese technology license, or too many subcomponents, or materials produced in China — even if there are few or no alternatives — would be enough to render a company ineligible for the very incentives they need to finance and build new U.S. energy production or manufacturing facilities.

This would put companies in the position of having to prove the absence of Chinese entanglements (and guarantee that there will be none in the future) to qualify for tax credits, an all but impossible task, particularly given the untested set of new rules. Huge portions of the supply chain have flowed through China for decades, including 65% of global lithium processing and 97% of solar wafer manufacturing. American companies are already working to distance themselves from Chinese expertise and components, but the complex, commingled nature of global supply chains and corporate business structures make it infeasible to flip the switch overnight.

On top of that, the latest version of the bill would impose a brand new tax on any new solar and wind projects that have too much foreign entity “assistance,” while providing the Treasury Secretary carte blanche for determining what that might be. The result: An impossible bind, whereby the very sectors that need the most support to disentangle from China are now the ones most penalized by the new Republican “foreign entity” restrictions.

The fact is that China is ahead, not behind, in many energy sectors, and America desperately needs help playing catch-up. Ford’s CEO has called Chinese battery and electric vehicle technologies “an existential threat” to U.S. automaking. In energy supply chains for nuclear, solar, batteries, and critical minerals, China is not merely producing cheap knockoffs of American inventions, it is churning out cutting-edge battery chemistries, advanced manufacturing processes, and high-speed charging systems, all at lower cost. And at least until the Inflation Reduction Act enacted incentives for U.S. manufacturing and deployment, the gap between the U.S. and China was widening.

These untested foreign entity rules will widen that gap once more. Since the start of the year, developers have abandoned more than $14 billion in domestic clean energy deployment and manufacturing projects, citing the uncertain tariff and tax policy environment, and that was before the new tax on solar and wind. New analysis from Energy Innovation finds that the latest version of the bill would reduce U.S. generation capacity by 300 gigawatts over the next decade — multiple times what we will need to power new data centers for artificial intelligence. Stopping clean energy projects in their tracks is also likely to trigger an energy price shock by constraining the very energy technologies that can be built most quickly. In the end we will cede not only our supply chains to China, but also our competitive edge in the race for AI and manufacturing dominance.

Fortunately, we have all the ingredients in this country already to achieve energy leadership. The U.S. boasts deep capital markets, a highly skilled manufacturing and construction workforce, a strong consumer economy driving demand, and, in spite of recent attacks, the world’s greatest universities and national labs. We simply need policy to provide a workable path for companies to invest with certainty, bring factories back to the United States, hire American workers, and learn to produce these technologies at scale.

With the Inflation Reduction Act’s domestic production incentives and supply chain restrictions, hundreds of companies stepped up over the past few years and made that bet, pouring billions of dollars into American supply chains. Should they be enacted, the reconciliation bill’s foreign entity rules would slam the brakes on all that activity, playing right into China’s hands.

There is a way to apply a set of carefully crafted restrictions to wean us off Chinese supply chains, but we cannot afford to saddle American energy with new taxes and red tape. If we scatter rakes across the floor for companies to step on, they will just throw up their hands and send their investments overseas, leaving us more reliant on China than before.