The Biden administration left office without ever disclosing how much of the historic climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act it had spent.
Politico reached out to every federal agency in November in an attempt to answer that question and could only conclude that it was a “big mystery.” The administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants created by the IRA, the outlet found, but the amount that had been obligated — meaning legally committed and therefore, at least in theory, protected — remained largely unknown.
That continued to be true right up until the legislative process for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. In addition to overhauling the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, Republicans in Congress rescinded the unobligated funds from 47 of the law’s more than 80 climate and environmental programs. According to scores from the Congressional Budget Office, $31.7 billion of the $93.4 billion for those programs, or about 34%, was left.
That means the Biden administration spent or contracted out about two-thirds of the funding from these programs. The data puts into focus what the ultimate effects and outcomes of the Inflation Reduction Act will be over the coming decades — or rather, what they could be, if the Trump administration upholds existing contracts. Whether the administration must honor these agreements is the subject of several ongoing lawsuits.
But we can see, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency, which had the largest appropriation from the IRA of any agency, obligated the vast majority of that money to states, tribes, nonprofits, and other beneficiaries. Billions of dollars to monitor and address air pollution in low-income communities and at schools, to phase down planet-warming refrigerants and transition to next-generation technologies, and to help states build out and implement their climate action plans should theoretically be flowing into the economy, so long as the contracts are ultimately honored. The entirety of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was obligated, and while the EPA has attempted to claw back roughly $20 billion of that — a process that has been held up in the courts — the $7 billion set aside for a low-income solar program called Solar For All is actively funding new projects around the country.
The agency under Biden was less successful in standing up a series of programs designed to advance greenhouse gas emissions reporting. Initiatives to improve the labeling systems for low-carbon construction materials and to standardize corporate emissions reporting never really got off the ground.
The Department of Agriculture was also an efficient spender. While the data shows it had obligated only about $7 billion of the more than $18 billion allocated for climate-focused conservation programs, only $10 billion of the funding was actually available for the department to use by the time Biden left office. On the one hand, that means it awarded 70% of the available funds. On the other, that means Congress has now evaporated a whopping $11 billion that could have been disbursed.
The Forest Service, which is under the USDA, also deployed more than $2 billion, or about 93% of its funding for National Forest restoration, urban forestry, and climate mitigation grants for private forest owners.
There are limitations to the data. It shows that the Department of Energy only spent about 39% of its funding, but because the Budget Office did not break out the rescissions by program, we can’t see how far along the agency got with each one, or how much of each was clawed back. The data can also be somewhat misleading, as several of the programs provide loans and loan guarantees, while the OBBB only rescinded “credit subsidies,” i.e. money to cover the costs of this lending service. In other words, this doesn’t tell us much about how much Biden’s Loan Programs Office accomplished. But in this case the office’s website helps fill out the picture: It lists 23 active loans that were made after the IRA passed, worth nearly $58 billion. (The IRA appropriated about $11.7 billion in credit subsidies to the Loan Programs Office.)
I also put together a list of programs that Congress did not rescind, as they show which IRA creations the GOP either deemed worthwhile or too depleted, a.k.a. obligated, to be worth the effort. Several big-ticket items jump out. As I’ve previously written, two rebate programs for home efficiency improvements remain intact, although most of the $8.8 billion in funding is currently paused. Drought mitigation, water access, and tribal electrification and climate resilience grants were also untouched. A $3 billion EPA program to reduce air pollution at ports made it through the gambit after an initial House draft of the OBBB had proposed killing it.
Republicans in Congress also preserved a nearly $10 billion program to help rural electric cooperatives invest in clean energy and energy efficiency. Rural coops disproportionately rely on coal-fired power plants, burdening their members with higher energy prices and dirtier air. While the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is a major advocate for coal power and has applauded Trump’s moves to boost it, the group also championed the rural clean energy program, with its CEO telling E&E News last fall that the program was oversubscribed and that “there is an appetite for investing in clean energy.”
To be sure, the question of whether and to what extent the Trump administration will disburse previously obligated funds or continue to spend down the remaining programs is a big one. But the supposition that the OBBB “killed” the IRA is also not really accurate. Between obligated funds and the programs that weren’t rescinded, more than $105 billion could still flow into the economy to fight climate change.
California beamin'.EIA
