Trump’s Grand Energy Plans Still Have to Survive Congress

JD Vance had a message recently for Germans uneasy about the way Elon Musk has been promoting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party ahead of their country’s upcoming elections: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference. It was supposed to be a joke, but apparently the vice president of the United States is still peeved at the fact that he had to see a Swedish teenager on his TV saying that we ought to do something about climate change.

Just a throwaway line meant to convey the Trump administration’s general belligerence and contempt for Europeans? Perhaps. But it also communicated that the administration has had it with scolding, not to mention any government actions meant to confront planetary warming; in its first month in power, it has moved swiftly and aggressively to suspend or roll back just about every climate-related policy it could find.

Now congressional Republicans have to pass a budget, and in so doing decide what the law — and not just a bunch of executive orders — will do about all the existing programs to promote clean energy and reduce emissions. That means we’re headed for an intra-GOP conflict. On one side is ideology, in the form of a desire by the administration and many Republicans in Congress to eviscerate government spending in general and climate spending in particular. On the other side are the parochial interests of individual members, who want to make sure that their own constituents are protected even if it means their party doesn’t get everything it wants.

Climate hawks got optimistic last summer when 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson imploring him not to push for wholesale repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2022 climate law filled subsidies for clean energy, since their districts are benefiting from the boom in manufacturing the law helped spur. About 80% of the green energy funding from the IRA is going to Republican districts; in some places that means thousands of local jobs depend on the free flow of federal funds.

While some of the largest spending is concentrated in the South, especially the areas that have come to be known as the “Battery Belt,” there are hundreds of congressional districts around the country that benefit from IRA largesse. That’s an old best practice of policy design, one the defense industry has used to particularly good effect: The wider you spread the subcontracts or subsidies, the more members of Congress have jobs in their district that rely on the program and the safer it will be from future budget cuts.

The IRA could have some other allies in its corner; for instance, automakers that are struggling to bring the prices of their electric models to an affordable level will be lobbying to retain the tax subsidy that can reduce the sticker price of an electric vehicle by $7,500. There is already a backlash brewing to the administration’s freeze on climate-related programs in rural areas. Many farmers entered into contracts with the federal government in which they would be reimbursed for land conservation and renewable energy projects; after taking loans and laying out their own money believing the government would honor its part of the agreement, they’ve been left holding the bag.

So will Congress step in to ensure that some climate funding remains? This is the point in the story where we inevitably invoke former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s dictum that “All politics is local.” No matter what issue you’re working on, O’Neill insisted, what matters most is how it affects the folks back home, and the most successful politicians are those who know how to address their constituents’ most immediate problems.

Like many such aphorisms, it’s often true, but not always. While there are many members of Congress whose careers live or die on their ability to satisfy the particular needs of their districts, today national politics and party loyalty exert a stronger pull than ever. The correlation between presidential and House votes has grown stronger over time, meaning that voters overwhelmingly choose the same party for president and their own member of Congress. Even the most attentive pothole-filling representative won’t last long in a district that doesn’t lean toward their party.

Which is perfectly rational: Given the limited influence a single House member has, you might as well vote for the party you hope will control Washington rather than splitting your ticket, no matter who is on the ballot. That doesn’t mean members of Congress have stopped working to bring home the bacon, but it does mean that the pressure on them to deliver concrete benefits to the voters back home has lessened considerably. And when the congressional leadership says, “We really need your vote on this one,” members are more likely to go along.

There will be some horse-trading and pushback on the administration’s priorities as Congress writes its budget — for instance, farm state members are already angry about the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which buys billions of dollars of agricultural products from American farmers to distribute overseas, and will press to get that funding restored. And with a razor-thin majority in the House, individual members could have more leverage to demand that the programs that benefit their districts be preserved.

On the other hand, this is not an administration of compromisers and legislative dealmakers. Trump and his officials see aggression and dominance as ends in and of themselves, apart from the substance of any policy at issue. Not only are they determined to slash government spending in ways never seen before, they seem indifferent to the consequences of the cuts. For their part, Republicans in Congress seem willing to abdicate to Trump their most important power, to determine federal spending. And if Trump succeeds in his goal of rewriting the Constitution to allow the president to simply refuse to spend what the law requires, Congress could preserve climate spending only to see it effectively cancelled by the White House.

Which he would probably do, given that it is almost impossible to overstate the hostility Trump himself and those around him have for climate-related programs, especially those signed into law by Joe Biden. That’s true even when those programs support goals Trump claims to hold, such as revitalizing American manufacturing.

What those around Trump certainly don’t want to hear is any “scolding” about the effects of climate change, and they’re only slightly more open to arguments about the parochial interests of members of Congress from their own party. As in almost every budget negotiation, we probably won’t know until the last minute which programs survive and which get the axe. But there are going to be casualties; the only question is how many.