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The new climate politics are all about affordability.
On the third anniversary of the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, Heatmap contributor Advait Arun mourns what’s been lost — but more importantly, charts a path toward what comes next.
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
When Congress rescinded unobligated funds from the historic climate law, it inadvertently answered a question climate advocates have been asking for months.
The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.
The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
