Republicans have described the “big, beautiful” megabill they’re currently attempting to pass as a way to end “Green New Deal–style waste” and “limit government spending to what actually helps Americans,” according to Brett Guthrie, the House Energy and Commerce Committee chair. The House’s Ways and Means Committee put its plans to ax the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate and energy programs under the heading “Working Families Over Elites.” The class warfare–style language is familiar. Over the last several years, the right has reliably leveraged its faux populism against Biden’s climate and energy measures: Tax cuts for the rich are “pro-growth, pro-family, and pro-America,” while the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is “corporate welfare for progressive special interests.”
They’re lying about the content of their megabill, and they’re plain wrong that climate and energy spending benefits only the wealthy. The most bizarre thing about the GOP’s war on alleged climate elites getting rich off the IRA, however, is that the main beneficiaries of Joe Biden’s trademark legislative achievement have actually been Republicans. Nearly three-quarters of investments spurred on by that bill have flowed to states that voted to make Trump president; two-thirds of those funds have come in the form of private-sector investments incentivized by the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax breaks for zero-carbon energy, advanced manufacturing, and more. This week, as House Republicans decide how quickly and thoroughly to dismantle the so-called “green new scam,” the results will signal how committed GOP politicians are to snatching from their own constituents.
Top Republicans seem to have wagered that talking points about ending “handouts to Democrats’ climate activist cronies,” as Guthrie put it, could unite the caucus—and, importantly, inspire them to pass the bill quickly. Repealing the IRA—a rallying cry within the GOP—would serve as cover for huge and deeply unpopular cuts to Medicaid and other programs. Some Republicans have said they want to preserve IRA funds that have helped court billions of dollars’ worth of investments to their district. Others have argued that those cuts should go much further.
On Friday, the House Budget Committee voted against advancing the party’s tax-and-spend proposal. Republican hard-liners were demanding that even steeper cuts be made across the board before they were ready to vote for it, cuts that included a fuller, more immediate rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act. Late Sunday night, that bloc eventually relented, voting “present” so that the package could move forward. Still, the group signaled that they’d continue fighting to extract more concessions. It’s not clear exactly what those lawmakers got out of this weekend’s deal or what else they’ll demand, but Republicans appear poised to deal an even more critical hit to IRA incentives than those they’d proposed last week.
The original package would eliminate most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 tax credit to purchase certain electric vehicles at the end of this year and phase out incentives for wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal power years ahead of schedule. A preliminary analysis from the Rhodium Group projects that the Working Families Over Elites proposal could raise household energy costs by as much as 7 percent in 2035. Repealing the Inflation Reduction Act also stands to put at risk $388 billion worth of investments in Republican-controlled House districts, as investors wary of Trump’s tariff chaos, a potential recession, and the prospective end of IRA tax incentives continue to walk away from previously announced projects. Republicans have tried to suggest otherwise, but much of the $880 billion in cuts the Energy and Commerce Committee hopes to extract would come out of Medicaid. As of last week, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the GOP’s proposed Medicaid cuts would suck $625 billion out of that program.
The overarching aim of the bill is to extend the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017, which expire this year and inordinately benefit the wealthy. They’d also like to expand those cuts, create new ones, and fund a host of other GOP priorities. Among those is $150 billion of new defense spending, including tens of billions of dollars for military contractors like SpaceX, which is run by the richest man on earth. In order to offset the cost of doing all that, the GOP wants to kick more than 10 million poor and disabled people off Medicaid and leave 7.6 million people uninsured, adding work requirements and making it easier for states to cancel coverage. Republican changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—including the addition of work requirements—could kick millions of people off that program as well, making it much more difficult for them to eat.
Despite some Republicans’ objections to entirely dismantling the IRA, it’s not clear that it would be a red line for any of them in negotiations. In other words, it’s likely that so-called moderates who are ostensibly pro-IRA would be willing to sacrifice the law in order to ward off steeper cuts to Medicaid or win a larger state and local tax deduction.
It remains to be seen what’s been axed already and what will be on the chopping block this week. Chip Roy—a key holdout on the Budget Committee—wrote on social media that the bill will now “move Medicaid work requirements forward” and reduce “the availability of future subsidies under the green new scam.” He’s also complained specifically that his district has experienced a wave of investment as a result of the IRA. The package presented last week, he ranted, would have failed to stop the “devastatingly bad projects being implemented in my district” and even cause a “race to construction” as developers attempt to scoop up IRA funds before they expire.
Roy’s approach speaks to a broader derangement within the Republican Party. Decades of industry funding for climate denial have congealed into a GOP whose members don’t just hate anything called climate policy but actively oppose any green-tinted private-sector investment in their districts. That’s a problem for the planet, and, increasingly, for Republicans, as they struggle to manage a coalition that’s become unmoored from reality and the material interests of its donors and constituents. Whatever big, beautiful budget they eventually produce will be a disaster. And while attacks on the “green new scam” target Democrats, a decision to go even more nuclear against the IRA stands to hurt their own voters much more.
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