House Freedom Caucus members are warning that a budget plan Congress is debating to enact large swathes of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda must gut former President Biden’s green energy law.
Failure to incorporate a full repeal of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) could imperil the final bill’s passage in the House, Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Eric Burlison of Missouri told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The two conservative lawmakers’ decision to go to the mat for a full IRA repeal sets up a clash with moderate House Republicans who appear committed to saving the law’s green energy tax credits from the chopping block, which Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate.
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“If Republicans are going to refuse to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, they are not going to get a Republican tax bill through the House,” Roy told the DCNF. “It’s costly, it’s inflationary, and we should repeal every dollar of it.”
“The Trump presidency was built on the back of undoing all of the harm of the Biden administration, so that we can deliver for the American people,” Roy continued. “We told people we were going to do it. And we need to deliver on it.”
Deficit hawks and moderate Republicans are battling over how much spending and which programs to cut to help pay for the president’s sweeping legislative priorities, which could cost anywhere between $5 trillion and $11 trillion, according to analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
GOP lawmakers are seeking to provide additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to fast-track the president’s deportation agenda, boost defense spending and increase oil and gas leases in a budget reconciliation package this year. Trump has also asked congressional Republicans to enact the president’s sweeping tax priorities, which include a permanent extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts and no taxes on tips, overtime pay or Social Security benefits.
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A full repeal of the IRA’s green energy subsidies would create $851 billion in savings between 2025 and 2034, according to analysis from the Tax Foundation released Thursday.
“Giving that up is jeopardizing Trump’s agenda, not only to do what he promised, which was to repeal the ‘Green New Scam,’ but to [also] make the Trump Tax cuts permanent,” Burlison added.
“If you’re not going to repeal the IRA … and find savings in other mandatory spending programs — if you’re not willing to make that happen — you’re not going to be able to achieve these wins for Donald Trump,” Burlison continued.
House Republicans’ initial budget resolution floated $2 trillion in spending cuts over a decade to help offset $4.5 trillion in deficit increases to enact the president’s tax priorities. If Republicans fail to identify $2 trillion in spending cuts, the House budget resolution included an amendment pushed by Roy and other deficit hawks that would shrink the deficit ceiling window to $4 trillion, potentially imperiling Congress’ ability to implement all of the president’s tax priorities.
“Republicans can’t default to their one-way ratchet of cutting taxes but never delivering on the spending restraint,” Roy warns. “If you do not repeal the subsidies, it’s going to continue to cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money.”
The IRA’s energy subsidies could cost taxpayers between $2.04 trillion and $4.67 trillion by 2050, according to a report from the CATO Institute published March 11.
No Republican lawmakers voted for the IRA when it passed the Democratic-controlled Congress through budget reconciliation in August 2022.
Repealing the IRA through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process currently being pursued by congressional Republicans could represent the lone opportunity to rescind Biden’s climate law during Trump’s second term. Budget reconciliation allows the Senate to pass a tax and spending bill by a simple majority vote, effectively circumventing Democrats’ opposition.
However, a considerable number of House Republicans have thrown their weight behind preserving the green energy subsidies, which Biden considered to be one of his core legacy items upon leaving office. Roughly 60% of the manufacturing projects spurred by the green energy tax credits are in GOP districts, according to data from E2 in August 2024.
Twenty-one House Republicans, led by New York Republican Rep. Andrew Garbarino, wrote a joint letter March 9 urging Congress’ chief tax writer to preserve the law’s green energy tax credits during the budget reconciliation negotiations. The considerable number of GOP lawmakers that signed the letter suggests that Roy and Burlison may lack enough support among House Republicans to enact a full repeal given the conference’s slim majority.
“This is a line in the sand to counter what the Freedom Caucus guys have been saying, which is full repeal,” Garbarino told the New York Times on March 18. “[I] think this letter shows that there is enough support that full repeal would be too painful.”
Roy and Burlison slammed their Republican colleagues’ attempts to frame the Biden green energy tax credits in the letter as pro-Trump policy, arguing that cheap, abundant fossil fuels rather than subsidized-green energy is the best pathway to promote the president’s energy abundance agenda.
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Trump campaigned aggressively to repeal Biden’s expensive climate law, dubbing the IRA the “Green New Scam” in a speech at the New York Economic Club in September 2024.
“Our grid is weaker with unreliable, more expensive energy that we are subsidizing to undermine the market.” Roy told the DCNF. “That’s what we’re doing. Texas is like 90% renewable energy now being put on the grid, which makes our grid less reliable, makes it less efficient and effective and more costly. Because if you actually made it [green energy] compete in the market, it would be astronomically more expensive. But instead, we subsidized the crap out of it, and which costs taxpayers while producing less reliable energy on the grid.”
“Here’s what I want to say to my colleagues: go vote for a tax increase for your constituents to pay for your nonsensical fantasy green subsidies,” Roy added. “They act like it’s [green energy subsidies] free money.”
A brewing fight between conservative and moderate House Republicans over the future of the climate law’s green energy tax credits will create a new headache for Speaker Mike Johnson as GOP leadership looks to build consensus in crafting a tax and spending bill that can pass the House.
House Republicans narrowly passed an initial budget resolution 217 to 215 in February after House GOP leadership convinced several holdouts to back the budget blueprint. Johnson will likely need both Roy and Burlison’s votes to pass a compromise budget resolution with the Senate and a final tax and spending bill.
Johnson previously told reporters that changes made to the IRA in budget reconciliation will “be somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.”
“I’m a consensus builder and I get all the guys from the disparate, different sides of the conference with different districts and interests and priorities to an equilibrium point,” Johnson told Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman on March 11. “I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next five to six weeks to find the perfect balancing point on each one of those metrics.”
Roy previously said his decision to support the initial House budget resolution was contingent on the final tax and spending bill including a full repeal of the IRA’s green energy tax credits, Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts and a freeze on discretionary spending that accounts for future emergency spending.
“If Republicans are going to refuse to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, they are not going to get a Republican tax bill through the House,” Roy reiterated to the DCNF.
“Donald Trump said explicitly that he wants the entire thing repealed,” Burlison told the DCNF. “He didn’t say half-assed.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
