Congress began tearing down the most consequential climate policy it had ever passed as torrents from a 1,000-mile-long atmospheric river lashed Washington, D.C.

The worst impacts of Tuesday’s storm were far up the Potomac River. Any concerns about how the United States would grapple with the increasingly intense weather of a warming world receded to background noise, less audible than the rain pelting the Capitol dome.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee voted to repeal clean energy incentives early Wednesday after an all-night session marking up legislation they titled “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” The $4.9 trillion package would extend the tax cuts passed in President Donald Trump’s first term and add a few more, such as eliminating taxes on tips, while ramping up border security spending. A portion of the funds to pay for the bill—about 11 percent, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s tally—would come from eradicating tax credits passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that were meant to spur a U.S. transition to cleaner energy.

Billions of dollars of private investment have poured into hundreds of new electric vehicle and battery plants and other clean energy projects in the wake of the IRA’s passage, with much of the boom occurring in Republican-led states. As President Joe Biden’s climate team left the White House, they expressed faith that this bipartisan impact would give the IRA durability, even though it had passed Congress with solely Democratic votes. The House Ways and Means Committee decisively put this notion to rest with its 389-page draft.

“Make no mistake, this bill takes a sledgehammer approach,” a coalition of environmental groups wrote in a letter to committee leaders. The legislation “guts America’s clean energy production, raises costs for families, worsens air pollution, and eliminates hundreds of thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs – all to fund massive tax breaks for billionaires.”

The outnumbered Democrats on the committee focused their fight on the legislation’s other impacts—like its massive cuts to Medicaid and food assistance—with little or no mention of the energy tax credits. Republicans maintained that lowered taxes benefited the vast majority of ordinary Americans.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill is the key to making America great again,” said Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “This bill wasn’t drafted by special interests or K Street lobbyists. It was drafted by the American people in communities across the country.” Smith talked about mothers, farmers and owners of small businesses who lauded the tax cuts during field hearings committee Republicans held last year. But certainly big business lobbyists also liked the package, including the American Petroleum Institute, which called it a plan “that supports American energy leadership.”

This committee vote is just the first step in a long, byzantine process known as “budget reconciliation,” special legislation that has an easier path to passage because it only requires a simple majority in the Senate. In the past decade, nearly all major policy, including the IRA, has been enacted through this route. 

The bill will be changed before it hits the president’s desk because of bitter disputes among Republicans over the so-called SALT deduction cap in states with high state and local taxes and over public lands in the West. But whether any of the clean energy incentives can be saved in this process will depend largely on the clout of a few Republicans who have dared to voice support for them amid Trump’s vocal campaign to end what he calls the “new green scam.”

“The Most Complicated Venn Diagram”

Clean energy advocates were heartened two months ago when 21 House Republicans sent Smith a letter urging his committee to maintain support for the energy tax credits that were spurring economic development in their districts. Given the Republicans’ narrow majority, their no votes could sink any attempt at repeal.

But fissures began to emerge, with some of the would-be Republican clean energy champions concerned primarily with the biofuels incentives that are popular in farm country. Biofuel tax credits were the only climate policy that got a boost from the House Ways and Means committee; it extended them to 2031, four years beyond their original expiration date.

Faring worst in the legislation were consumer credits, like those for the purchase of electric vehicles, home efficiency upgrades or solar installations; all would expire by year’s end.

“Basically the suite of consumer-focused credits is just being torn out root and branch, everything from stuff that’ll help people better insulate their homes, to get solar on the roofs, to find more cost effective transportation,” said Harry Godfrey, managing director of Advanced Energy United, which lobbies for the clean energy industry. “These are all the tools that people are using to help manage rising energy and transportation costs. We’re taking those tools away from people at a time of rising costs—that is dangerous and problematic in and of itself.”

But the Republican leadership framed clean energy incentives as something solely of interest to the upper classes, naming this section of the legislation, “Working Families Over Elites.” (In fact, Democrats had designed the IRA to extend the benefits of clean energy to working class communities, offering tax credits for used EVs for the first time and providing bonus tax credits for projects located near old fossil fuel industry sites or in low-income communities.) 

The tax credits that go to businesses and investors are eliminated more slowly, with phase-out of most beginning in 2029. But since the consumer credits would help generate the market demand that developers and producers are relying on, the extra time may not help.

“This is the first concrete act of this Congress to attempt to dismantle these tax credits, and a lot of folks in the industry were hoping for a better starting point,” said Chris Moyer, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill and the founder of Echo Communications, who now advises clean energy companies. “I will emphasize this is a starting point and it’s very unlikely this version will become law. However, a lot of this could become law, and that’s the concerning thing.”

He and other clean energy advocates will argue that withdrawing support for new energy projects is at odds with Trump’s energy abundance and dominance themes. The vulnerable tax credits are especially important for forms of energy that Republicans say they support, like nuclear and advanced geothermal developments, that need a long lead time.

So far, Republicans have put the big Trump tax cuts first. Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), who called in March for preservation of the energy tax credits, voted with her fellow GOP members on Ways and Means to repeal them, even while noting that she would have liked government support maintained for the four nuclear power stations in her upstate district. “Individual priorities do not take precedence over ensuring American families, workers and businesses do not face tax hikes in 2026,” she said.

Godfrey said that if repeal of the clean energy tax credits were a standalone bill, he did not see how it could get out of the House or Senate. But the dynamic is more difficult when Republican supporters of clean energy would have to stand in the way of Trump’s promised tax cuts.

“The politics are incredibly complicated, and [it] creates an incredible amount of pressure on a member to really hone in on their particular priorities,” Godfrey said. He said advocacy on the measure involves putting together “the most complicated Venn diagram in the world” to figure out how to build a coalition of votes that can make a difference.

“The question really does become, are enough members going to say, ‘This is the hill I’m going to die on?’” Godfrey said. “That is hard to discern.”

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