| House Republicans’ 2025 budget blueprint made it abundantly clear: Billions of dollars in climate spending under President Joe Biden will be slashed if the GOP controls Congress and the White House at this time next year. The House Budget Committee voted this week to pass its non-binding budget blueprint for funding the government beginning Oct. 1, including a recommendation to repeal $250 billion in clean energy and climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the administration’s signature climate legislation, as Timothy Cama writes. The budget, meant to guide the House’s spending and appropriations strategy, may be the closest thing to a GOP party platform that voters will see before November’s general election. Since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have voted over and over again to partially or entirely repeal the IRA. The House votes match up with the views of former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Trump has assailed IRA tax credits for electric vehicles and has crusaded against wind energy, even suggesting turbines cause cancer. The Department of Energy under Biden is using its loan office to boost energy technology aimed at cutting climate pollution. Conservative think tanks have mapped out changes under a GOP-led administration that would gut the agency’s clean energy initiatives. ‘Reverse the Curse’
The contrast with Biden couldn’t be sharper. During Thursday night’s State of the Union address, Biden touted spending and tax plans in a $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the IRA – some of which is projected to bring down U.S. deficit spending. Biden boasted that IRA tax credits are fueling “tens of thousands of clean energy jobs,” pointing to plans to build electric vehicles at a plant in Belvidere, Illinois, and the boon to union labor. The House Republican budget blueprint, titled “Reverse the Curse,” seeks to cut federal spending by over $14 trillion over a decade and balance the budget. Federal food assistance, social programs and foreign aid would all face the music. Taxes would be cut under optimistic economic-growth projections. The blueprint calls for passage of the Republicans’ Lower Energy Cost Act, which would repeal the bulk of Biden’s regulations and nearly $400 billion in the IRA for clean energy. IRA tax credits are “green corporate energy tax subsidies,” Republican Budget Chair Jodey Arrington of Texas has said. “We all know our current fiscal trajectory is unsustainable,” he said, “and the catastrophic and the irreparable harm that will come to this if we fail to act.” The top House Democrat on the budget panel, Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, criticized the GOP’s plan. “Even after trillions of dollars in draconian cuts they make to programs that help the most in need, this Republican budget still doesn’t balance,” he said.
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