OPINION:
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans may not want to admit it, but the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is foundational to achieving significant parts of their energy agenda.
Long before COVID-related cost increases, millions of Americans have struggled with energy affordability. In 2020, during President Trump’s first term, the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that more than a quarter of U.S. households reported having difficulty paying their energy bills or keeping their homes at safe temperatures because of energy cost concerns, and millions forgo food and medicine to pay energy bills.
President Trump campaigned on reducing energy costs by half within his first 18 months in office. Notwithstanding a self-inflicted economic catastrophe, this will be yet another broken promise. Initial analysis has found that, since President Trump’s re-election, utility rates have begun to increase across the country, and study after study shows that repealing or weakening the IRA’s energy tax credits will further raise bills.
These studies recognize that demand for electricity is expected to grow. In the near term, the cheapest, quickest way to meet this demand is by deploying more solar, wind, and storage resources, which can fully take advantage of the IRA’s tax incentives.
But the threat of repealing these credits is already having a chilling effect on private sector investment, resulting in the pausing or cancellation of numerous pioneering projects. By one estimate, more than 50,000 American jobs have already been lost or delayed due to this increased uncertainty.
This risk to U.S. jobs should come as no surprise. The IRA has been incredibly effective at job creation, spurring more than 400,000 jobs and over $420 billion in private sector investment since August 2022. Many of these jobs directly support domestic manufacturing of energy technologies. The overwhelming majority of these investments to produce batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and other technologies have gone to congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Republicans may support manufacturers in their districts, but these sites will likely fail without incentives to actually deploy the technologies being produced. The IRA correctly anticipated that a manufacturing renaissance requires support for both making clean energy technologies through the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit and bonuses for domestic content, as well as deploying these products through the technology-neutral clean electricity tax credits and various consumer-facing credits and rebates.
Prioritization of domestic manufacturing is part of a broader bipartisan desire to enhance America’s economic competitiveness in strategic industries of the future, including energy and artificial intelligence. Without a doubt, China is leading the global race to dominate emerging energy industries, having invested $680 billion in clean energy in 2024, about as much as the United States and the European Union combined. Other countries have shown little sign of reducing their demand for clean energy, and China is currently best positioned to fulfill those needs as a technology exporter.
But this race is far from settled. IRA-inspired investments are already supporting the reshoring of industries that many people had previously written off as lost to overseas competitors. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the United States ranked 14th in the world in 2017 for solar panel manufacturing capacity. Today, we rank third, surpassing low-wage countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. We are now able to produce enough solar panels to meet our domestic needs.
The United States and China are also competing in artificial intelligence, which will require the construction of power-hungry data centers. The IRA’s incentives set the economic conditions that will foster private sector investment to expand our electricity system and allow the United States to win this competition.
If we are serious about rapidly expanding our nation’s electricity infrastructure as an economic and national security priority to lead the world in AI, it is incomprehensible to consider repealing the incentives that will enable us to meet growing energy demand at the lowest cost possible.
If we agree there is bipartisan support to lower energy costs, boost domestic manufacturing, and ensure U.S. competitiveness in key industries, maintaining the existing suite of energy incentives should be a no-brainer. I hope President Trump and Congressional Republicans set aside their feelings about who signed the IRA into law for long enough to realize that undoing these incentives would seriously jeopardize their own agenda.
• Rep. Paul D. Tonko is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing New York’s 20th Congressional District in the Capital Region. He is ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment. In addition to serving on the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations, he co-chairs the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC), and the Bicameral Electrification Caucus.
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