Trump rails against green tax credits in big, beautiful bill
President Trump railed against the green energy tax credits included in his big, beautiful bill in a Truth Social post on Saturday.
“I HATE “GREEN TAX CREDITS” IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL. They are largely a giant SCAM,” Trump posted.
His comments come amid a GOP internal debate over the big, beautiful bill on how to roll back former President Biden’s green energy tax credits. The Senate is taking a more lenient approach on this topic, while the House voted to “sledgehammer” the tax credits.
This is another point of disagreement that could slow the leadership’s ability to meet the July 4 deadline to pass the bill in the Senate.
Trump continued by saying he would rather the money be used anywhere else and that “Windmills, and the rest of this 'JUNK,' are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy.”
“None of it works without massive government subsidy (energy should NOT NEED SUBSIDY!). Also, it is almost exclusively made in China!!! It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!” he continued.
In August 2022, the Democrat-controlled House passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which included $369 billion for energy security and climate investments. This move underlined the need for domestic, clean energy manufacturing and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
The Senate is debating how to decrease these investments. The text now allows the construction of clean energy infrastructure, such as solar panels and wind farms, to begin this year to receive the full credit amount.
Before, when the bill was in the House, it demanded that those projects start only 60 days after the bill passed, essentially leaving no time for new clean energy investments.
The Senate is also allowing projects that begin construction in 2026 to receive 60 percent of the credit, in 2027 to receive 20 percent and in 2028 to receive no credits at all.
The House version would give no credits at all to projects that did not start producing electricity by 2028.
The Senate is still slashing Biden’s IRA significantly. Before the bill's passage in the House, some moderate Republicans issued a joint statement claiming that sledgehammering the IRA would “provoke an energy crisis or cause higher energy bills for working families.” Nevertheless, the bill still moved up to the Senate.