President Trump campaigned on “ending the Green New Scam.” That’s the trillion dollar-plus climate spending in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The repeal of the pointless and inflationary subsidies should be a no-brainer layup for congressional Republicans. The opportunity to do so is coming up as part of the President’s much-anticipated Big Beautiful Bill. But now there’s drama.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022. Not a single Republican in the House or in the Senate voted for it. The bill was able to avoid filibuster in the Senate because the Senate Parliamentarian controversially determined that it qualified to be considered under the Senate’s reconciliation process. Even so, the IRA only passed Congress because then-Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
The good news is that, because the IRA was enacted by reconciliation, it can also be repealed by reconciliation. That is exactly how Republican leadership plans to pass the Big Beautiful Bill, possibly as early as Memorial Day. The problem is that, while all Republicans seem to want to pass some sort of Big Beautiful Bill, not all want that bill to repeal the Green New Scam.
A group of at least 21 Republican House members, none of whom voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, signed a March 9 letter to Speaker Johnson warning against repealing the subsidies. “We have 20-plus members saying, ‘Don’t just think you can repeal these things and have our support,’” Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who organized the letter, told Politico.
What exactly is behind this resistance to a President to whom many of the letter signatories may very well owe their seats?
While it’s often difficult, if not dangerous, to get in between politicians and their subsidies, the Biden administration made it especially so with the sheer amount of Green New Scam spending.
As of September 2024, Biden spent $147.4 billion in 41 states, including $63.7 billion in just seven 2024 battleground states. Eleven of the 21 signatories to the March 9 letter are from states that received at least $4.7 billion dollars. Eight signatories are from blue states and two are from ethanol subsidy-loving red states. Biden’s Green New Scam spending might be corrupt but it wasn’t stupid. These subsidies were obviously intended to purchase red state politicians so that it could be held over their heads and used against future repeal attempts.
In response to a recent X post by me about the letter, signatory Rep. Don Bacon (NE-02) wrote “Biofuels are important to Midwest. It is the reality.” He later added, “You might as well accept it… some of the tax incentives are going to remain. For one, folks already have invested billions based on the promise.”
Another piece of the resistance, according to two House members supporting the repeal with whom I talked, is coming from the oil and gas industry. The Inflation Reduction Act contains $8 billion in tax credits earmarked for carbon dioxide emissions capture and sequestration. This includes: (1) $85 per ton of emissions captured and sequestered from manufacturing and refining operations; and (2) $60 per ton of emissions captured during oil production.
None of this carbon capture and sequestration activity is meaningful to the climate. At best, it would amount to roughly 114 million tons of emissions captured and stored by 2031. Over that time period, global emissions will be on the order of 420 billion tons. That latter amount is about 3,700 times more emissions than the relatively trivial amount of emissions the oil industry would be paid $8 billion to capture.
The subsidy is outrageous waste, if not also fraud and abuse. First, the oil industry already has a tried-and-true business model that mints money without subsidies. Second, regardless of one’s views of climate science, the emissions capture and sequestration would be climatically insignificant. As trivial as the captured emissions would be to the climate, it’s not even clear that such a large amount of emissions could actually be physically captured and sequestered. Finally, President Trump is already undoing Biden’s regulations that hamstrung the oil and gas industry.
Yet the ungrateful oil industry is still demanding the subsidies. Its friends in Congress are willing to risk the Big Beautiful Bill, including maintaining the vital Trump 2017 tax cuts, for the sake of petty and pointless subsidies.
Candidate Trump made his campaign promises. Americans voted for them and elected a Congress to enact them. No one voted for the subsidies. President Trump has issued the necessary Executive orders and directives. It is now time for congressional Republicans to do what they were elected to do: Repeal the Green New Scam.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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