Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy said the initial Senate draft of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” is dead on arrival in the House barring changes to green energy tax breaks and the bill’s broader impact on budget deficits.
Roy, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, has been a leading voice calling for a full repeal of green energy tax credits enacted under former President Joe Biden. He torched the Senate for “backsliding” on House language by phasing down green energy subsidies on a less aggressive timeline and for weakening a House plan to transfer some of the costs of federal food aid to states, in a press call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.
Roy said he and his House Freedom Caucus (HFC) colleagues have been engaged in frequent conversations with the Senate about the upper chamber’s proposed changes and argued the Senate’s draft bill will not pass muster in the House. Following the Senate draft clearing the upper chamber, the House and Senate will have to adopt identical provisions before sending the package to the White House for signature.
“The message we’re delivering back — both to Senate leadership and to Senate conservatives — that they’re not getting the job done in terms of terminating the ‘Green New Scam’ subsidies, or frankly going far enough on Medicaid.”
“I have said publicly, and I’m speaking for Chip Roy here — not anyone else — but I think there are some like-minded individuals that are not going to vote for a bill that does that,” Roy told reporters. “It is definitively dead if it were to come over to the House in anything resembling its current form: the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] provisions, the ‘deficit damage,’ some of the other policy changes that we think are concerning.”
Roy and conservative fiscal hawks secured a near immediate phaseout of tax credits for wind, solar and battery storage in the House-passed bill, but stopped short of convincing House Republicans to pursue a wholesale repeal. The Texas Republican said he and his fellow conservatives are not ready to walk away from the House deal to aggressively roll back green energy tax breaks, including a provision requiring wind and solar projects to commence construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage to qualify for certain tax credits.
The Senate’s proposal nixes the 60-day construction start requirement for wind and solar projects and sets up a more gradual phase down for wind and solar tax credits.
The Texas congressman also bashed the Senate plan for ignoring a recommendation from conservative House Republicans to pair dollar-for-dollar spending reductions to additional tax cuts. The Senate’s proposal would enact a permanent extension of the lapsed or expiring provisions of the president’s 2017 tax cuts. Permanent tax relief is a redline for several GOP senators, including Republican Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who argued Americans and businesses need certainty in the tax code.
“Now, most of us, I’m speaking to the House generally, conservatives, Freedom Caucus, Chip Roy, we want to see tax permanence,” Roy said. “But you have to do the math still.”
“We’ve got a serious delta in the overall deficit impact of their bill and reality,” Roy added. “Math is still math. We still have a big hole here in terms of deficits.”
Roy also lauded the Senate plan for making “serious improvements” in some areas, including the removal of new taxes on electric vehicles and hybrids — a controversial provision in the House-passed bill — and for limiting states’ provider taxes used to acquire additional federal Medicaid funding, which he called a “step in the right direction” that could save taxpayers $150 billion over a ten-year period.
However, Roy said both the initial House draft and the Senate plan left the most consequential Medicaid reform off the table, which he argued would be lowering federal Medicaid payments to states, also known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) rate.
House and Senate GOP leadership declined to include changes to the FMAP rate in their respective proposals due to opposition from moderate Republican lawmakers.
Roy also pushed back on the idea that Congress needs to send the tax and spending bill to the president’s desk by the floated July 4 deadline, citing the “serious delta” between the House and Senate on certain provisions. Vice President JD Vance told Senate Republicans during a Tuesday lunch that the bill needs to be on the president’s desk before the August recess, Punchbowl News first reported.
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