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One Big Beautiful Bill is One Big Horrible Mess
The reconciliation bill will cut off clean energy projects, gut American jobs, and increase household energy bills—all while inflating America’s debt.
Credit: Lydia Sulik/NWF
President Trump’s so-called “one big beautiful bill”—also known as the budget reconciliation bill, or the GOP-led megabill—passed out of the House on a slim margin late last month and now heads to the Senate, where leadership plans to work quickly to debate and advance the bill to the floor.
The bill may be big, but it is not beautiful—nor beneficial for Americans or our nation’s treasured wildlife. As passed by the House, it includes provisions to remove clean air and water protections and short-circuit proper environmental review for government-approved projects. It rolls back fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, removes fees on methane wasted in the atmosphere, and expands oil, gas, and coal mining. All of which put public health and wildlife at risk, while further destabilizing our climate.
Progress Abruptly Halted
Perhaps the biggest blow to climate progress in the bill is the changes to clean energy tax credits.
These credits have enabled the U.S. to produce more energy from clean sources like wind and solar more quickly. To date, they have generated $321 billion in new private investment across nearly 2,400 domestic clean-energy facilities. An additional $522 billion private sector investment has been announced across 2,217 facilities.
More than just statistics, these numbers are income for landowners, tax revenue for towns, and job opportunities for blue-collar workers in construction, manufacturing, and operations.
The reconciliation bill destroys all of this. It repeals some credits immediately, including all clean vehicle credits, all residential energy efficiency credits, and the clean hydrogen production credit. It revokes transferability of credits—the mechanism by which smaller companies with low tax liability access the credits through credit markets. This effectively denies credits to a wide swath of the industry.
It makes more severe changes to the technology-neutral tax credits. Though framed as a phaseout, the changes amount to elimination. The bill mandates aggressive placed-in-service dates: clean energy projects have to commence construction within 60 days of the enactment of the law. Even with expedited permitting currently being pursued by this Administration, it’s likely that no clean energy projects could be sited, permitted, and moved to construction in time to meet that deadline.
The bill also places “foreign entity of concern” guidelines, meant to prohibit sourcing materials for clean energy projects from certain countries. The guidelines are so strict they are virtually unworkable, and likely even unenforceable by the Internal Revenue Service. These changes will affect not only wind and solar, but also promising clean technologies like next-generation geothermal.
Jobs at Risk
The reconciliation bill would cripple the U.S. clean energy industry. The solar energy industry alone estimates it could kill 330,000 American jobs—including more than 30,000 each in Texas and Florida—and could wipe more than $280 billion in investments off the map. Recent modeling estimates the bill will kill about 830,000 American jobs by 2030. For an administration that claims to want to revitalize American manufacturing, why would they get rid of incentives that have been doing exactly that for more than two years?
Factoring in impacts to other clean energy sectors, the bill is estimated to kill about 830,000 jobs by 2030. Those impacts will extend into everyone’s pocketbooks. The bill will increase the average household’s energy bill by $400 a year. Additionally, the bill will have long-term effects on our climate—halting the transition to clean energy will undoubtedly mean pumping more climate-altering pollution into the air, continuing to raise global temperatures, trigger more extreme weather, and wreak havoc on our lungs.
The cost of eliminating the clean energy tax credits is clear. The Senate has a chance to fix these issues, and shield American consumers, workers, and burgeoning clean energy industries from this devastation. Take action by telling your Senator to keep America first by preserving the clean energy tax credits.
