Five Republicans on the House Budget Committee joined with Democrats to block the draft budget bill that included significant cuts to clean energy incentives.
Before clean energy industries get too excited — they blocked the bill from reaching the floor because they don’t think there were enough cuts.
A few of President Trump’s main requests on the budget bill were making his 2017 tax cuts permanent and eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay. In order to make up that deficit, the House Ways and Means Committee made cuts to Medicaid and solar subsidies, but the conservatives denying the draft bill said that the cuts are not enough, The New York Times reports. They also want immediate elimination of tax credits created through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The House Ways and Means Committee-approved draft bill, unveiled earlier this week, ended the residential investment tax credit (ITC) this year and sped up the phase-out of incentives offered at the utility level.
Solar industry trade organization SEIA said the bill will “effectively dismantle the most successful industrial onshoring effort in U.S. history.”
“This legislation will cause hundreds of American factories to close, eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, force electric bills to skyrocket for everyone, weaken the reliability of our electric grid, and eliminate our capacity to compete with China. This disruption would devastate local, red-state economies, with more than 75% of at-risk factories and investments concentrated in these communities,” said SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper in a press statement.
The goal was to send the budget bill to the Senate by Memorial Day. The House Budget Committee will now continue its markup of the bill and vote again on Monday.
