As Republicans continue to inch forward on their megabill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been working to sway them against wholesale repeals of the Biden-era climate law he helped get passed in 2022.
It’s an exercise he’s been undertaking since President Donald Trump and Republicans swept the elections last year, he said in an interview Wednesday.
The New York Democrat said he reached out to clean energy executives and environmental leaders months ago to strategize over protecting the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy tax credits, which are overwhelmingly befitting red districts and states.
But Schumer conceded he wasn’t prepared for how aggressive the House GOP would be in scaling back many of these incentives in their version of the domestic policy package central to enacting Trump’s legislative agenda.
“Most of the Republican congressmen didn’t know of it, but I called up everyone that weekend, and I said, ‘DEFCON 1,'” Schumer said, referring to the highest alert level for nuclear war.
In his fight he has enlisted finance people; clean energy advocates; tech executives; governors with major renewables investments; “friendly” Trump administration officials; Duke Energy and Southern Co. executives; and Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, to call senators.
Specifically, Schumer and his allies are targeting 16 Senate Republicans who he thinks show “some discomfort” with undoing certain key elements of the climate law driving investments in their communities.
“I have a list of the one hundred biggest clean energy projects in America,” Schumer said. “Eighty percent are in red states, it turns out. One of the companies that runs those projects is saying, ‘People, call your senator,’ and say, ‘This will shut me down.’ And they are doing it.”
The Senate Finance Committee is expected to release text as soon as Friday for its portion of the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill.” In a briefing to the Senate Republican Conference on Wednesday afternoon, panel Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) told lawmakers he wanted to “extend the runway” for certain tax credits that House Republicans all but scrapped — though details were sparse.
Andres Picon contributed to this report.
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