To: Interested Parties
From: Evergreen Action Deputy Communications Director Seth Nelson
Date: July 7, 2025
Re: These Republicans Promised to Protect Clean Energy. Then They Voted to Kill It Anyway.
“My sincere hope is that this is not the final product,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski told reporters last week. “This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk. We need to work together to get this right.”
If you thought Sen. Murkowski delivered that statement before the Senate vote on Trump’s Big Oil Billionaire Bill—a massive transfer of wealth from working-class families to oligarchs and the ultra-rich—we would forgive you for assuming so.
No, she actually said it after voting for Trump’s Big Oil Billionaire Bonanza.
Despite declaring the bill “not good enough for [...] our nation—and we all know it,” Sen. Murkowski cast her vote in favor before walking straight into a press gaggle to express her concerns. And she wasn’t alone.
Letter after letter, interview after interview, statement after statement, Republicans lined up for months to express their concerns with the bill. They praised “transformative investments” in clean energy, warned repeal would bring “severe economic consequences,” and vowed to “prioritize energy affordability for American families.”
Then they voted to pass a bill into law that guts the very investments they knew their districts were depending on. Clean energy tax credits—responsible for so much progress in rebuilding American industry, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cutting energy costs—are functionally dead. Nearly a million jobs are now at risk. Electricity bills could soar for the average family by $110 next year and up to $400 annually within a decade. And our grid will become less reliable, heightening the threat of blackouts.
Before the bill even hit the president’s desk, they started saying the quiet part out loud. After final passage, Texas Rep. Chip Roy bragged to POLITICO, “We believe we’re going to get 90-plus percent of all future [clean energy] projects terminated.” While the Trump team cheers on the rapid expansion of power-hungry data centers, they’re working just as hard to block the very new American energy we need to power them—slashing clean energy projects that lower costs, create jobs, and strengthen the grid.
Republicans knew this bill would be bad for the country, and they passed it anyway, even as the devastating impacts of the climate crisis are unfolding in real-time. In Texas, more than 90 people are dead—including 27 children and counselors from a beloved all-girls summer camp—after catastrophic flooding linked to extreme weather fueled by climate change. And now, our last best shot to cut emissions and prevent a worsening climate crisis is slipping out of reach—leaving us, our children, and their children, and their children to suffer the increasingly disastrous consequences.
They praised and promised to protect clean energy. And then they voted to kill it anyway.
Republican Members of Congress On-the-Record Praising Energy, Manufacturing Tax Incentives and Warning About Repealing Them
MICHIGAN REP. JOHN JAMES urged caution in cutting provisions that have “incentivized onshoring of the future of automotive jobs.” He even signed a letter warning that repeal “would increase utility bills the very next day.”
And then he voted to raise utility bills anyway.
NEW YORK REP. MIKE LAWLER, PENNSYLVANIA REP. ROB BRESNAHAN, and NEBRASKA REP. DON BACON issued a joint statement with nine other Republicans after Ways and Means Republicans released their devastating repeal package. In it, they proclaimed to leadership that it was vital to “ensure certainty” for energy investments and vowed to “protect our constituents from higher energy costs.”
And then they voted to throw American businesses relying on that vital certainty into chaos—and left their constituents to fend for themselves. Twice.
LAWLER, BRESNAHAN, NEW YORK REP. ANDREW GARBARINO, and BACON, along with 13 other Republicans, sent a desperate letter to Senate leaders begging them to “mitigate” the damage inflicted by their own votes after helping pass the repeal through the House. They warned the House bill would cause project cancellations to “snowball” and asked the Senate to clean up their mess. The Senate did not, in fact, clean up their mess.
And then they all voted for it the second time anyway (except Garbarino, who only voted once, claiming he “fell asleep” and missed the first vote).
GARBARINO led multiple letters—signed by at least 18 Republicans—urging leadership not to pull the rug out from under energy developers who “relied upon” the ten-year timelines for “capital allocation [...] and project commitments,” which they warned would be “jeopardized by premature credit phase-outs.” In a POLITICO interview, Garbarino added, “We have 20-plus members saying, ‘Don’t just think you can repeal these things and have our support.’”
And then they all caved to Trump and voted for final passage—which, in fact, did “repeal these things” anyway.
MICHIGAN REP. TOM BARRETT promised voters he wouldn’t “claw back things that have already been promised” when he ran for office last fall, pledging to act “in the best interest of Michigan [...and] our workforce.”
And then he voted for a bill that would claw back billions in promised investments and put more than 25,000 Michigan jobs at risk anyway.
NEVADA REP. MARK AMODEI called keeping the advanced manufacturing and clean vehicle credits in place a “red line” for him, saying their preservation is the bare minimum for earning his support—what he described as “the floor.” He added that keeping the credits is “the right policy” and “a smart thing to do,” no matter which party you’re in.
And then, when the bill crossed his “red line,” he voted to kill the credits—twice—anyway.
BRESNAHAN, AMODEI, BACON, and others joined a last-ditch effort led by IOWA REP. MARIANNETTE MILLER-MEEKS just before the House Ways and Means markup, signing a letter to Chair Jason Smith begging him to preserve the credits for “families and businesses” who depend on them. They warned repeal could drive up electricity costs by 10% next year.
And then they all voted to repeal the credits and spike electricity costs anyway.
INDIANA REP. ERIN HOUCHIN cautioned her Ways and Means colleagues that repealing clean energy tax credits could bring “severe economic consequences.” MILLER-MEEKS praised the credits for “driving transformative investments” in American energy.
And then they voted to end those investments—and trigger the very consequences they warned about—anyway.
MURKOWSKI, UTAH SENATOR JOHN CURTIS, and KANSAS SENATOR JERRY MORAN warned that repeal would create uncertainty, jeopardize investments and project planning, and cost jobs across the energy sector and broader economy. In a letter to Majority Leader John Thune, they noted that many companies “have made substantial investments in domestic energy production [...] based on the current energy tax framework.”
And then they voted to dismantle that framework and invite that uncertainty they warned about anyway.
UTAH SENATOR JOHN CURTIS told CNN ahead of the first House vote that “we need clean, affordable, reliable energy,” and pointed to the very provisions House Republicans later voted to kill as “actually Republican priorities.” After the bill passed the House, Curtis held a press conference with a battery storage company and called repeal “a problem for the future,” not just for clean energy, but for the entire energy system. He then laid bare the absurdity of the Republican approach, saying, “My friends in the House kind of called me up to say, ‘Listen, we’re counting on you to fix it.’” The Senate did not fix it.
And then he and his Republican colleagues in Congress voted to create a problem for the future of the entire energy system anyway.
After all the handwringing, grandstanding, and urgent letter writing begging their colleagues to fix the bill, Republicans once again proved who they are really working for: billionaires, corporate polluters, and the special interests who bought their tickets for seats at the table.
Republicans spent months making it clear that they knew the consequences of kneecapping America’s clean energy and manufacturing industries would be dire. But when it came time to act, their loyalty to Donald Trump and his Big Oil donors prevailed. They handed Trump the win he craved—but sold out the working-class Americans they claimed to be fighting for.
And they did it as the climate crisis they’re fueling turns even more deadly. When people see how this bill jacks up their bills, kills job opportunities in their community, and makes their lives harder, Republicans will have to answer for it.
For more information on this memo or to speak with an Evergreen Action policy expert, please contact Deputy Communications Director Seth Nelson at seth@evergreenaction.com.
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