It’s Time to Deflate the Inflation Reduction Act: Look How Much It’s Costing You

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is one of the more deceitfully named pieces of legislation ever to come out of Washington. That’s really saying something, considering that coming up with bull manure titles for congressional bills for PR purposes and to smooth their path toward passage is something of a DC parlor game of longstanding tradition.

Of course, once it was enacted into law on a party-line vote, Democrats were free to take off the mask and tell us all what we already knew: The Inflation Reduction Act was not a bill aimed at curbing inflation at all. Joe Biden himself literally said so.

So, what was the true purpose of the IRA?

Simply, it was to create an enormous “green” energy slush fund, paid for by deficit spending. The lion’s of that spending comes in the form of subsidies and tax credits to green energy sources such as wind and solar power, battery storage, and electric vehicle (EV) purchases.

The IRA also directs substantial funding and subsidies for “environmental justice” initiatives and green lobbying groups, many of which are sketchy, newly formed, beak-wetting entities founded and staffed by Democrat politicos, such as the $2 billion given to Power Forward Communities, an organization formed in 2023 and with only a hundred bucks in reported revenue at the time of its 10-figure award.

The group is led by Timothy J. Mayopoulos, who ran Fannie Mae for six years during the Obama administration. One of its directors is Shaun Donovan, an eight-year Obama veteran, including a stint as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

That award was only 40 percent as much as was gifted to the Coalition for Green Capital (they must have had $250 in total revenue to be able to swing that kind of money), whose board members at the time included Hugh Frater, another Obama head of Fannie Mae, and Cecilia Martinez, Biden’s Senior Director for Environmental Justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

As The Heartland Institute points out in a new policy study, The High Costs of Climate Scams: Assessing the Green Giveaways in the Inflation Reduction Act, the true cost of these and all the other open-ended subsidies tucked away in the IRA is hard to quantify, but they are also certainly an order of magnitude higher than the $369 billion the Biden administration claimed.

Goldman Sachs pegged the actual cost at $1.2 trillion through 2032.

Credit Suisse thought it was approximately $1.7 trillion before they disappeared the study. The left-wing Brooking Institution estimated $1.2 trillion through 2031. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget went with $1.1 trillion through 2031. Wood Mackenzie ballparks it from $2.5 to $3 trillion. The Cato Institute thinks it’s possibly as high as $1.97 trillion over the next decade and $4.67 trillion through 2050.

The point being, whatever the true cost, the IRA is going to cost insane amounts of dough. Considering that the IRA is a market-distorting, inefficient, environmentally dubious, massively expensive legislative piece of green featherbedding that not a single Republican voted for, one would assume that congressional Republicans are gearing up to take on IRA repeal like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, right?

See, the Democrats were smart. Any sort of spending in Washington becomes entrenched and sacrosanct very quickly, and a significant amount of the IRA’s green subsidies are being allocated to Republican-controlled or Republican-leaning congressional districts.

As of last June, according to Bloomberg Opinion, $161 billion of the $203 billion allocated so far for investment in “clean” technology manufacturing had gone to 80 Republican House districts, including nine of the 10 districts receiving the biggest allocations, and 21 of the largest 25. Of the 51 projects allocated more than $1 billion, 43 of them were located in Republican districts. The Clean Economy Tracker, a project of Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University, lists that 73 percent of “clean” energy and technology manufacturing facility investments have gone to Republican congressional districts.

Accordingly, 18 Republican members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) this past August, urging him to support the IRA’s green tax credits, the premature repeal of which, they argue, “would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.” Sixteen of the 18 signatories won reelection in November, while one of them, union shill Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, was tapped by President Trump to head the Department of Labor.

The number of pro-IRA Republicans has only grown since then.

On March 9, 25 GOP members signed another letter, this time addressed to Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging him to keep “on our current path to energy dominance amid efforts to repeal or reform current energy tax credits.” With the GOP having only a five-seat majority in the House, Democrats would only need to flip five of those 25 signatories to block any IRA repeal.

To his credit, Trump issued an executive order (EO) just hours after taking the oath of office that immediately paused the disbursement of IRA funds. Without congressional repeal of the IRA, however, all that EO does is maintain a holding pattern until a Democrat eventually returns to the White House and issues an EO to reverse Trump’s EO and turn on the green spigot once again.

If the Trump administration truly wants to Make America Great Again, it cannot rely on stopgap executive orders. It needs Congress to act.

As the leader of the party, the president must make clear to congressional Republicans, especially the Gang of 25, that repealing the IRA root and branch is a centerpiece of the MAGA agenda, something that simply has to be done, and he and his people must move heaven and earth to get them to vote accordingly. Short of that, the Inflation Reduction Act is likely here to stay.

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