Celebrating a big beautiful victory with America First energy policies
By
Kevin Mooney
|
August 17th, 2025
By greatly restricting and outright eliminating some of the most pernicious taxpayer funded government favors in the energy sector, President Donald Trump has delivered on key campaign promises that will ultimately lead to lower energy costs.
That’s a victory worth celebrating, since the policy shift puts America back on a path toward energy independence while also cutting ties with hostile foreign sources. Among the key winners, are American consumers who stand to benefit from a wider range of choices for everyday items like cars that suddenly drop in price.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), which Trump signed into law this past July, torpedoes what Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), calls “market-distorting subsidies” for wind and solar projects. This move alone represents a sharp pivot away from the Biden-era policies that penalized domestic oil and gas production while artificially pumping up green energy projects that can’t stand on their own two feet.
The OBBB delivers a powerful one-two punch in favor of American energy independence by making most solar and wind projects ineligible for the subsidies and by opening new avenues for oil and natural gas lease sales across federal lands and waters. In a nutshell, Trump’s OBBB effectively guts the worst elements of President Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act (IRA),” which was, in reality, a climate bill that increased taxpayer costs. That’s the upshot. But one major defect of the OBBB is the presence of a loophole that makes it possible for last-minute green energy projects to receive taxpayer subsidies if they are “under construction” within a year of the bill becoming law. Apparently, projects committing 5% of costs within this time frame would qualify and could still receive tax credits so long as they get started by July 2026. Even so, Pyle views the overall legislative package as a significant victory.
https://www.cfact.org/2025/08/17/celebrating-a-big-beautiful-victory-with-america-first-energy-policies/
