FROM: Matthew Davis, Vice President of Federal Policy, League of Conservation Voters
TO: Interested Parties
MEMO: Senate Republican’s Big Ugly Bill Is Still a Disaster for Household Energy Costs and Clean Energy

Senate Finance Republicans Follow the House’s Lead in Driving up Families’ Costs and Wrecking our Clean Energy Future

The Senate Finance Committee Republicans have released their title of the GOP’s reconciliation bill (a.k.a. Big Ugly Bill), and let’s be clear: while some of the words may have changed, the effect is the same – increased energy costs for people across the country ($110 more per year next year and rising to over $400 per year in the next five), attempting to ban clean energy like wind, solar, and batteries (93% of new U.S. electricity generation last year), and slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of private investments. This bill remains an assault on U.S. manufacturing and American families struggling to keep up with rising energy bills—threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, billions in private investment, and higher energy costs for consumers. The “tweaks” in this section of the Senate bill cannot disguise the basic fact: polluters benefit and people get screwed. This Senate scheme doubles down on the House’s agenda of gutting incentives for clean energy, pushing the U.S. clean energy industry off a cliff, further enriching fossil fuel executives, and handing Trump’s agencies broad power to rewrite vague provisions into full-blown roadblocks for clean energy deployment.

Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans would take a scalpel to clean energy. The House showed up with a sledgehammer—and now the Senate is following the House’s lead, swinging a slightly different sledgehammer straight at American jobs, manufacturing, and energy security.

Any Senator who says the Senate’s version of the Big Ugly Bill is an improvement for clean energy businesses is clearly not listening to clean energy businesses or their workers. And they’re not listening to Independent voters, 70% of whom get that this bill will raise their energy costs.  Here are some of the key details:

The Phaseouts: Still Terminating Clean Energy Incentives

Despite some differences in how tax credits are phased down, the Senate bill sticks to the same playbook as the House: it moves aggressively to phase out and terminate the very incentives that have powered America’s clean energy boom – wind, solar, and batteries accounted for 94% of new electricity generation added to our grids last year.

• Incentives designed to create long-term business certainty to make investments now face nearly immediate phaseouts under the Senate plan. Wind and solar—the workhorses of the U.S. clean energy buildout—would lose 40% of its credit value in 2026, and disappear by 2028, if clean energy companies can get over the newly minted overly specific and overly vague hurdles around ownership and control to qualify at all. 
• This isn’t reform — it’s demolition. Solar and wind made up  86% of new U.S. power capacity additions in early 2025. Entire project pipelines may become stranded, with billions in private investment disappearing overnight.
• Right as new battery, solar, and component factories are coming online, the Senate Finance text also guts domestic manufacturing incentives by immediately adding unworkable hoops for all companies to jump through to get 45X, eliminating 45X for wind components in 2028, and phasing down 45X for critical minerals starting in 2031. Over $185 billion in private manufacturing investment is now on shaky ground, threatening tens of thousands of jobs in states like Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Arizona.

Beyond Phaseouts: Full-on Elimination of Entire Clean Energy Sectors

• The Senate bill goes far beyond wind and solar phaseouts — it fully terminates entire clean energy sectors, ripping out tax credits for EVs, charging stations, home energy upgrades, rooftop solar panels, and commercial building efficiency.
• This isn’t targeted policy—it’s a coordinated purge of anything that lowers emissions, saves families money, or helps American companies compete globally. It’s retribution against those who dare to outcompete fossil fuels.

FEOC: A Regulatory Nightmare Waiting for Trump’s Weaponization

The Senate claims it “softened” the House-passed Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) provisions, but don’t be fooled. The FEOC language remains a convoluted, barely workable maze that invites regulatory chaos, giving the Trump administration wide-open authority to worsen and weaponize the rules through agency guidance.

• The definition of FEOC remains broad, complex, and heavily reliant on Treasury rulemaking — creating enormous uncertainty for companies with global supply chains, in other words most companies.
• Critically, the Trump administration can weaponize these provisions — using the ambiguities to block projects, revoke credits, and effectively freeze new manufacturing investments.
• The bill does not and the Trump administration would never apply these same unworkable constraints to their buddies at fossil-fuel companies, which feature products from China throughout their supply chains.
  

Families Will Pay the Price

By derailing clean energy credits and driving up uncertainty in manufacturing, this bill will lock families into higher energy bills and strip them of affordable options to save money – whether it’s upgrading their homes, buying an EV, or installing solar:

• The clean energy credits were projected to save families thousands of dollars through lower energy bills, EVs, and home upgrades. The Senate plan wipes out billions in  savings—leaving families stuck with higher costs. Fewer jobs, higher bills — working families lose twice.
• Slower renewable deployment means greater reliance on volatile fossil fuel prices, unmet demand for more electricity, and increasing costs for families, particularly in working-class communities.
• Gutting the clean energy tax credits jeopardizes more than 830,000 in 2030 and nearly 720,000 in 2035. Rural communities and red states — where clean energy investment and deployment is booming — will be abandoned. 
• The Finance title carries the bitter irony of destroying hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs — largely in Republican states — while simultaneously adding work requirements for Medicaid. All to benefit big polluters and billionaires. 

The Bottom Line

This isn’t a compromise — it’s an effort to ban home-grown clean energy and transfer more of families’ hard-earned money to fossil fuel barons. The Senate bill tears out the foundation of a growing U.S. energy economy, handing our competitive advantage to other countries; threatens hundreds of thousands of jobs; drives up household costs hundreds of dollars per year; and hands the Trump administration new power to shut the door on domestic manufacturing. The U.S. is building real momentum towards a clean energy future and its myriad benefits. This new text in the Big Ugly Bill slams it into reverse.

###