Hard-line Republicans in the House had won. They’d taken a sledgehammer to former President Joe Biden’s tax credits for wind and solar projects in their House-passed bill, and they had President Donald Trump’s full backing.
That’s when Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), a first-term senator and former congressman who succeeded Mitt Romney, started fielding phone calls from former House Republican colleagues imploring him to “fix this” before the Senate passed it.
Curtis is a unique Republican. A former registered Democrat, the affable Curtis is known for seeking bipartisan solutions. Unlike others in the GOP, Curtis contends that humans play a role in climate change. He founded the Conservative Climate Caucus and has urged Republicans to be more outspoken on environmental issues. He also doesn’t shy away from criticizing Trump and was one of the few Republicans who won his GOP primary despite a rival attracting the president’s endorsement in 2024.
Still, Curtis recognized he was the new guy on the block as he sought changes to the legislation.
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“I found myself saying to the industry, to one of my colleagues who had asked me about it, ‘Don’t worry, I got this,’” Curtis recalled to the Washington Examiner. “They’re looking at a brand-new senator saying, ‘Don’t worry, I got this.’ Very skeptical.”
Curtis knew that the hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies were without a doubt on the chopping block. They were, after all, from the largest-ever climate bill passed and championed by Democrats.
But he also knew that “how they go away is everything.” Curtis argued that businesses would be “decimated” if they were not given time to adjust to ending federal subsidies. As it turned out, many Republicans quietly agreed with him, despite it meaning they were at odds with most in their party and, more importantly, Trump.
The ensuing tug-of-war policy battle would rage for weeks over clean energy, constantly nearing the brink of disaster against the backdrop of other contentious negotiations that could crumble the entire legislation at any time.
Just a week before the law’s passage, Trump was about to lose another Republican vote. Curtis had leverage. Yet, the White House refused to budge on cutting cold turkey the hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits.
“Put a fork in me. I’m done,” Curtis recalled telling White House staff. “This is not logical, it’s emotional. And you’ve lost my support for the bill.”
Right says cuts don’t go far enough
Tensions over the clean energy tax credits, established under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, had been brewing for weeks as a key provision in the bill set to deliver on Trump’s tax agenda. A group of conservatives blocked the measure from hitting the floor in the House until the subsidies were completely scrapped.
Initially, the bill included fairly gentle terminations of the clean energy tax credits, phasing out the subsidies in the early 2030s — several years after Trump leaves office. Centrist Republicans had for months urged leadership to handle the repeal of the credits with a scalpel, to prevent any significant losses of investments in their districts. The hardliners wanted a sledgehammer to decimate the Biden-era policies.
There were many obstacles that Trump and Republican congressional leaders faced before they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Finding the perfect balance between centrists and conservatives on energy tax credits was extremely difficult, lawmakers and aides said.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), a member of the GOP leadership team, said he was surprised that much of the energy-related negotiations weren’t ironed out until the last possible moment, calling it “a really big battle at the end.”
He added, “I would have never guessed that would have been the final battle.”
At various times, as Republicans got close to a tentative deal, Trump pushed harder.
Sean Clerget, who served as chief tax counsel to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) and helped craft the energy tax language, said, “Trump was very aggressive on wind.”
Indeed. Trump has aggressively and consistently moved to halt offshore wind projects and repeal policies that help to bolster renewable energy throughout his second administration, while also rolling back regulations to prop up the fossil fuel industry as part of his energy dominance agenda.
Trump has many staples to his stump speeches, and one of his so-called greatest hits is railing on wind energy. Attracting rebuttals from fact checkers, Trump has claimed wind energy kills eagles, causes cancer, and isn’t used by “smart countries.”
Emboldened by their party leader, fiscal hawks in the Freedom Caucus called for stronger cuts to minimize the federal deficit and offset other tax credit extensions. And — as a bonus — stronger cuts to green subsidies helped deliver on Trump’s campaign promise to kill the so-called Green New Deal.
“We were making progress, but the vote was called, and the problems were not resolved, so I voted no,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said in a post on X after blocking a crucial committee vote. “I am staying in Washington this weekend to deliver. Medicaid Work requirements must start NOW not 2029 & the Green New Scam must be fully repealed, as President Trump called for.”
Trump phoned Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), chairman of the House Budget Committee, from Air Force One while traveling back to the United States from his diplomatic and economic tour of the Middle East in mid-May.
The call came just after the panel had held its last markup on the measure, and it was headed to the floor for a vote. The final House vote count was still up in the air, as some members were not satisfied with how quickly the legislation would repeal the wind and solar energy tax credits.
“There was no issue that the president emphasized as wasteful spending more than the green energy tax subsidies,” Arrington told the Washington Examiner. “So it seemed like some of my colleagues, some of my fellow budget committee members, were aligned with what the president wanted to do. And they didn’t think we had gone far enough.”
Arrington said he agreed with their sentiment. However, the legislation needed to move forward. “But I also knew we could make some changes in [the] rules committee,” he said.
A big problem for the speaker
With a single-digit majority in the House, dual pushback from the Freedom Caucus and centrists threatened to tank the entire bill. It was a major problem for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who had his energy expert on speed dial.
Johnson would call Energy Secretary Chris Wright as late as 11 p.m. or even 2 a.m. to talk strategy on getting the votes. Sometimes these were individual calls with the speaker, and other times with groups of members.
Most lawmakers didn’t need much convincing about stripping tax credits for things such as electric vehicles or preserving subsidies for technologies such as nuclear and geothermal energy.
To Wright’s surprise, the biggest revolt was on the clean energy tax credits. This was partly because legislators didn’t want to see less money going to their districts, as Republican-led states were attracting private sector investments in renewable energy projects during the Biden administration.
In the immediate years after the Democrats’ climate law was passed, roughly 80% of total investments made went to Republican congressional districts. This included new manufacturing facilities, utility-scale clean energy projects, and decarbonization sites in states such as South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. Many of these projects were expected to generate tens of thousands of jobs in the states.
At the same time, solar and wind lobbyists had the ear of many legislators on Capitol Hill. One solar industry advocate recalled various lobby days and fundraisers that involved offering education to members about the industry and bringing constituents together from their respective districts.
“Reconciliation Bill Risks Devastating Job Losses in Every U.S. State if Senate Fails to Change Course,” the Solar Energy Industries Association wrote in a report released in early June, a month before the July 4, 2025, legislative deadline.
And the industry saw some success. Months earlier, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) organized a letter alongside 20 other House Republicans urging against wholesale repeal of the clean energy tax credits.
“The solar lobby just came in and brought new data and new arguments, and then they were bombarding senators and House members constantly,” Wright recalled, saying it led to a lot of back and forth between himself and Congress. “The trade groups, the lobbyists, fought tooth and nail to the end … that was the biggest battle.”
Republican infighting
Curtis, the Utah Republican senator, was taking a calculated political risk in being the point man to save some of the energy credits.
He served eight years in the House before coming to the other side of the Capitol. But in many ways, it was a whole different ball game that left Curtis wondering how much to wield the newfound leverage that he lacked in the lower chamber.
“As a newbie, as the new senator, I didn’t really have a good sense of how hard to push my feelings and work to exert myself,” Curtis said. “But as it unfolded, it was clear that the bill text had gone too far, and I literally came — it was not a bluff — I came to the point where I was not willing to support it because it had gone too far.”
He wasn’t alone. Republicans including Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Jerry Moran (R-KS) also pushed heavily against the House-proposed cuts.
Conservatives succeeded in accelerating the repeal of the green subsidies, with the House-passed bill ending tax credits for all projects — regardless of whether they were for wind, solar, or other alternative energies — unless they start construction within 60 days of the bill’s enactment and are placed in service by the end of 2028. Only nuclear developers saw relief, with the measure ordering those projects to start construction by 2028 to qualify for energy subsidies.
The stiff arm from the Republicans in the Senate surprised Wright just a “little bit.” The secretary spoke with both Curtis and Murkowski specifically as the vote neared, aiming to find a compromise.
“We all agreed the subsidies should go away,” Wright said. “The question was just the pathway, and so even when there was a meaningful disagreement in the pathway, it was always polite. It may have been firm … but they were polite.”
Murkowski’s office declined to comment.
Curtis knew he was going against the grain: “It was clear that it was in opposition to the White House. It was clear it was in opposition to some of my colleagues.”
The notion of immediately nixing renewable energy credits and subsidies “didn’t fit with a strategy of being energy dominant” and seemed “more punitive,” Curtis said. Funds or tax breaks already committed to the wind and solar industries meant companies were expecting the money for ongoing projects.
In June 2025, Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environment Policy Research reported that about $522 billion worth of clean energy investments were announced between mid-2022 and the first quarter of 2025, though they have yet to come online.
The investments included the expansion of solar generation, geothermal plants, sustainable aviation fuel, hydrogen facilities, wind turbines, EVs, and much more.
Trump steps in
With such a slim majority in both chambers, a few votes against the bill could tank the entire legislation.
So about 36 hours before the bill hit the Senate floor, Trump stepped up his involvement.
Wright recalled huddling with the president, Johnson, and a few others in the Oval Office. The president was “pretty clear” on what he would and wouldn’t support during the meeting, Wright said.
While the secretary didn’t elaborate on what Trump specifically told leadership during the meeting, it is well known that the president viewed any tax credits for renewable energy projects, such as wind and solar, as wasteful government spending and that his signature tax bill would not pass without those rollbacks.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) wasn’t present at the meeting, but later met with the president that night to discuss how they could secure the votes in the upper chamber.
The following morning, Thune called Wright to explain his conversation with the president, where he thought negotiations in the upper chamber had landed, and how many more senators they needed to get to passage.
Wright, a career oil and gas executive and fracking pioneer, recalled that Thune had made “great progress” and that the budget reconciliation bill was finally at a place that would work with the administration’s priorities.
The secretary wasn’t getting everything he wanted, but he knew that would always be the case. He had succeeded in securing federal subsidies for nuclear and geothermal technologies, and had long pushed for sharp rollbacks for renewable energy alternatives, which he called unreliable and overly expensive.
With Thune searching for votes, the Senate wasn’t going to be able to pass the dramatic subsidy repeals outlined in the House version. But for Wright, the bill was finally in a position to slash Democrats’ climate change legislative agenda significantly.
Wright’s conversation with Thune left him in good spirits, allowing him, for the first time in a long time, to have a “relatively relaxed” day, walking along the river with his wife.
Looking back, Wright described the day as a “false calm,” as the Senate prepared to enter a more than 24-hour vote-a-rama to get a final version of the legislation on the floor, with key Republicans going back and forth right up to the moment they cast their votes.
“Then the night came,” Wright said, as he and Thune would soon again be forced to negotiate with members for their votes.
Crunch time
Just one day after Thune met one-on-one with the president, the wheels in the Senate started to come off.
The upper chamber was headed into its closely watched vote-a-rama marathon amendment session, providing a last chance for senators of either party to propose changes and force votes.
This series of votes stretched late into the evening on June 30, 2025, and well into the early hours of July 1, with the majority leader attempting to please both fiscal hawks and moderate Republicans pushing for softer cuts.
Confidence was wavering over whether Thune could corral the centrist votes. Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who often butts heads with Trump, was among those on the fence.
With their votes up in the air, Wright went back to the phones.
The energy secretary made a “couple” of calls late that night, telling certain members that “if we have to take a step back, we’ll take a step back, but we can’t blow up the core of what we’re doing.”
Thune spoke with Murkowski throughout the night and the following morning. She ultimately succeeded in squeezing in an amendment that allowed projects beginning construction less than one year after the bill was enacted to claim the federal subsidies. The amendment also slashed a new tax proposed by GOP hardliners in the Senate that would have been imposed on solar and wind projects that fail to meet restrictions on the use of Chinese materials.
With Murkowski’s amendment added to the bill, Republicans appeared to have a deal on slowly removing the green tax provisions, where enough senators were satisfied. Murkowski ultimately and reluctantly voted for final passage.
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“There were plenty of times I thought she was going to vote no,” a GOP aide told the Washington Examiner.
Fiscal hawks in the House criticized the Senate-passed bill. Roy accused the upper chamber of offering a “giveaway” to the renewable energy industry. While the changes were a “deal killer” for him, Johnson called his bluff by putting the bill to a vote. And ultimately, Roy voted in favor of the final package.
Members of the Washington Examiner’s staff who have worked on this series over the past several months are Haris Alic, Hailey Bullis, Bob Cusack, Christian Datoc, James A. Downs, Gabrielle M. Etzel, Lauren Green, Zach Halaschak, Chris Irvine, Joseph Lawler, Naomi Lim, Maydeen Merino, Callie Patteson, Mabinty Quarshie, Samantha-Jo Roth, David Sivak, and Ramsey Touchberry.