Slash it: The IRA

The election of Donald Trump and control of the House and Senate, presents a real opportunity for the GOP to pursue structural reforms. The GOP website states that “freedom matters.” Hopefully, this new leadership will take that slogan to heart and work to repeal the numerous laws and regulations that have cost Americans trillions of dollars and hampered economic prosperity. There are countless examples of laws that need to be repealed, but one particularly egregious statute is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law by then-President Joe Biden. Despite its name the IRA has little, if anything, to do with reducing inflation or even monetary economics at all. Instead, the IRA is simply a giant spending bill that takes billions of dollars from taxpayers and transfers it to various special interest groups. As IER’s Thomas Pyle pointed out in the Washington Times, the IRA is much more about subsidizing the green agenda than an attempt to reduce the deficit.

The IRA allocates $369 billion for “energy security and climate change.” While this number may seem massive, the true cost is far higher. A Goldman Sachs article from 2023 states that “[the IRA] will provide an estimated $1.2 trillion of incentives by 2032.” Because the subsidies in the IRA are open-ended with no end date, the true costs of the IRA are unknown. Other researchers have noted that this is due to the subjective nature of the cost models. In other words, with some heavy grace given by the model makers, the true costs of the act can be substantially underestimated to make it appear less fiscally burdensome, which is exactly how politicians were able to sell the legislation to the American people.

IRA funding is being distributed through various federal agencies, such as the EPA. Much of this funding is often obfuscated or difficult to obtain; the EPA’s website helps one gain a better understanding of where and how the IRA’s money is being used. According to their website, “EPA has selected 98 [Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving (EJCPS)] awardees to receive a total of $43.8 million in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for community-based nonprofit organizations to help underserved and overburdened communities across the country.”

Some of the funding goes to projects you might expect, such as data collection related to temperature and air and water pollution. However, much of this money goes to more absurd causes. For example, United Charitable received $500,000 for a project entitled “Growing Environmental Justice Through Community Food Forest Development,” whereby eight food forests would be created in rural Maine. The Nature Conservancy received $500,000 for their project “Collaborating for Tree Equity in Providence, Rhode Island.” This project would “plant 1,000 trees and create the foundation for growing an equitable urban forest and ensuring the benefits are equitably shared across Providence.”

Other similar projects were granted funding too, such as Ecology Action Center’s “Bloomington-Normal Climate Responsive Community (BNCRC),” which, in part, seeks to address tree equity and 2CMississippi’s “Equitable access to microparks for climate resilience through flood mitigation, education,” which “replaces abandoned, blighted properties in West Jackson with a system of microparks.” Both of these organizations also received $500,000 each for these projects. Another strange use of taxpayer dollars rides into the expenditure on two wheels. The Bessemer Historical Society received a grant for $500,000 for a project titled “Electronic bicycles for Pueblo, Colorado,” which would distribute 100 Class-2 e-bikes to underserved communities.

Additionally, the EJCPS also gave millions to a more sinister cause: political left-wing organizations and climate activist groups. The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance received $500,000 for their “New Jersey EJ Education Collaborative” project. This project essentially trains locals to be able to act as activists for the environmental cause by “creat[ing] and provid[ing] EJ basic information and a blueprint for navigating governmental processes.” The purpose of this is to help residents fight and use New Jersey’s Environmental Justice Law to fight against permitting. Resilient Virginia received $150,000 for “Building Community Capacity for Climate Justice.”

There are numerous other examples like this of IRA money being distributed by the EPA to implement climate justice through so-called NGO’s. The Delaware Valley Citizens Council for Clean Air got $500,000 for their project, “Monitoring Air Toxics and Assessing Benefits of Reduced Air Pollution from the Delaware,” in which “project partners will assist residents in making pollution complaints regarding the [Delaware City Refinery (DCR)] and other nearby pollution sources…[which]  will influence the next iteration of the DCR’s air pollution permits.” The Iowa Environmental Council, like others, received half a million dollars for “connecting underserved communities to local, state, and federal decision-makers and resources.” It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that this organization is not exactly energy neutral as they mention they will partly focus their efforts on communities with coal plants in their project description. Similar projects, like the Central California Environmental Justice Network’s “Residents, Researchers, and Regulators Collaborating for Environmental Justice” received the same amount from the IRA. In addition to these grants, there are many focused on pushing an overtly political perspective of climate change on children.

Larger grants from the IRA go through the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program. This program gives $50 million each to ten “Grantmakers,” with one receiving $100 million, as they serve in multiple districts. Some of these institutions that received $50 million each include the Climate Justice Alliance and Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), Inc. More IRA funding goes through the EPA to various “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers.” Eighteen centers were selected and they will receive a combined $177 million, with no single one receiving less than $10 million, to “remove barriers and improve accessibility for communities with environmental justice concerns.”

Some of the awardees include the West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc., the National Wildlife Federation, Blacks in Green, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Some partners of these awardees include the Environmental Protection Network, Empower DC, Alliance for Affordable Energy, Environmental Defense Fund, People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources, and Climate Science Alliance. A simple Google search will tell you the political stance of these organizations and that they are anything but neutral institutions. Rather, all of these organizations and partners are pushing for various explicitly left-wing causes and many of these groups have ties to the current administration and/or ostensibly supported candidates that voted in favor of distributing this money. By stepping back and acknowledging this fact, the whole picture of the IRA becomes clear. This bill was not a set of “wise investments” in programs to improve the environment, but rather a clever way to advance climate clientelism.

There’s further evidence for this as the effectiveness of the IRA and other similar programs for improving environmental outcomes has been a disaster. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) spent over $7 billion on creating 500,000 EV charging stations. Two years later, only 7 charging stations were made. Where did all that money go? The age of fiscal responsibility ended many decades ago. Currently, the federal debt is nearing $36 trillion. Due to the open-ended nature of the tax credits provided by the IRA, it is quite likely that the act will eventually add billions, if not trillions, to the national debt.

When the IRA was being passed, every Republican in the House and Senate voted against it. One can only hope and pray that lawmakers still have the political will to slash the IRA to secure a better future for the country.