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President Joe Biden may no longer be on the 2024 ballot — but his legacy is. And former President Donald Trump would have multiple tools to thwart his ambitions on energy, infrastructure and climate change.

Donald Trump is vowing to dismantle the heart of Joe Biden’s governing legacy — the effort to spend more than $1 trillion on a pro-climate reshaping of the American economy.

He may soon get his chance.

Trump’s power would not be unfettered even if he defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in November. But he would have multiple potential avenues to block, rewrite or slow-walk large parts of Biden’s $1.6 trillion in climate, energy and infrastructure initiatives, Republican officials and government spending experts tell POLITICO — in some cases, limited only by how aggressively he chooses to attack them. The results could be one of the most lasting consequences of the November election, with implications for everything from hundreds of planned electric car, battery and renewable energy factories to hopes for slowing the Earth’s warming.

Trump has been vague about which parts of Biden’s programs he would seek to throttle or alter — but not about his hostility to the climate agenda.

“All of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on meaningless Green New Scam ideas,” Trump said during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, vastly overstating the amount of money Biden’s agencies have yet to disburse.

The new GOP platform similarly calls for “terminating the Socialist Green New Deal” and ending what it describes as Biden’s “ELECTRIC VEHICLE MANDATE.”

A limited number of forces might be in place to deter Trump.

Republican governors and lawmakers whose states are in line to benefit from Biden’s programs could object to repealing them. Trump would face varying legal and practical difficulties in clawing back whatever money Biden’s agencies have shoveled out the door before Inauguration Day, as well as the hundreds of billions of dollars in transportation and energy money that Congress placed in states’ hands to spend.

Administration officials have expressed confidence in another guardrail: Unless Congress repeals the Biden-era programs, Trump would be legally obliged to carry them out. But Trump has asserted he should have the authority to override Congress’ spending decisions — and just this month, the Supreme Court handed presidents broad immunity from legal consequences for openly flouting the law.

Heightening the risk for Biden’s agenda is the fact that only a small percentage of his $1.1 trillion in congressionally appropriated energy, climate, technology and infrastructure investments has been spent to date — less than 17 percent as of this April, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal data. Reasons for that lag include the pace of doling out grants, completing the regulations guiding energy tax breaks and other big steps required of Biden’s agencies, some of which ended up with huge sums of cash for projects they’d never overseen before.

Besides seeking to repeal Biden’s programs outright, Trump could also seek to divert spending to his own priorities — such as promoting oil, natural gas and coal or, with Congress’ help, using the money to help pay for renewing Trump’s 2017 tax law, which it’s estimated would cost $4.6 trillion.

Here are some of the tools Trump could use to make his assault on Biden’s vision a reality — and the roadblocks he might face:

What Trump could do quickly

Rewriting tax rules

A central plank of Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, comes from its estimated $527 billion in tax incentives for low-carbon technologies such as electric vehicles, solar and wind power, hydrogen fuel and efforts to capture carbon pollution.

But Congress left the details of how to implement those tax breaks for the Treasury Department to figure out. And much of that work — covering the majority of the new tax breaks — remains unfinished. That means Trump’s Treasury appointees could rewrite or reinterpret those implementation rules, with no need for Congress’ blessing.

Among them are tax credits for the production of clean hydrogen or less-polluting aviation fuels, estimated to cost at least $19.3 billion and $45 million through 2031, respectively. Other still-unfinished guidance would offer incentives for clean energy projects that use domestically produced iron, steel and other materials or would extend tax credits beyond this year. While a Trump-led Treasury Department couldn’t fully repeal the credits without the help of Congress, it could revise the pending rulemakings to limit who could qualify while still working within the confines of the underlying law.

“I am 100 percent sure that a potential Trump administration would change the regulations under which the tax credits are issued,” said Dan Simmons, a consultant and former assistant secretary in Trump’s Energy Department. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Vast majority of $527B in Inflation Reduction Act tax breaks have not been finalized

Climate and energy tax provisions under the IRA, by estimated cost from 2022 through 2031

Tax regulation finalized by Treasury

Tax regulation not finalized

Two VEHICLES* tax credits have been finalized, both intended to incentivize the purchase of electric vehicles.

FUELS

EFFICIENCY

MANUFACTURING

ENERGY GENERATION AND CARBON CAPTURE

$0-$50B

$50B-$100B

$100B+

Tax credits by estimated cost

CREDIT MONETIZATION OR BONUS CREDITS**

(New tax provisions that allow businesses to buy, sell or expand tax credits)

One especially controversial credit, the one for clean hydrogen, is still in the proposed stage. That means a Trump administration could scrap the proposal and loosen the interpretation to favor fossil fuel companies instead.

The fate of these kinds of tax incentives would “be a question of bandwidth” and how much priority a new administration would place on changing them, said an official at the Biden Treasury Department, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Regulations that Treasury has already finished, including consumer tax breaks for electric vehicles, would be more difficult for Trump to alter — although not impossible. Instead, the department would have to undergo a full rulemaking process to change them, which could take months, if not years.

Either way, “you don’t need single-party Washington to reinterpret and reissue regulation,” said Kevin Book, managing director at the nonpartisan research firm ClearView Energy Partners.
Easy
Pausing the money flow

The four laws underlying the Biden agenda — the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and a 2021 pandemic-relief measure called the American Rescue Plan — gave the administration more than $1 trillion to spend on climate, energy and infrastructure. As of June, it had announced tentative funding decisions for $564 billion of this money — and spent less than $208 billion, according to POLITICO’s analysis.
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By law, presidents are required to spend money in the way that Congress has appropriated it. But nothing would stop Trump’s administration from hitting pause on Day One to examine where un-obligated money is going and what stage it’s in — something not out of the ordinary for any new president.

And he’s already pledged to do so, promising a crowd at one rally this year that he would impose “an immediate moratorium on all new spending.” When contacted by POLITICO, Trump’s campaign did not provide any details on how long the moratorium would last, though spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the former president would repeal Biden’s electric vehicle policies “and cut costs to reduce inflation and get our economy booming again.”

That has meant the race is on for the Biden administration to get money out the door. But nobody expects that all of the energy and infrastructure money can be obligated or spent before Jan. 20. Just under a third of the funds do not become available to agencies to award until the fiscal year that begins this Oct. 1 — or later.

“From an outsider’s perspective, one of the challenges of the Biden administration is that they have not spent as much money as it might seem,” said Simmons, the former Trump assistant Energy secretary.

Indeed, implementation of key pieces of Biden’s agenda has proceeded piecemeal.

The Energy Department, for example, selected seven regions last year to receive $7 billion to help kickstart a national network of clean hydrogen producers, consumers and infrastructure — with the aim of providing a blueprint for commercial-scale deployment. But DOE is still in the process of negotiating the terms of the awards with the recipients — with just two of those hubs securing initial funding as of this week.

Another program, which would provide $9 billion for state-run home energy rebates, has led so far to just one state program being launched. An analysis by POLITICO’s E&E News found that much of the funding is unlikely to be distributed before the November election.

Just this month, DOE selected 11 struggling or shuttered automotive plants to receive a total of $1.7 billion in grants to help retool their factories to produce electric vehicles, including in swing and battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia. But final award negotiations are expected to take several months.

Another set of programs, which Trump has repeatedly lampooned in his campaign rallies, aims to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle charging stations near major roads in every state. The effort, paid for by the 2021 infrastructure law, has so far led to 15 charging locations being built, in part because of the time it has taken for states to set up their grant programs, gain federal approval and begin seeking applicants.

Trump scoffed again at the charging programs during his speech at the RNC, telling the crowd — inaccurately — that Biden had “spent $9 billion on eight chargers.”

In fact, the EV charger programs have announced roughly $3.2 billion in tentative awards so far, according to the White House’s infrastructure tracking website, Invest.gov. The 15 charging locations built to date received an average of $770,000 in federal funding apiece, excluding four where the dollar amounts are not available, according to the research firm Atlas Public Policy.

The administration has indicated it’s keenly aware of the time crunch, but says it’s also trying to ensure that that money is spent wisely.

“We’re trying to get as much of it contracted by the end of the year as possible, because then it’s committed,” David Crane, the Energy Department’s undersecretary of infrastructure, said last month at an industry event. “Getting the money contracted is important, because that can’t really be undone. Or at least historically has never been undone.”

For any unallocated funds that remain in grant programs, a new administration could slow-walk the money, perhaps leaving it undistributed for an extended period, said Matt Leggett, a former senior Republican Senate staffer who is now an attorney with the law firm K&L Gates. A new president’s team could also do “a reorientation” of what projects might be top candidates for that funding, or rework the criteria that recipients need to meet.
EASY
Throttling the loans

The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has more than $200 billion in remaining authority to help finance innovative and emerging projects that have trouble getting lending from traditional banks.

But it has wide discretion in how it chooses to hand that money out — if at all.

Under Biden, the office has announced or completed nearly $30 billion in loans or loan guarantees to 23 commercial projects, supporting efforts including the domestic supply chain for electric vehicle batteries, clean hydrogen and replacing fossil fuels in steelmaking. That spigot could stop immediately under a Trump appointee, however.

“A Loan Programs Office director who wasn’t interested in issuing loans could have the same effect as a rollback of the funds in the pot,” said Book of ClearView.

In fact, Trump’s first administration did just that. The loan office was largely dormant, aside from backing $3.7 billion in additional loans for a nuclear plant in Georgia.

Loans that received final approval under Biden would be more secure from being clawed back than conditional commitments that it doesn’t close by January, energy industry and former administration officials said. As of July 23, the office under Biden had finalized nearly $6.5 billion for five projects, according to public department tracking. The department has also announced roughly $23.4 billion in conditional commitments for a loan.

It remains an open question how exactly Trump would use the office during a second term, particularly since it could also start lending money for technologies that Republicans support. House GOP appropriators are already eyeing siphoning away billions of dollars from the office and steering it to nuclear power demonstration projects.
He’d have to fight — or stretch the law

Trump would need to go through a more cumbersome bureaucratic process to roll back Biden administration rules that have already crossed the finish line. Those include the Treasury Department regulations that spell out which cars and trucks are eligible for the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 tax credits for electric vehicles.

Revising those rules — perhaps making it much harder for vehicles to qualify — would require agencies to take steps such as issuing public notices and weighing hundreds or thousands of comments. That process could take a year or more, and would open the Treasury Department to lawsuits from critics of the new administration’s policies. Some of those suits would have a greater chance of success thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in June that gave judges broader leeway to second-guess agencies’ regulatory decisions.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the Biden administration’s support for electric vehicles, as well as the vehicles themselves, contending they “cost a fortune” and “don’t go far” and falsely claiming that “they’re all made in China.”

“The electric vehicle tax credit, I think it’s going to be probably the number one most vulnerable component of the IRA,” said one former Trump administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ex-president’s potential second term.

A Trump administration could theoretically modify the EV tax credit rules to tighten their requirements that the vehicles’ parts or ingredients come from the United States, or make the incentives less generous. Already, only around 20 percent of EV models are eligible for the incentives.

But companies are also already claiming some of the tax credits under the IRA, using them to launch domestic manufacturing of clean energy components and expand the tax breaks to entities that previously could not benefit from them. That could complicate a new administration’s efforts to retroactively change course, in much the same way that President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act became harder to repeal once tens of millions of Americans began using it.

“In general, Treasury and the [Internal Revenue Service] do not try to retroactively change rules,” said one aide on the Senate Finance Committee, who was granted anonymity to discuss what a second Trump administration could do. “Usually, if you propose new rules and finalize them, the agency tries to look prospectively.”
He could need help from Congress — or the courts

Trump has repeatedly promised to restore presidential authority to withhold congressionally approved spending that he considers wasteful — a practice known as impoundment that Congress prohibited in a 1974 law amid a fight with President Richard Nixon. That power could give Trump another weapon to wield against Biden’s energy and infrastructure laws.

Impoundment “allows the president to go out and cut things and save a fortune for our country,” Trump said in May. “Things that make no sense. And there’s so many of them. We have so much waste.”

The 1974 statute that restricts the president’s authority is a “disaster of a law” that “is clearly unconstitutional,” he argued in a video last year.

Trump has said he would direct federal agencies on his first day in office to identify portions of their budgets where money could be saved through impoundment.

Opponents say his proposal contradicts the Constitution’s provisions giving Congress the power of the purse.

Impoundment caused trouble for Trump during his last White House stint. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office — Congress’ watchdog agency — found that the administration had illegally withheld $91 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which funds research into cutting-edge energy technologies. The administration quickly relented.

Impoundment was also at the center of Trump’s Ukraine scandal and his 2019 impeachment, which included accusations that the president had frozen $391 million in military aid as part of a scheme to smear Biden. GAO found that it was improper to withhold the money. A Senate trial ended in Trump’s acquittal.

But Trump aides continue to believe he has the authority to hold back money if he doesn’t want to spend it.

“President Trump agrees with the experts that this power has been wrongly curtailed in recent decades,” senior campaign adviser Jason Miller said, adding that Trump “will seek to reassert impoundment authority to cut waste and restore the proper balance to spending negotiations with Congress.”

In a letter to the House Budget Committee the day before Trump left office, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought argued that the 1974 law “is unworkable in practice and should be significantly reformed or repealed.” He further argued that the Constitution, in telling the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” gives him impoundment authority.

The Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank Vought launched and leads, did not respond to questions about the issue. Vought has since joined other Trump supporters and alumni in helping write a sprawling conservative policy manifesto called Project 2025, which calls for repealing the IRA and the infrastructure law and rescinding “all funds not already spent by these programs.” He was also policy director for the Republican convention’s platform committee.

Alan Morrison, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University and former head of litigation at the watchdog group Public Citizen, rejected the idea that the Constitution is on Trump’s side.

He compared the impoundment issue to the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, which the Supreme Court overturned because it gave too much legislative power to the president. “If that Act is invalid, even where Congress agrees, it is surely even more unconstitutional when the President acts directly contrary to what Congress has enacted,” Morrison said in an email.

It’s unclear how the fight over impoundment would play out, particularly if Congress doesn’t change the law as Trump wants. A finding that the president impounded money could lead to litigation, experts said, leaving the courts to decide the constitutionality of the 1974 law.

Penalties for violating the 1974 law could be few, especially if Republican control of either the House or Senate takes impeachment off the table.

The Biden administration is adamant that Trump would be required to carry out the IRA and other laws unless Congress repeals them. “The executive branch has no authority to withhold appropriated funds just because it disagrees with the policies Congress enacted,” said White House spokesperson Jeremy Edwards.

Still, the administration is trying to finalize as much as possible before the end of Biden’s tenure: “Agencies are working with recipients to obligate as much funding as possible by the end of the year,” Edwards said.
HARD
Choking money still in the pipeline

Cash that agencies are still in the middle of handing out in the form of grants would be likely to fall under the microscope of an incoming Trump presidency, former administration officials and other experts say.

Even then, the conventional wisdom from most experts is that this kind of spending would be safe from interference once the federal government has obligated, or formally awarded, the money to a state or other entity.

“Many, many of the grants are going through a competition process and many of those processes are well along,” said David Hayes, a professor at the Stanford Law School and Sustainability School who worked as a climate policy adviser in Biden’s White House in 2021 and 2022. “To the extent that they are completed, the grants are out the door and are not available for later mischief.”

Then again, a new administration could also redirect programs before the funding decision is final — although statutes like the infrastructure law have codified much of that.

“To the extent that there’s grant authorizations that have not been awarded before a hostile administration comes in, there may be some flexibility to reduce the chance of that money going out the door,” Hayes said, adding it would depend on the specific provision under the law.

Some former Trump officials, while acknowledging it is hard to claw back spending once agencies have handed it out, contend the money would need to be in the hands of the awardees to truly be safe.

“You could see a Trump administration doing as much as they can to want to direct that money toward the Trump administration’s policy goals and not the Biden administration’s policy goals,” said Simmons, the former DOE official. “It probably is not enough for it to be obligated. … Otherwise, the administration could possibly say that they have not met the requirements of the award.”
HARD
Repealing the tax breaks

Trump would need Congress’ cooperation to eradicate the Biden tax breaks altogether.

One of the most potent tools at the GOP’s disposal would be a legislative maneuver known as budget reconciliation, the same procedure Democrats used to pass the climate law in the first place.

Under reconciliation, Congress can quickly enact fiscal changes with simple-majority votes in each chamber, unlike the de-facto 60-vote threshold that applies to most legislation in the Senate.

Republicans on the Hill are already preparing a package of policy priorities that could pass under reconciliation should they take unified control of Congress. They have begun weighing whether to gut portions of the IRA’s climate spending provisions to help pay for the estimated $4.6 trillion cost of renewing Trump’s first-term tax cuts, which are set to expire next year.

Project 2025 similarly advocates that the next administration “fully repeal” the IRA tax credits.

“I would see a number of those IRA provisions — particularly the tax credits, particularly on electric vehicles, some of the other particular subsidies — I would see them as being definitely on the chopping block in that kind of a reconciliation instruction,” said Bill Hoagland, the senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former director of Senate budget and appropriations.

But not all Republicans might be on board with axing the IRA’s subsidies, which have spurred hundreds of announced manufacturing investments in green technologies — largely benefiting districts and states represented by GOP lawmakers who opposed the legislation.

House Republicans attempted to repeal the energy tax credits through last year’s debt ceiling negotiations, but have since introduced legislation taking a more piecemeal approach. Numerous Republicans have expressed misgivings about full-scale rollbacks of the Biden laws, saying they would want to preserve major provisions.

Former Trump Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, now the leader of the utility industry trade group the Edison Electric Institute, argued that the “vast majority” of the Inflation Reduction Act would stay in place under a Republican presidency or GOP congressional majority.

“A lot of Republicans these days, unfortunately, from my point of view, support the energy subsidies — a lot of wind power in Texas, of course, and that sort of thing,” said Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. “So I don’t think [Trump is] going to be getting very much pressure from Republican senators and congressmen on the Hill to cut much of any of this spending.”

Another potential avenue for overturning some of Biden’s tax credit rules is the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law allowing lawmakers to reject recently enacted regulations. In May, for example, lawmakers of both parties introduced legislation to overturn Biden administration EV tax credit rules that they argue are too lenient on China.
This spending is probably safe

—
Long shot
Money that’s completely out the door

Money that agencies have formally awarded is likely safe from any Trump rollback, even if recipients have not yet finished spending it. That amounted to between $255 billion and $327 billion from all four laws as of June.

If agencies have signed grant contracts or doled out the loans, prompting recipients to begin making investment decisions, “that’s going to be hard from both a legal and a political perspective to take it back,” said the previously mentioned former Trump official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For at least one program, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Congress mandated that agencies get the money out the door by Sept. 30 — months before any future administration could take a hammer to them. The IRA created that $27 billion fund to provide grants for expanding clean energy financing in low-income areas.

Trump’s hands would be tied once any agency has formally awarded money. “If a grant agreement has been signed with a recipient, there is a high standard to rescind it — the recipient must be in breach of terms and conditions,” said Edwards, the White House spokesperson.
Long shot
Mandatory infrastructure funding

Also likely to be safe is the $383 billion in authorized federal funding that the infrastructure law hands out for a range of highway and transit programs from the Highway Trust Fund. Much of this money is bipartisan and noncontroversial, as seen in Trump’s shout-outs to “roads, bridges [and] dams” during his convention speech. But a small slice of it — $2.5 billion in highway dollars — will go toward developing the country’s network of EV chargers.

Those pots of money receive special budgetary treatment intended to ensure they are spent as the law’s writers intended. For one thing, appropriators in Congress must follow the law’s instructions for how to dole out those dollars.

Susan Howard, director of policy and government relations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said mandatory highway funding under the infrastructure law would be safe from any attempted repeal, given it has “very little to do with politics” or even control of Congress.

“That is as ironclad as it gets when it comes to domestic spending and budget authority,” Howard said.
Long shot
Republican priorities

Other grants and loans of the law could be safe from interference due to the support they’ve garnered from GOP lawmakers or Republican-aligned industries since the passage of the laws.

Financing for projects creating jobs in the lawmakers’ districts, or supporting industries that they’ve historically backed such as nuclear power or carbon capture, could be safe from rollback attempts. That dynamic came into play during last year’s debt ceiling fight, when several GOP lawmakers blocked provisions that would have axed subsidies for biofuels benefiting farmers in their states.

Trump has also largely been silent on his plans for one major Biden-era law: the CHIPS and Science Act that passed Congress with bipartisan support, which includes $24 billion in subsidies to manufacture semiconductors inside the United States.

Former officials and other experts see that industrial policy law as potentially safe from Trump interference, particularly given its focus on countering China.