Democratic senators are plotting ways to reduce or eliminate proposed cuts to international clean energy and climate programs in the White House’s rescissions package ahead of crucial Senate votes this week.
The eleventh-hour push to narrow the scope of the energy and environment clawbacks comes as the chamber prepares to finalize and then pass the Trump administration’s first set of formal funding repeals focused on public broadcasting and foreign aid.
The effort to strike the cuts may not succeed amid growing Republican momentum behind the package and some White House concessions to GOP lawmakers.
But it could give Democrats yet another platform from which to bash the GOP for pursuing policies that they say will threaten energy security, raise electricity prices and further erode the United States’ reputation as a global leader in the fight against climate change.
“Clearly, their idea of a good day is to get up in the morning and try to roll back the opportunity for some clean energy,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member on the Finance Committee. “I think they’re going to find that what they really get out of it is higher prices, because they’re reducing choices and competition in private markets.”
The Senate advanced the rescissions bill, H.R. 4, on two procedural motions Tuesday night — with Vice President JD Vance breaking 50-50 ties both times — and will kick off a marathon series of amendment votes as soon as Wednesday. It’s not yet clear which, or how many, amendments could get votes.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and fellow appropriators Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against moving forward.
Collins said in a statement, “The sparse text that was sent to Congress included very little detail and does not give an accounting of the specific program cuts that would total $9.4 billion. For example, there are $2.5 billion in cuts to the Development Assistance account, which covers everything from basic education, to water and sanitation, to food security – but we don’t know how those programs will be affected.”
Republican leaders are hoping to pass the package and send it back to the House, where a previous version passed last month, for a final vote before the weekend.
The legislation needs only a simple majority to pass, and it must get the president’s signature by midnight Friday in order to rescind the funds in question.
The legislation, championed by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, would target the United States’ fiscal 2025 contributions to multilateral environmental efforts such as the Montreal Protocol and the Clean Technology Fund.
It would repeal $496 million in already appropriated funds for international disaster and humanitarian aid. And it would claw back millions more approved dollars for economic assistance and foreign aid programs that often address environmental issues abroad.
Republicans say those programs, run by the State Department and funded by bipartisan appropriations laws already approved by Congress, are a waste of taxpayer dollars.
“How many people went to the polls and told politicians to spend $7.4 million of their hard-earned money on teaching foreign countries about ‘environmental racism’? No one,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) quipped on the Senate floor, referring to a program the administration says the bill will target.
Climate amendments
Republican leadership crafted a substitute amendment for the package Tuesday, making some changes to lock in the support of a majority of GOP senators.
The Republican amendment stripped proposed cuts to a popular AIDS prevention program, lowering the scope of the bill’s clawbacks from $9.4 billion to $9 billion.
But the package still takes aim at hundreds of millions of dollars for international disaster aid, clean energy financing and other overseas climate programs.
Several Democrats told POLITICO’s E&E News on Tuesday that they were thinking about introducing amendments to protect those investments for the “vote-a-rama” that could begin Wednesday. None of them specified what the amendments would entail.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said an effort to address climate and clean energy cuts was “in process.” He called the proposed clawbacks “backwards thinking.” “We should be investing more, not less,” he said.
A spokesperson for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the ranking member on the Budget Committee and a senior appropriator of energy and environment funding, said the senator was “exploring offering amendments on several topics, including clean technology.”
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said his office was “certainly looking at a variety of amendments.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been calling on the Senate to approve the package with as few changes as possible to avoid upsetting the narrow House Republican majority that barely passed the bill last month.
“I’ve urged them, as I always do, to please keep the product unamended because we have a narrow margin and we have to pass it,” Johnson said Tuesday morning.
Targeting the ‘Green New Deal’?
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who had expressed concerns about the effects that public broadcasting cuts in the package could have on tribal radio stations, said he struck a deal with the Trump administration to divert “Green New Deal money” toward Interior Department grants that support those stations, but details about the agreement remained murky.
Rounds said the reallocated funding is less than $10 million in total, but he did not know where exactly it would come from.
“It would be money that’s been appropriated, but I don’t know which fund they took it from other than that it was part of the Green New Deal funding that they were not utilizing,” Rounds said in a brief interview.
“It’s for a good cause,” he said. The tribal radio stations “wouldn’t have survived without this, but they provide emergency services information for some of the most rural parts of the country and some of the poorest counties in the United States.”
Republicans often refer to the “Green New Deal,” a nonbinding resolution that never passed Congress, as a catchall for climate programs they disagree with.
Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, later suggested that Rounds had mischaracterized the deal but did not elaborate.
After a meeting with Senate Republicans, Vought told POLITICO’s E&E News, “it’s not Green New Deal” funding. “There’s money that’s been around for a long time that we can [re]purpose for what’s needed,” he said.
An Interior Department spokesperson said the agency will be using “a transfer of previously appropriated federal funds” to “support tribal communications infrastructure” but did not specify where the funds would come from.
Kansas GOP Sen. Jerry Moran, who had stated concerns about the impacts that cuts to foreign food assistance programs would have on commodity farmers in his state, said he had won some protections in the bill.
Moran said in a statement Tuesday evening that he had secured language within the updated legislation “that clarifies that funding will not be taken from the administration of commodity-based programs like Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole that provide a critical market for our farmers to sell excess commodities to feed a hungry world.”
Confusion over proposed cuts
As Senate Republicans plow ahead with plans to vote on the package Wednesday and potentially Thursday, senators and outside observers remain confused about the exact programs the Trump administration plans to target based on the broad rescissions outlined in the bill.
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said senators made the point to the administration Tuesday that they were dissatisfied with the level of detail they have provided thus far.
“Next time, give us the specific information,” he said before voting to proceed on the package.
Vought has touted specific environmental and clean energy initiatives that he said would be canceled, but he has not publicly explained which of the rescissions in the bill would actually accomplish those cuts.
He and OMB officials have mentioned clawbacks of $6 million for “net-zero cities” in Mexico, $5 million for ”green transportation and logistics in Eurasia,” $2.1 million for “climate resilience in Southeast Asia, Latin America [and] East Africa” and $500,000 for “electric buses in Rwanda,” among other cuts.
But it’s not clear how OMB decided to target those programs and which funding buckets the cuts would come from. Those specific initiatives are not explicitly named in Congress’ fiscal 2024 State-Foreign Operations funding law, which was extended through fiscal 2025.
And investments that countries receive for projects under the Clean Technology Fund are not directly tied to donor countries’ contributions.
“We do not know which economic aid and development programs are going to be cut off, undermining congressional direction,” the office of Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote in a fact sheet Tuesday.
“Will they cut funding to counter the Chinese government, support American farmers — both? We don’t know,” the fact sheet reads.
Reporters Kelsey Brugger, Garrett Downs and Jordain Carney contributed.
