President Donald Trump has lost no time in freezing and dismantling clean energy programs undertaken by former President Joe Biden's administration — but the areas with the "most to lose" from this policy appear to be states and congressional districts that voted for him, The New York Times reported on Monday.
"In a quest to eliminate any funding linked to climate change, the Trump administration has frozen federal grants for everything from battery factories to electric school buses and issued executive orders that have halted federal approvals for wind and solar projects," reported Lisa Friedman, Brad Plumer, and Harry Stevens. But as it so happens, most of that funding was set for GOP-dominated areas: "In the nearly three years since it was passed, private companies chasing the law’s tax breaks have announced plans to spend $165.8 billion to build factories that make solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and more, according to new data from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm" — 80 percent of that in Republican districts.
And already the freeze on that spending is "causing pain" in these areas already, according to the report.
"The uncertainty is delaying projects and halting investments in areas that voted for Mr. Trump. In Montana, a biofuels plant did not receive on time a $782 million payment it was owed, the first part of a $1.67 billion federal loan guarantee. In Georgia, $1 billion in projects to modernize the power grid are on hold. In Nevada, a half-dozen large solar projects on federal lands are caught in a permitting freeze," the report noted.
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Nevada and Georgia are swing states which backed the president in the 2024 election, and many of these projects are in solidly red areas of those states.
Jason Walsh, who heads up a labor union and environmental coalition known as the BlueGreen Alliance, had some blunt words for this state of affairs: “This is where we get a test of whether the Republican Party is a real political party serving its constituents, or a personality cult. I expect thousands of people to be laid off, I expect workers to be furloughed, and I expect construction projects to halt.”
This comes amid reporting that Trump's broader spending freeze, which was ordered halted by federal judges but still appears to be in a cloud of uncertainty, is also causing financial harm for farmers who invested in energy upgrade programs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.