CCL staffers Flannery Winchester and Jennifer Tyler
Our takeaways after Congress passed this bad-for-climate bill
By Flannery Winchester
The budget reconciliation bill that has been working its way through Congress for months cleared its final hurdle through Congress when it passed the House on July 3. It reached President Trump’s desk for a signature on July 4.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — now law — strikes a serious blow to America’s clean energy progress and therefore for the climate. Over the last few months, we’ve talked a lot about the content of the bill and the harm it will cause, as well as our efforts to steer Congress in a better direction.
Since the beginning of this Congress in January, our volunteers have generated more than 61,000 contacts to congressional offices and more than 800 media hits, and the vast majority of which have been focused on this policy defense. (Check out our 2025 Policy Roadmap for a further breakdown of our actions specific to each phase of the reconciliation process.)
We’re grateful for every one of our volunteers and supporters who took action on this over the last few months.
“We worked incredibly hard. You guys made so many calls, so many emails, had lobby days, did so much outreach,” said Jennifer Tyler, CCL’s Vice President of Government Affairs. “For the bill to not end up in a place where we could be supportive and was really harmful to clean energy — that’s extremely disappointing.”
Now that the bill has passed, it’s time for some reflection. What impact did we have? What did we learn through this advocacy push? How can those lessons inform our climate advocacy moving forward?
We explored some of those questions with Jenn during CCL’s July monthly meeting on Saturday. Watch Jenn’s remarks in the recording below, or read on for her takeaways:
Lesson 1: It would have been worse without us, and support is growing. It’s worth it to keep showing up.
With a piece of legislation, it’s easy to think of success or failure in pretty stark terms. A bill either passes or doesn’t pass, which can feel like a clear win or a loss. But it’s important to remember that victory isn’t always just vote outcomes.
In the case of this bill, our advocacy over several months was successful in making the legislation better than it would have been without our engagement. And along the way, members of Congress were vocally supportive and increasingly bought-in to the value of clean energy.
“If you’ll remember, even at the beginning of the Congress, Republicans were saying, ‘We’re just going to completely repeal the IRA — outright repeal,’” Jenn reminded us. “And the first bill that the House released and then passed was a pretty quick repeal of most of the clean energy tax credits.”
Jenn said, “That was pretty jarring for a lot of us. We had been lobbying on the House side. You guys had done a great job reaching out to those members, but we realized at that moment we have to go even harder. We have to reach out more. We have to do more.”
We shifted into high gear with our advocacy on the Senate side. We weren’t the only group getting loud about this bill, of course, but Jenn said, “Largely because constituents like you were making our voices heard, the Senate went in a very different direction.”
“It still didn’t end up being great for clean energy, but it preserved a lot of those clean energy tax credits much longer,” Jenn explained. “And even at the last minute, when a really toxic provision was put in to add an additional tax on solar and wind, our advocacy took that off the table.”
Ultimately, the final bill was a lot better than the first version — 25% better, in fact. “Even though the bill wasn’t great in its final iteration, it was much better than it could have been because of our outreach,” Jenn said.
Lesson 2: Partisan pressure in a reconciliation process is almost insurmountable. Regular order gives bipartisan policy a chance.
Another key lesson is about partisanship. “Reconciliation is a really partisan process,” Jenn pointed out. “The party determines what their goals are. Party leadership and the administration put a lot of influence into what they want to pass, and usually the party gets behind it other than a few votes.”
The process we just saw Republicans go through was the same one Democrats used to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. We supported that previous reconciliation bill because it was so good on climate, but the processes were functionally the same, and partisanship played a big role in both.
“It’s not durable when it’s one party pushing things forward,” Jenn explains. “That’s why the IRA is now under attack.”
Even the combined advocacy of many organizations across many issue areas — not just climate — was not enough to overcome that partisan pressure, Jenn points out. “It happened with Medicaid. It happened with nutrition assistance. The outpouring of opposition or support for other policies was not as strong as some of the political force that was at play.”
That’s a stark contrast to bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or the Growing Climate Solutions Act which moved through regular order, passed with support from members of both parties, and have stood the test of time.
So that’s another important reminder: When not forced into partisan policy vehicles, thoughtful clean energy and climate policy can and often does have broad bipartisan support. We will work to foster more of these types of opportunities in the future.
Lesson 3: Even MOCs who aren’t ‘climate champions’ can be useful allies. Our relationships with lawmakers all along the political spectrum remain vital.
Through the course of our advocacy these last few months, we saw lots of different letters come out from Republicans acknowledging the value of clean energy tax credits to their districts and states, which Jenn says is a stark difference from even just a few years ago.
These letters are evidence of the long-term power we’re building. “It’s clear that we are generating support in Congress — it’s there. They’re willing to step out publicly and make those proclamations,” Jenn says.
We also saw examples of lawmakers who you may not think of as “climate champions” stepping up in important ways near the end of the reconciliation process, like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa who led an amendment to remove a harmful clean energy tax from the bill.
That’s why it’s important that we continue to develop and maintain relationships with lawmakers all along the political spectrum. You never know who could make a pro-climate move in a key moment, no matter what letter is beside their name.
“We’re in this for the long haul, and we’re going in the right direction.” We’ve gained a lot of ground — and we still have more to go.
What’s next?
“We don’t want to just let this bill go,” Jenn says. “This is a really critical window to let members of Congress know that constituents are watching.”
Jenn explains that when she worked on Capitol Hill, there was a “window” of a few weeks after a vote, during which she and other staff would pay close attention to the calls and the emails they received. They wanted to know, “Did this resonate? Are people paying attention, or was this fine?”
So when we head to Capitol Hill for hundreds of in-person lobby meetings later this month, we will take advantage of that window. “We want to let them know what we think of the bill and what we want to happen going forward,” Jenn says.
We’ll tell them the bill went too far in cutting clean energy tax credits. We’ll ask them to fix the implementation of these harmful provisions and to reject any further attempts to restrict these tax credits, such as those that might come from the White House. And we’ll look ahead to other steps they can take to support clean energy, such as working on a bipartisan permitting reform package and ensuring robust funding for clean energy programs in federal agencies.
“We’re going to take our message to the Hill and let them know that clean energy is important not just for climate, not just for emissions, but for energy costs, for American competitiveness, and for the overall success of our economy,” Jenn says. “It’s going to be a really important ask to follow up on this reconciliation process and to let Congress know exactly what we’re thinking.”
See updates from our 2025 Summer Conference and Lobby Day and how lawmakers responded.
