https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2025/07/09/trump-crackdown-on-renewable-energy-has-just-begun/84518961007/
President Donald Trump issued an executive order this week ordering his administration to crack down on remaining loopholes allowing access to renewable energy tax breaks, after Congress voted last week to overwhelmingly roll back the subsidies.
The order aims to placate the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, which argued the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump on July 4 should have gone further to cut subsidies and reduce the law’s impact on the deficit.
Share prices of at least a dozen solar companies, including Enphase Energy and Sunrun, dropped after the order was signed late Monday.
A last-minute deal between Senate and House Republicans last week allows wind and solar facilities that break ground within 12 months to receive subsidies for several years. Democrats uniformly opposed the bill, which gutted the Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law.
“We met with President Trump and he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office to make the bill better,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina, told CNBC on Thursday.
“We accepted the bill as-is. What is different is President Trump is going to use his powers to — like on the subsidies - to make sure a lot of these subsidies won’t remain in effect from here on out.”
Monday’s order directed the treasury secretary to narrowly define what it means for projects to be “under construction” by the deadline. The order says the department should prevent projects from circumventing rules about what counts as beginning construction, “unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
Restricting that loophole could reduce the number of projects that qualify for the tax breaks and potentially save the government hundreds of millions of dollars, said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, a conservative think tank.
Manish Bapna, president of the environmental Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, said the executive order could be used merely to enact the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — or it could be used to overstep and go beyond what the law mandates.
“The real question is whether this is more bark than bite,” Bapna said. “If we see this go beyond the letter and intent of the law, we will take the administration to court.”
The order also directs the Interior Department to eliminate any policies that give preferential treatment to wind and solar.
Trump’s order appears to be targeting established tax rules that are aimed at allowing for a realistic timeline for financing energy projects of all kinds, including solar and wind, said Abby Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement.
“We will continue to make the case that business certainty, predictability, and even-handedness are bedrocks of federal policy that cannot be undone by the stroke of a pen,” Hopper said. “We expect the Treasury Department to follow the law.”
