The legislation is poised to decimate clean energy programs while giving tax cuts to billionaires

Republicans in Congress have delivered a big legislative victory for President Donald Trump, but environmental and public health advocates warn it will come at an enormous cost: to the health of millions of Americans, their jobs and livelihoods, and the ongoing fight against runaway climate change.

The Senate voted this week by a razor-thin 51-50 margin to pass the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a massive reconciliation package that is expected to add over $3 trillion to the US budget deficit while slashing nutrition assistance and access to health care while also gutting investments in green energy and climate initiatives. The bill needed a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance to pass the Senate. The House passed the bill two days later by an equally thin margin. Critics say the megabill is the most regressive, anti-environment piece of legislation in US history, one that will destroy clean energy jobs, increase fossil fuel pollution and raise electricity prices, and abandon working-class families in favor of tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.

“This disastrous bill is the largest-ever transfer of wealth from working-class people to the wealthy,” Collin Rees, United States campaigns manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement. “It strips health care from 17 million people, forces kids to go to school hungry, allows corporations to further pollute our air and water, destroys thousands of clean energy jobs, and puts us all at greater risk from climate disasters—all to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and handouts to the Big Oil CEOs who bought access to Trump.”

Before the legislation passed the House, public health experts warned that Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will have devastating consequences for children, seniors, people with cancer, and local communities.

“If enacted, the cuts to Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act will result in more than 17 million people losing health-care coverage,” said Harold Wimmer, president and CEO of the American Lung Association. “This will increase uncompensated care, lead rural hospitals to close, destabilize our nation’s entire health-care system, and increase health-care costs for all of us. The cuts to clean air programs paired with greater investments in the buildout of fossil fuel sources will increase air pollution, cause more asthma attacks in kids, and result in families paying more for utilities.”

Public pressure helped beat back several provisions in the bill, including a forced sale of millions of acres of public lands and a new excise tax on wind and solar. But overall, the legislation further boosts fossil fuels—the root cause of the worsening climate emergency—while undermining clean energy and efforts to reduce pollution.

“It is not an overstatement to say this is the most anti-environment bill in history,” said Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy for the Sierra Club.

The bill will decimate the Inflation Reduction Act—the largest climate and clean energy investment in US history—by cutting incentives and funding for renewable energy and clean energy technologies like heat pumps and electric vehicles. It eliminates the tax credit for electric vehicles, ends the advanced manufacturing tax credits for clean energy and batteries, including wind turbines, and slashes tax credits for solar and wind projects. The bill also repeals residential clean energy tax credits that help homeowners install renewable energy systems like rooftop solar, and it axes incentives for home energy efficiency upgrades like weatherization.

By stifling clean energy, which is the fastest-growing and cheapest source of electricity, the legislation is projected to reduce additional power capacity and raise electricity costs. Generation capacity could fall by 340 gigawatts and consumer utility rates may rise by 10 to 18 percent over the next 10 years, according to one analysis. And hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean energy sector are expected to be lost.

“This measure props up the dirty and expensive technologies of the past while strangling the clean energy investments that are creating millions of jobs across the country,” said Manish Bapna, president of Natural Resources Defense Council. “At a time when we need new energy more than ever, Republicans are punishing the plentiful wind and solar power that can be quickly added to the grid.”

Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, warned the legislation will saddle families with higher electric bills and take away families’ ability to “choose the energy savings, energy resilience, and energy freedom that solar and storage provide.”

In advancing the legislation, Republicans were working against their own stated priorities, Drupp said. “They said they were going to bring back manufacturing jobs, and this bill would cut manufacturing jobs. They said they were going to lower electricity rates. This bill clearly will increase electricity rates,” he told Sierra. “It’s all in service of tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and to further the interests of the fossil fuel industry.”

That industry stands to benefit with more handouts and favors, from reduced royalty rates and required leasing of 4 million acres of federal lands for coal mining to facilitated expansion of oil and gas drilling. The bill mandates regular onshore and offshore oil and gas lease sales, opening up ecologically sensitive public lands and waters to drilling. Wind and solar development on federal lands, on the other hand, would be subject to new fees under the legislation.

Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called the bill a “heartless effort” that “ensures our air is less safe to breath” and “borrows from our kids' and grandkids' future” by driving up the deficit. “This bill destroys America but does make the very rich even richer at the expense of all,” he said in a statement.

The bill also extends a tax credit to production of metallurgical coal, primarily used in steelmaking, even if that production occurs outside of the US. It cripples a program intended to crack down on methane emissions by suspending collection of a waste emissions charge on polluters. And it raises the tax credit level for carbon capture and storage projects that involve enhanced oil recovery—a type of drilling using carbon dioxide to stimulate oil production. According to one analysis, the oil and gas industry is poised to receive $18 billion in new handouts over the next 10 years with the extended carbon capture subsidy and other incentives.

Fossil fuel industry trade associations including the National Mining Association, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the American Petroleum Institute all issued statements applauding the Senate’s passage of the reconciliation package.

Climate campaigners, however, slammed the move by Republicans to advance the legislation, arguing it will harm Americans and unleash more climate change devastation.

“Climate pollution will increase, and kids will struggle with asthma and other respiratory problems. And, more people will suffer from devastating extreme weather catastrophes," said Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign. “This travesty of a bill benefits only billionaires at the cost of every other person in this country.”