The House Freedom Caucus has never precisely said what it extracted from the White House in exchange for voting for President Donald Trump’s signature tax and domestic policy law — though its members heavily hinted they secured several concessions.
Part of that deal, NOTUS has learned, was executed just days after the president signed the budget bill into law. The Freedom Caucus was directly involved in Trump’s July 7 executive order, which provided strict guidance on how to implement clean energy tax credit restrictions. The conservative lawmakers’ negotiations with the administration also led to an Interior Department memo significantly increasing the level of review that wind and solar developers are subject to.
“What I was told, it was written almost in real time, like back-of-the-napkin-type stuff,” a source familiar with the origins of the executive order said.
Another source familiar with the Freedom Caucus’ negotiations said the caucus negotiated the details of the executive order “and the subsequent actions it sets up,” including the Interior memo. The source added that members communicated with the Trump administration about the actions before the budget bill came up for a final vote.
Previously, Rep. Chip Roy told Politico he had met with “some lawyers in the administration” for hours on what the president could do to “reverse” the language that moderate Republican senators negotiated into the bill to undo the harshest House-proposed cuts to tax credit eligibility for clean energy developers.
Roy did not detail the result of those meetings, but this depiction of the Freedom Caucus’ involvement in these executive actions gives new insight into how Republicans were able to get the budget bill over the line. It also offers additional context about the frustrations some lawmakers had regarding final negotiations.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News she felt “cheated” by Trump’s executive order, adding that she felt like “we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made with someone else.”
Murkowski is not the only one worried that the administration’s directives could deal a blow to wind and solar developers.
Several Republican lawmakers have also been hesitant to embrace Trump’s executive actions on clean energy. Multiple senators who advocated against some of the most restrictive language on renewable energy in earlier versions of the tax bill told NOTUS they have concerns about the executive order and Interior Department directives, including the speed at which the administration issued interpretations of legislation passed just days ago.
“They better go back and look at congressional intent,” Sen. Thom Tillis said of the administration. “It feels like they are OK with stranding capital and moving a little bit too soon.”
In a Congressional Record announcement last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley — who was heavily involved in negotiations to expand the window for tax credit eligibility for developers — also brought up congressional intent. Grassley said he placed a hold on three Trump nominations to the Treasury Department because of concerns that the department’s implementation of tax credit restrictions would stray too much from the budget bill’s language.
Sen. Mike Rounds, who has supported maintaining pathways for wind and solar developers, told NOTUS that “we may need some additional” on wind and solar development “just to meet the needs.”
Rounds told NOTUS he thinks Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other Cabinet officials are the right people to implement energy decisions. But when asked if he thinks wind and solar developers will still have a level playing field given the new executive actions, he responded, “I don’t know.”
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields did not address the House Freedom Caucus’ involvement in the executive order and Interior memo, but said in a statement to NOTUS that “President Trump and the nearly 80 million Americans who supported his America First energy agenda are not interested in advancing scam energy industries that embolden our adversaries, stifle domestic energy production, and raise prices for countless Americans.”
“The President’s OBBB is a complete overhaul of the Biden Administration’s slush fund for the Green New Deal lobby and will further unleash the might of America’s energy dominance while continuing to lower costs for millions of families,” the statement said.
The budget law, which mandates that wind and solar developers must start projects by a certain date to qualify for tax credits and places restrictions on developers who source materials from foreign countries, had stoked worries in the industry that those measures could disincentivize renewable energy development.
Now, wind and solar developers are looking at Trump’s subsequent executive order, which gives Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent authority to “strictly enforce” the clean energy tax credit measures in the bill, as a sign they could be at even more of a disadvantage than they initially thought.
Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said the organization is frustrated that the executive order seemingly undoes “long-standing and well-established tax standards” that allow clean energy developers to carry out projects on a realistic timeline.
“Business certainty, predictability, and even-handedness are bedrocks of federal policy that cannot be undone by the stroke of a pen,” Hopper said in a statement to NOTUS.
The order directs Bessent to create guidelines to ensure that developers have a “substantial portion” of their wind or solar facilities built in order to qualify for tax credits. That language is a strict interpretation of the budget law’s mandate that only developers who start construction by the end of 2026 are eligible for tax credits. The language suggests that previous guidelines for start-of-construction dates, like taking on at least 5% of the cost of a total project or doing significant construction work off-site, will no longer apply, according to tax and business law experts.
Industry leaders are also frustrated about the other, similarly stringent executive actions that followed the executive order, such as the directive that Burgum must personally review even routine development moves related to wind and solar energy on federal land.
More recently, there was a series of related announcements in July suggesting the Interior Department wants to further cull offshore wind development. A secretarial order from Burgum last week also compels the Interior Department to consider “whether the use of Federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law” and evaluate the necessity of wind and solar projects by looking at their energy generation potential compared to alternative projects.
Jason Grumet, the CEO of the American Clean Power Association, said in a statement that the Interior directive heightening review for wind projects came at the “worst possible moment.”
“This isn’t oversight,” Grumet said in the statement. “It’s obstruction that will needlessly harm the fastest growing sources of electric power.”
More than 30 wind and solar projects around the country, totaling more than $30 billion in revenue, have been canceled or scaled down by developers since Trump took office this year, according to data from environmental researchers at Wellesley College. Developers and clean energy advocates have chalked those rollbacks up to a mix of trade uncertainty and unfriendly policies, and some are warning that this new host of executive actions could spur further hits to the industry.
“Adding more layers of bureaucracy and red tape for energy projects at the Interior Department is exactly the wrong approach,” Stephanie Bosh, the senior vice president of communications at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement to NOTUS. “There’s no question this directive is going to make it harder to maintain our global [artificial intelligence] leadership and achieve energy independence here at home.”
In addition to broader concerns, industry groups and lawmakers are also worried about the directive in the executive order that puts Bessent in charge of implementing the foreign entity of concern restrictions, which disqualify developers from tax credits if they source a certain amount of material from a set of foreign countries including China.
The restrictions “will weaken America’s clean energy industry — and may ultimately make the U.S. even more reliant on countries like China,” centrist think tank Third Way said.