Photo illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump's slate of executive orders piles onto Hill Republicans' to-do list.
Why it matters: Beginning the rollback of Biden regulations and pausing IRA spending are a big deal. But beyond that, a lot of what Trump seeks to do will hinge on Congress.
Here are four big issues for the Hill …
DPA dollars: The energy emergency order directs agencies to recommend ways to speed up energy production and generation under the Defense Production Act.
- The DPA's toothiest provision allows them to offer up loans and federal purchases to bolster domestic industry — with an appropriation from Congress.
- Democrats threw $500 million at the DPA in the IRA. Republicans called that an overreach, but funding their own DPA efforts could help fast-track fossil fuel and nuclear plants over the backlog of wind, solar and battery projects.
Possible drilling drama: Trump's move to reverse the Biden ban offshore drilling ban and "initiate additional leasing" in ANWR could complicate GOP plans to expand oil and gas production as a pay-for in reconciliation.
- The Interior Department still needs to fill in the details, but that could potentially change the budget baseline for leasing expansion provisions in reconciliation.
- If the expansion can be done simply by EO, "then it is an executive action that would generate receipts and therefore would not be available (scoreable) to Congress to use in reconciliation," Bill Hoagland, a budget expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said in an email.
- "I do not rule out the possibility that somehow a reconciliation bill could reference the savings from the EO, but that would be unique."
- Still, Republicans have wondered aloud whether Trump would even be able to reverse the offshore drilling ban. We expect this to remain a huge issue for reconciliation.
NEPA flip-flops: Trump is trying to expedite permitting, mostly for fossil fuels. But he'll need legislative help.
- The "energy dominance" order rescinds the Carter-era EO that forms the basis for CEQ's NEPA implementing regulations. It starts a process to once again rewrite them after they flipped back and forth during the first Trump and Biden administrations.
- The White House will also be drawing up recommendations to Congress to "facilitate the permitting and construction of interstate energy transportation and other critical energy infrastructure."
- But ironically, Trump also cites "inadequate" NEPA reviews as a reason to halt federal offshore wind leasing.
- It's clear that lawmakers will need to step in if they expect any kind of long-term consistency on permitting laws.
Wind addendum: The offshore wind industry will need Congress to get out of Trump's crosshairs.
- Federal law requires five-year leasing plans for oil and gas, and the Biden administration had moved forward with one for wind.
- The Manchin-Barrasso permitting bill would have required Interior to hold at least one offshore wind lease sale per year from 2025 to 2029 and establish a 30 GW national goal for generation.
- That bill's now dead — but expect that proposed provision to loom large over the Hill permitting debate.
