- Details
- By Chez Oxendine
- Energy | Environment
More than 100 tribes and Native-serving organizations are warning Congress that the Senate budget bill would severely damage tribal clean energy efforts across Indian Country.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” would eliminate tax credits for building clean energy projects and the $20 billion Tribal Guaranteed Loan Program under the Department of Energy. The Senate's budget reconciliation bill cleared a key procedural hurdle Saturday and appears headed to debate on Monday.
New estimates from the Congressional Budget Office show the Senate measure would add more than $3.3 trillion to the national debt over a decade — nearly $1 trillion more than the House version. The bill extends tax cuts passed by the Trump administration in 2017, while cutting roughly $1.3 trillion from Medicaid, SNAP, and green energy programs to offset the resulting tax deficit.
In letters to congressional leaders, tribal leaders and advocates warned the cuts seriously undermine Indian Country's growing clean energy transition. Robert Blake, owner of solar development company Solar Bear, said it would “devastate” his efforts to build renewable projects for Minnesota's Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians.
“If these cuts happen, then all that work that has gone into putting these projects together will essentially be for nothing,” Blake told Tribal Business News. “That's going to be devastating for tribal communities who planned to rely on solar power for their tribes and their economies.”
Blake outlined plans for the tribe to utilize the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program to help cover costs of building a 20-megawatt, utility-scale project. If built, the project would be community-scale, with enough extra power to create revenue for the tribe by selling excess energy.
The project would impact nearly every facet of tribal life, according to Blake: energy savings at the tribe's casinos would allow them to invest more money in their employees, many of whom are rural Minnesotans. Maintaining the energy facility would provide career paths for Red Lake students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. The tribe's plans also include a business that would use agrovoltaic farming practices, which involve utilizing solar panels and farmland to both generate electricity and grow food.
None of this would happen if the cuts are enacted, Blake said.
“It just doesn't happen — we can't get this off the ground without these programs. It would do irreparable harm to our community,” Blake said. “If the money stops, so does the energy transition that so many tribes like ours have banked on.”
The Senate bill would rapidly phase out existing federal tax subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027 and impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027. The tax provision, tucked inside the 940-page bill that the Senate made public just after midnight Friday, stunned observers, according to the New York Times.
While the loan program and direct pay tax credit programs are both critical for wider Indian Country energy, a range of more specific programs are also at risk, potentially undermining decades of work. At the Oceti Sakowin Power Authority (OSPA), proposed cuts to programs that support grid connectivity could derail all of their work, said OSPA general counsel Jon Canis.
OSPA, which also wrote letters in support of the endangered programs, is a cooperative organization composed of seven midwestern member tribes. The group is building a 1-gigawatt, utility-scale energy project, but that project has stalled because of massive costs associated with connecting the wind farms to the larger power grid, Canis said.
Federal programs could help OSPA pay for those costs, such as the Grid Resilience Innovation Partnerships grant, or the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor, both of which are under the Department of Energy. That money may disappear under the reconciliation bill however — and could end OSPA's lead project as well, Canis said.
“These programs mean so much to what we're doing, and people are talking about getting rid of them,” Canis said. “These are some of the best ways to get transmission costs paid for, and they could just go away.”
The letter campaign was highlighted in a joint press release from Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). The senators called the tax cuts part of a “big, beautiful betrayal” that would prove “particularly harmful to tribal nations.”
"Together, the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program and our Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy tax credits have cleared pathways and removed significant barriers for tribes to finance and build their own resilient energy infrastructure," the Democratic senators wrote. "The bill would pull the rug out from under projects that would strengthen their energy sovereignty and power local communities."
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is still being debated and discussed in the Senate, where Republicans remain divided on how to approach any cuts to clean energy program funding. Some senators, such as Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), want to see the tax credits phased out more quickly, while others, such as Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), have called for a “targeted approach.”
Tillis was also part of a group statement issued by him and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), John Curtis (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan) that warned against fully repealing the tax credit program.
“Many American companies have made substantial investments in domestic energy production and infrastructure based on the current energy tax framework,” the GOP senators wrote. “A wholesale repeal, or the termination of certain individual credits, would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.”
Cheri Smith, founder and CEO of energy advocacy nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, encouraged those senators to examine the proposed cuts. Smith told Tribal Business News that the cuts would impact roughly 500 megawatts of potential energy projects among western tribes alone.
“We're hearing some Republican senators are concerned that the cuts go too deep. That's good — we ask them to prioritize trust and treaty responsibilities and what's right over tax cuts for billionaires,” Smith said. “All those economic and climate resilience benefits, all those jobs and economic development — this would slow all that way down, or stop it completely.”
President Donald Trump, who has strongly supported the bill's passage, has set a July 4 deadline for signing the bill. The bill's final form in the Senate — and how any changes will be received in the House — remains unclear.
Brian Edwards contributed reporting.
