Echo Communications in Latitude Media

Chris Moyer, founder and president of Echo Communications Advisors, was quoted in Latitude Media shortly after the House voted to gut the IRA’s clean energy tax credits:

Latitude Media: What to watch as the fate of IRA credits heads to the Senate

By Maeve Allsup
May 22, 2025

The clean energy industry is facing even steeper cuts after the House unveiled eleventh-hour changes to its reconciliation bill and passed it off — by a one-vote margin — to the Senate. And with this stage of the reconciliation process comes even more uncertainty.

The final House version made significant modifications to the partial draft released by the Ways and Means Committee earlier this month, which had proposed eliminating or curtailing most of the tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

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As Chris Moyer, a policy expert and former Senate staffer, put it to Latitude Media, the clean energy industry woke up to a “holy shit moment,” watching Republicans who had previously signaled support for the credits agreeing to gut them. “If there’s one lesson for the broader clean energy industry and community, it’s that signing onto a letter does not mean that the member is going to vote a certain way,” Moyer said.

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Senate dynamics

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Clean energy tax credit repeal hasn’t been as front and center as cuts to Medicaid, for example, but while Medicaid changes are currently slated to take effect after the midterm elections, “this parade of closings and abandoned factories and abandoned projects would start [in] two months.”

Moyer has a more skeptical take. Senators face a similar political dynamic to the one that just caused members of the House who said they supported the credits to vote against them, he explained; while certain GOP Senators — like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Michael Lee of North Carolina — are pushing to eliminate the tax credits entirely, others have already indicated they’d like to see changes to the draft.

“It’s a matter of who is going to go for the mat for the changes that they want to see and say ‘I’m not going to vote for it unless those changes are in there,’” Moyer said. And there’s a good chance that nobody steps up to do that — not even the four Republicans who made headlines in April when they signed on to a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, urging leadership against a full-scale repeal of IRA tax credits.

“It’s hard to see how anyone other than Lisa Murkowski would vote against this,” Moyer said, pointing to the Alaska Senator who was among the signatories of the April letter and has been public about her desire for major changes to the House bill. “There’s so many other things in this broader bill that they like…and it’s very hard to go against the president of your own party for his top legislative priority.”

“There’s no question that if this were a standalone vote on just tax credits, they would all vote to keep them,” he added. “But the force of partisan politics is so strong and it’s very hard to go against that.”

Double jeopardy for clean energy

The outlook for wind, solar, and electric vehicles is unlikely to improve in the Senate, Moyer said. But all three experts are closely watching two key restrictions introduced in the final House bill that — especially taken together — would make it almost impossible for most other projects to qualify for their respective credits: the “foreign entity of concern” restrictions, and the bumped-up credit phase-out timelines.

Read the entire story here.