🏡💚 Terminating the green new deal

January 31, 2025

On Day 1 of his new administration, Trump issued an executive order on “Unleashing American Energy,” which includes a slew of anti-clean energy policies, including directives to open up federal land for drilling, “eliminate the electric vehicle (EV) mandate,” reduce regulations and oversight on fossil fuels, and repeal a number of Biden’s climate-related executive orders.

It also includes a section entitled, “Terminating the Green New Deal.” I hope most of us would scoff at the idea that we are anywhere close to anything like a true Green New Deal, but Trump has taken to using the “Green New Deal” moniker to reference any and all climate and clean energy policies he opposes. This section of the executive order called for immediately pausing the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

On the one hand, it is not uncommon for incoming administrations to call for temporary freezes on federal agency actions taken by their predecessor. But it is something else entirely to make federal agencies halt spending on programs mandated in laws passed by Congress.

This has caused significant confusion — while somewhat expecting a halt on spending that had been approved but not yet allocated, the text of the executive order left open the possibility that it would also target spending that has already been ​“obligated,” or legally committed under contract. That appears unlikely, and any attempts to do that would undoubtedly be met by lawsuits. But this day 1 order augers the authoritarian moves that we fear from Trump 2.0, where he attempts to accrue executive authority and erode the balance of power. As with other early actions, he’s testing the limits of how far he can go.

It didn’t take long to see the next move. This past Monday, we saw the next phase of this assault when the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a 2-page memo ordering a total freeze on “all federal financial assistance.” This sparked alarm and outrage throughout nearly every sector of society. With only initial exemptions to Social Security and Medicare, there was widespread fear that this would mean the freeze of many direct assistance programs that people rely on — things like Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), rental assistance, Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and many more. Shortly after, we saw state Medicaid funding portals briefly shutting down.

The illogic and ideological motivation for this memo was to end “wokeness” in government through federal resources that promote “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” On the surface, this nonsensical grouping of ideological signifiers is just culture war fodder. But it reveals much more. Under the guise of ending wokeness, the Trump administration is setting out to gut the social safety net and basic functioning of the federal government. Green new deal social engineering = your ability to pay rent, get groceries, and access childcare.

Although weaponizing ideas like the ‘green new deal’ is meant to advance his agenda, we see how this could backfire. While our vision of a Green New Deal means going much further than the existing threadbare safety net, equating the GND with widely popular programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and rental assistance only bolsters our case that we need more programs like these that materially improve people’s lives.

On the other hand, that is also why the attacks on the IRA and IIJA are particularly effective, and why equating the GND with those laws is much more damaging to the brand. While both provided important and badly needed investments in climate and infrastructure, they were also (1) deeply flawed, and (2) not felt by everyday people. Polls repeatedly showed that a strong majority of people did not think those laws had improved their lives or their communities. Instead, people were mostly left with a feeling that, at best, someone else was benefitting, or perhaps it was just more wasteful government spending that causes inflation.

The vision for a GND stands in such stark contrast to this. Instead of a climate agenda based on tax breaks to private corporations, a GND law would make direct investments in positive impacting people’s everyday lives. This means expanding the safety net, creating good jobs, developing community infrastructure, upgrading schools, green social housing. As a friend likes to say, the Green New Deal is climate policy you can touch and feel.

Monday’s budget freeze didn’t even last 48 hours. Facing an outcry from nearly all of civil society, a federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order, and over 20 states joining a lawsuit in opposition, the OMB rescinded the order on Wednesday night. While I hesitate to call this a ‘win,' since it seems to constitute maintaining the bare minimum of checks-and-balances, it does show that people and governmental institutions won’t just roll over for authoritarianism. There are still limits on executive power, and people are still willing to fight.

Unfortunately, this does not unfreeze the halts on climate funding, nor does it reverse the governmental purge of environmental justice (under the guise of ‘DEI’). It still remains to be seen what spending, if any, will continue from the IRA and IIJA. For now, we are left with trying to make the most of the money that has already been obligated.

One pot of obligated money is the $27 billion for the federal Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. These “green bank” programs have wide latitude to support a number of climate infrastructure projects. Last week, Enterprise Community Partners (one of the recipients through the Power Forward Communities partnership) released a report detailing opportunities to use these funds to acquire and decarbonized affordable housing buildings. We’re going to need ideas like this, and many more, to think seriously about how we can use this money to make real change. This won’t and never was going to be the Green New Deal. But it can be a starting place for us to rethink how we ensure our climate policies are improving everyday people’s everyday lives.

I don’t really want to put pictures of Trump here, so instead here’s a picture of a cat at the Hermosa Beach city council meeting. Source: Daily Breeze

WHAT WE’RE READING

• After the LA Fires: Rent-Gouging in the Wake of Disaster (Rent Brigade) — highly recommend reading this report documenting the rental price gouging I talked about in last week’s newsletter!

• Decarbonizing Unsubsidized Affordable Housing: A Roadmap for Equity and Sustainability (Enterprise Community Partners)

• Vienna Embraces Heat Pumps to Ditch Russian Gas (Bloomberg) — interesting… I heard Vienna does some other good things too…

• The Los Angeles Fires Accelerated the Looming Natural Gas Crisis (HeatMap)

Feel free to reply any time! I always enjoy hearing from people and getting any feedback/questions/additional thoughts.

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