The Big Beautiful Bill Will Foster American Energy Dominance and Ensure Grid Stability

During his first term and throughout his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump focused on unleashing American energy dominance.

On Feb. 14, Trump established the American Energy Dominance Council, “to achieve energy dominance by improving the processes for permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation across all forms of American energy.”

Unlike his predecessor, Trump supports common-sense energy policy that ensures Americans have access to reliable, affordable, and abundant energy.

More importantly, Trump is a climate realist who understands that it is literally impossible to immediately transition to so-called green energy while simultaneously eliminating the mass use of fossil fuel energy sources.

As president, there is only so much Trump can do on his own with executive orders and other actions to push forward his drill-baby-drill agenda. What’s more, almost all of Trump’s pro-energy executive actions can be undone by a future president.

Fortunately, the reconciliation bill, which was recently passed by the House of Representatives and is now working its way through the Senate, would codify fundamental elements of Trump’s American energy dominance agenda into law.

According to Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, “This legislation takes decisive steps towards improving our nation’s energy landscape by repealing the Biden-era [methane] tax, unlocking oil and gas development on federal lands, and alleviating regulatory pain points that have stymied the build out of American energy.

“Passing this bill is essential to secure America’s energy dominance through smart, durable reforms.”

In general, the energy provisions of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” focus on two main things: undoing many of the crony capitalist green-energy scams that were passed under the Inflation Reduction Act and reforming the federal permitting process for energy infrastructure projects.

As many Americans now know, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, should have been called the Green New Deal.

It was never intended to reduce inflation; its actual intention was to subsidize unaffordable and unreliable green energy boondoggles.

For more on the astounding amount of subsidies tucked within the Inflation Reduction Act, I highly recommend this report by my colleague, Tim Benson, at The Heartland Institute.

As Benson noted, “After its enactment into law, Biden acknowledged the IRA had ‘nothing to do with inflation.’ Rather, the green subsidies contained in the bill, which the Biden administration said would total $369 billion, amounted to what they described as ‘the most significant action…taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history.’ Since then, however, the price tag on these tax credits has increased substantially, with a wide range of predictions for how much they will ultimately cost. All credible estimates are significantly more than the Biden administration initially claimed, including one that puts the actual cost as high as $1.8 trillion.”

Although the reconciliation bill would not completely undo all the green-energy spending, subsidies, and tax credits that are gumming up the system and distorting the energy market, it would eliminate and reduce a vast amount.

The big, beautiful bill would also transform the federal permitting process for energy projects, which will pay huge dividends for all Americans. In fact, the bill requires dozens of new offshore and onshore leasing sales for oil and gas projects over the next decade.

Not only will these new projects create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs for years to come, but they will also reduce American dependence on foreign nations like China for green-energy manufacturing components and resources.

Moreover, a robust American energy sector, dependent upon clean, affordable, abundant, and reliable natural gas, will pave the way for the United States to lead the global race for AI supremacy.

The sheer amount of electricity needed to drive giant data centers, AI, and quantum computing can only be achieved by a grid with ready access to baseload power provided by non-intermittent energy sources.

Perhaps best of all, the drill-baby-drill agenda within the One Big Beautiful Bill will almost certainly lead to much lower energy prices across the board.

This will be a boon to all Americans, especially those who paid through the nose to keep their lights on and their car fueled during Biden’s nightmarish term.

For those not keeping track, from January 2021 to December 2023, Biden’s energy policies raised energy prices by $2,548 for the average American family!

Lastly, it must be emphasized that the One Big Beautiful Bill will help save the environment.

Green energy projects like huge windmill farms and giant solar panel fields are terrible for the environment. They destroy pristine lands, have a large environmental footprint, kill all sorts of wildlife, disrupt ecosystems, rely on strip mining, require thousands of miles of new transmission lines, and are nearly impossible to recycle.

Green energy is not green in the classic sense of the term.

For America to thrive in the twenty-first century, we must have a robust grid backed by reliable, affordable, and abundant energy.

We saw the folly of pursuing net zero and relying on intermittent solar power when Western Europe experienced its largest blackout ever in April. We should learn from the European energy debacle that it is very unwise to depend on the wind and sun to power our modern societies.

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