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Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Senate Republicans shock the House with a supercharged megabill
It was the exact opposite of what nearly everyone on Capitol Hill expected. Rather than soften its edges, Senate Republicans took the sprawling Republican megabill the House sent them and sharpened it further, making the heart of President Donald Trump's legislative agenda more politically explosive. GOP senators made steeper cuts to Medicaid, hastened cuts to wind and solar energy tax credits and also managed to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit compared to the House plan. Usually, it's far-right conservatives in the House proposing politically precarious policies, leaving the careful moderates in the Senate — the 'cooling saucer,' according to the old Hill cliche — to dial them back. This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP's chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along. That bet paid off Tuesday with a 51-50 nail-biter vote. But now GOP senators are having to do some explaining to House Republicans who are already balking at the remodeled bill — particularly moderates who were counting on senators to water down the Medicaid and clean-energy provisions. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said House members who thought the Senate would walk back some of its changes had 'miscalculated.' 'We are a more conservative body,' Cramer said in an interview, adding that there are moderates in the House who 'cringe at the sound of any word that starts with 'Medi.'' As for conservatives who are cringing at the higher deficits created by the Senate bill, they're not finding much sympathy among their Senate counterparts, who ended up embracing a controversial accounting tactic that effectively zeros out the cost of extending expiring tax cuts. 'We actually make the business provisions permanent, right? That's the main difference,' Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview Monday about complaints by the House Freedom Caucus that the bill would add $651 billion to the deficit. Johnson was among a group of Senate fiscal hawks who railed against the legislation for months, then fell in line for the final vote Tuesday, just like their colleagues anticipated. In the end, the fiscal impact of the bill grew in two directions: Despite Senate leaders' vow to find more spending cuts, their bill might well have increased spending on net as a result of negotiations with holdouts who successfully pushed for increased funding for rural hospitals and carve-outs on safety-net program cutbacks. 'The bill includes over $500 billion in new spending, and at the end to get the vote of the Alaska senator, billions and billions more were added,' said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the three Republicans who voted against the bill Tuesday. House members, he added, are 'going to look at it and see that it's much less conservative than it started out to be and it's going to add much more to the debt.' Strict Senate budget rules also meant that some House spending cuts had to be scaled back or dropped altogether, so senators had to dig deep to find offsets elsewhere — especially given the $466 billion cost of adding the permanent business tax cuts to the bill versus just extending them through 2029, as the House did. Yet there was no serious discussion about leaving those tax cuts behind. Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo and other tax-writing Republicans considered it their top priority. Thune called it a red line for many of his members, and it was one that ultimately influenced some of the Senate's most politically fraught decisions. In an interview after the bill's passage, Thune acknowledged that the decision to make the business tax cuts permanent impacted the savings and overall strategy for the bill.'We really believed that permanence was the key to economic growth because it creates certainty,' he said. 'All the models that we saw showed that you got more growth with permanence.' To compensate, Finance Committee Republicans significantly dialed back some of Trump's marquee campaign promises to enact tax relief for tipped wages and overtime work. Many of those senators privately scoffed that the populist tax policies were not particularly pro-growth, as opposed to the write-offs for business equipment and research and development expenses. Even more explosive, however, is how they chose to wring additional savings out of Medicaid. The joint federal-state health program had already emerged as a political hornet's nest in the House, where members balked at various proposals that would turn off the federal money spigot and force states to kick residents off their health plans. Eventually the House landed on a compromise proposal of capping medical provider taxes, a popular financing mechanism for state Medicaid programs. Many Republicans objected, but it beat several alternatives, such as explicitly reducing the federal cost share formula for Medicaid enrollees. Many Republican senators prepared to make their peace with the proposal, including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said in a Monday interview that he was privately prepared to accept the House's provider tax cap with minor tweaks after a hospital association in his state formally blessed it. But before Hawley could announce his support, the Senate Finance Committee released a draft that discarded the freeze and instead drastically scaled down the tax. Instead of waving a white flag, Hawley went on the warpath, urging Thune to drop the Senate proposal and backchanneling with House leadership to undermine it. Hawley, who described himself as 'stunned' by the Senate's provider tax language, said he never got an explanation for why leadership went down that route. In the interview, he held up and rubbed his fingers together — indicating that he believed they were looking for money. 'I think it's a matter of our mark, the Senate mark, made a lot more of the business tax cuts permanent,' he said. While leadership was ultimately able to get Hawley on board — he won approval for a radiation victims compensation fund he's championed and other smaller goodies — the decision to go deeper on Medicaid lost Republicans two key senators during the final vote on Tuesday afternoon — Maine's Susan Collins and North Carolina's Thom Tillis. Both purple-state senators urged the Senate to revert to the House Medicaid language. Tillis privately warned leaders the Senate proposal would devastate his state and cost him reelection. Days later, he announced he would not run again and publicly torched the bill, saying it would 'betray the promise Donald Trump made.' The Senate's Medicaid swerve has also put Speaker Mike Johnson in a bind. When he was locking down support for the House to pass its version of the bill, he privately reassured his members that the Senate would soften his chamber's Medicaid cuts. Over the past week, he continued to reiterate to them that the Senate would end up closer to what the House passed. Now, he has to explain to increasingly frustrated House moderates why that didn't happen. But even as House Republicans were publicly banking on the Senate to soften the Medicaid cuts, Senate Republicans were pushing to go further. During an early June Finance Committee meeting with Trump at the White House, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming described to the president how the provider tax amounted to 'money laundering' and would constitute cracking down on fraud, according to a person granted anonymity to disclose private discussions. Other unpredictable events forced Senate Republicans to lose out on hundreds of billions of dollars in savings. After lengthy debates between Republican and Democratic staff in June, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised that upward of $200 billion in House offsets would have to be left out of the bill because they didn't comply with Senate budget rules. House Republicans had also banked on $116 billion in revenue from retaliatory taxes aimed at dissuading foreign countries from implementing digital levies and a global minimum tax that the GOP detests. Shortly after the Senate included the proposal in its text — and a freakout by analysts on Wall Street — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a deal with G7 countries on the global tax and asked for the retaliatory taxes to be removed. Other changes, like sharp cuts to certain clean-energy tax credits, seemed spurred more by politics than fiscal considerations. After the megabill passed the House in May, far-right influencers and lawmakers got increasingly vocal about what they perceived as deeply unfair subsidies to green industries. Trump began calling Thune to urge him to take an axe to wind and solar energy incentives that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden, even after softened language backed by Senate moderates was inserted into the Finance Committee text. Trump told the same to Senate conservatives, many of whom had been swayed by fossil-fuel advocate Alex Epstein. They invited Epstein to address a Senate lunch in June to win over skeptical colleagues. Even a late intervention from the world's richest man couldn't move the needle. Elon Musk publicly lashed out at Republicans for scaling back the tax credits, including making a public appeal to Speaker Mike Johnson to keep them online. He also personally approached Thune in recent days as the Senate debated the bill. Thune declined to comment on the conversation, but afterward Musk continued attacking the bill, arguing that it would hurt America's ability to compete with China. Senate holdouts did manage to clinch the removal of a controversial tax on solar and wind energy projects in 11th-hour negotiations, as well as a carve-out from the phaseouts for projects that start construction immediately. But the harsh language pushed by Epstein, which required most other wind and solar projects to be placed in service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the incentives, stayed in the final Senate product. Tillis, liberated of political niceties after announcing his retirement, railed against the clean-energy changes on the Senate floor on Sunday, arguing that they would gut power projects that are already being developed. Taking aim at Epstein, Tillis chalked up the changes to 'people who have never worked a day in this industry, maybe philosophized and written a few white papers on it, but haven't gotten their hands dirty.' Ben Jacobs, Josh Siegel and Kelsey Tamborrino contributed to this report.
Politico
a day ago
- Business
- Politico
House Republicans wanted the Senate to fix their megabill. They 'miscalculated.'
Usually, it's far-right conservatives in the House proposing politically precarious policies, leaving the careful moderates in the Senate — the 'cooling saucer,' according to the old Hill cliche — to dial them back. This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP's chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along. That bet paid off Tuesday with a 51-50 nail-biter vote. But now GOP senators are having to do some explaining to House Republicans who are already balking at the remodeled bill — particularly moderates who were counting on senators to water down the Medicaid and clean-energy provisions. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said House members who thought the Senate would walk back some of its changes had 'miscalculated.' 'We are a more conservative body,' Cramer said in an interview, adding that there are moderates in the House who 'cringe at the sound of any word that starts with 'Medi.'' As for conservatives who are cringing at the higher deficits created by the Senate bill, they're not finding much sympathy among their Senate counterparts, who ended up embracing a controversial accounting tactic that effectively zeros out the cost of extending expiring tax cuts. 'We actually make the business provisions permanent, right? That's the main difference,' Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview Monday about complaints by the House Freedom Caucus that the bill would add $651 billion to the deficit. Johnson was among a group of Senate fiscal hawks who railed against the legislation for months, then fell in line for the final vote Tuesday, just like their colleagues anticipated. No permanence enemies In the end, the fiscal impact of the bill grew in two directions: Despite Senate leaders' vow to find more spending cuts, their bill might well have increased spending on net as a result of negotiations with holdouts who successfully pushed for increased funding for rural hospitals and carve-outs on safety-net program cutbacks.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump pushes Thune to crack down on wind and solar in megabill
President Donald Trump is urging Senate Majority Leader John Thune to crack down on tax credits for wind and solar energy as part of the GOP megabill, siding with House conservatives who want to phase out those credits more quickly, according to three people familiar with the negotiations. The late-stage effort has involved direct conversations between Trump and Thune over the past two days. The intervention from Trump centers around a technical provision that could determine whether hundreds of planned projects are able to qualify for the wind and solar incentives, according to the people granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the conversations. The president's involvement has emerged as a complicating factor as Republicans aim to start voting on the megabill as soon as Saturday. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a close Trump ally, confirmed that Trump is directly involved in the push to further temper the Inflation Reduction Act credits. 'I talked to POTUS about it this morning and he certainly wants the renewables out ASAP,' Cramer said Friday. The approach pushed by Trump would match restrictive language in the House-passed reconciliation bill, H.R. 1, that would determine eligibility for wind and solar investment and production tax credits based on when those projects enter into service. It's a departure from Senate Finance Committee language backed by moderates allowing projects to receive credits based on when they begin construction. It's unclear whether Thune plans to include the so-called "placed in service" standard in the final bill text. Doing so would put moderate senators who have pushed a slower schedule for sunsetting those incentives in a major bind, forcing them to choose between rejecting Trump's agenda or allowing the gutting of tax credits that could lead to canceled projects, job losses and higher electricity prices in their states. Thune's office and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. Trump's new push follows his Truth Social post last weekend declaring, 'I HATE 'GREEN TAX CREDITS' IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL.' Renewable energy industry officials and advocates argue that a "placed in service" requirement is difficult for energy project developers because their timelines could be derailed by permitting delays, snags in connecting projects to the grid and other factors outside their control. Such a requirement would functionally end the credits for many planned projects, they say. Reverting to more restrictive placed in service language would likely see pushback from moderate senators such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who said Thursday that such a move would be 'disastrous in my state.' Another moderate who has pushed back on IRA rollbacks, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), declined to say Friday night whether he had heard about a decision on placed in service language, but called the Senate Finance Committee's approach 'a more rational way of doing it.' 'There are lawsuits, regulatory hurdles and other things that would make it virtually impossible to get [projects] in service' even if they are essentially complete and would otherwise qualify, Tillis said. Some Senate conservatives have backed the change, which they said will help keep Republicans' campaign promise to end the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said earlier this week 'there is a strong commitment to end the Green New Deal subsidies by the end of President Trump's term' — an objective, he said, 'that we're working hard to accomplish.' The effort has been supported by outside conservative voices in recent days, including Alex Epstein, a vocal opponent of wind and solar subsidies who has met with Senate Republicans in recent weeks. Epstein said Friday night that Trump is 'aware that the Senate had watered down in some significant way what the House did.' But he said moving to a placed in service standard is not a done deal and he is "not letting up myself until I see a law with this in it." Leading Trump officials like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who also chairs the National Energy Dominance Council, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, have also repeatedly criticized wind and solar energy, arguing those intermittent resources are unreliable and overly reliant on tax subsidies. In a post to X Friday night, Burgum wrote that Trump 'promised to reverse the Biden administration's disastrous energy policies, and the One Big Beautiful Bill delivers on this promise by ending the Green New Scam and investing in reliable, affordable baseload power!'
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Enphase Energy (ENPH) Jumped This Week. Here is Why.
The share price of Enphase Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENPH) surged by 18.2% between June 18 and June 26, 2025, putting it among the Energy Stocks that Gained the Most This Week. A solar panel array stretched across a large open field, its glimmering panels reflecting the sun. Enphase Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENPH) is a global energy technology company and the world's leading supplier of micro-inverter-based solar and battery systems. Enphase Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENPH) plunged to a 5-year low earlier this month following a proposal by the Senate Finance Committee to speed up the elimination of tax credits for solar and wind energy industries. The rooftop solar industry got hit particularly hard, as the proposed legislation aimed to end the residential solar tax credit by the end of this year. However, Enphase Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENPH) rebounded this week following reports that Republicans on the Senate tax writing committee are adopting a more generous stance regarding the clean energy tax credits, and may even push back their expiration dates. According to Senator Kevin Cramer, the Senate is also working on adjustments to a residential solar energy incentive that had been eliminated in previous versions of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill'. While we acknowledge the potential of ENPH as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 10 Best Nuclear Energy Stocks to Buy Right Now and Disclosure: None. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Enphase Stock Is Soaring Today
The U.S. Senate is reportedly considering retaining clean energy tax credits in the 2026 budget bill. Enphase and other solar stocks have suffered in recent months on expectations that the tax credits were going away. It is far from certain what credits will be preserved in the final budget. 10 stocks we like better than Enphase Energy › Congress apparently is having second thoughts about ending tax credits for rooftop solar. That talk is giving solar stocks a charge, with Enphase Energy (NASDAQ: ENPH) up 10% as of 10 a.m. ET. Enphase makes microinverters and other components necessary to turn the sun's rays into energy for your house. The stock has lost about half of its value in the last six months on investor concerns that the new political climate in Washington is less favorable toward solar, which could stunt demand for Enphase's products. But the situation might not be as dire as some had feared. Late Wednesday, U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer told reporters that Republicans are discussing changes to a provision that would end tax credits for rooftop solar panels. The senator said the Senate's version of the massive budget bill currently being debated in Congress could offer clean energy credits that are "a little more generous" than the version that came out of the House of Representatives. Investors should be aware that the legislation is still very much a work in progress, and buying in based on headlines about negotiations can be dangerous. We won't know the fate of the credits until a budget bill is signed into law, and that could be months away. It's possible the two sides end up with a compromise, but that could include a drastic reduction in credits even if they are preserved. That said, Enphase is a market leader in solar with a strong balance sheet and cost advantages over its rivals. As solar gains popularity worldwide, there should be ample opportunities for Enphase to benefit. Investors with patience and a stomach for volatility could do well in the long run by buying in today. Before you buy stock in Enphase Energy, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Enphase Energy wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $687,731!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $945,846!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 818% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 175% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 23, 2025 Lou Whiteman has positions in Enphase Energy. The Motley Fool recommends Enphase Energy. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Why Enphase Stock Is Soaring Today was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
