Well, the first thing to say is that we don’t know, and I think nobody knows for sure. The key term in the executive order was “disbursement.” The executive order called for a pause in the disbursement of funds connected to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or what is sometimes called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act. The implications of the order could potentially be interpreted in broad or narrow ways. I think the narrowest possible interpretation is that funds that have been appropriated by Congress but not awarded or obligated to a particular recipient, be that a state or local government or a private company, will no longer be obligated, and that no further funds can be awarded.

For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has a bunch of money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for lead pipe replacement. Not all that money by law could be awarded in a given year so there are sums that remain unawarded or unobligated that Congress has appropriated; it’s possible that further awards of that money will be paused.

The narrowest interpretation of the executive order is that those funds that have not yet been obligated or not yet awarded will not get obligated or awarded, or at least until this ninety-day pause is over. A more extreme interpretation of this order would be that even funds that are contractually required to be paid — so where the government has entered into a contract with some recipient, be that a public entity or a private entity, and that contract specifies that they’re supposed to be given money by the government on a certain date — it’s possible that those checks will not be written.

Most people think that that’s a violation of the law, potentially a flagrant violation of the law. But what we don’t know is whether the Trump administration is gearing up to contest the legality of that and to make a really broad assertion of executive power, as they attempted to do a few times in the first Trump administration, but were each time thwarted by courts, or if they mean something narrower than that. An order from the Office of Management and Budget on Monday strongly suggests that the new administration intends to mount an aggressive assault on the separation of powers by blocking federal spending not just on things related to climate, but on anything at all that the administration doesn’t like.

One thing I do think is likely to be the case, whatever the specific legal and procedural intention of the order, one effect is to induce a lot of uncertainty into many projects that are at various stages of execution. I don’t know if that was the intention of the administration in issuing the order, but it does appear to be one of the effects. What that means for many, many projects, we’ll have to see. But a lot of projects can’t live in a protracted state of uncertainty, not knowing whether they’re going to get paid or not.

Certainly, the vast majority of IRA’s expected cost will come from the tax credits. Although the executive order contains some language about how some of those subsidies and credits should be reconsidered, it does not rescind them because it can’t. Only Congress can alter the tax code. Any repeal of the IRA credits would have to be done through an act of Congress.

So between IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there’s several hundred billion dollars in grants, some of which are allocated on a formula basis to states and localities, but many of which are competitive in nature. In many cases, private companies, but in some cases, public entities as well, competed in applications for projects that they wanted to see funded under various authorities that either the IRA or the or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law established and then the relevant government agencies made decisions about which of those applicants were going to be awarded funds and in what amounts. From a climate point of view, there’s some very important IRA programs that took the form of competitive grants and those are among the things whose status is being rendered uncertain by that executive order.

Well, I think there are a lot of things that one can say. The first is that manufacturing has long been a source of high-quality blue-collar employment in the United States as well as in other countries. An indifference to where we make all the things that we consume has certainly led to policies that have really harmed working-class communities across the country that are still in some cases heavily dependent on manufacturing for employment and tax revenue.

There’s also a lot of good evidence that manufacturing has some particular qualities to it that generate a lot of positive economic spillovers in the form of innovation and productivity increases that don’t just benefit manufacturing companies and manufacturing workers but have broader effects on the economy as a whole. I think there are lots of reasons from a sort of risk management perspective why a total indifference to where things are made is not wise policy for any country to adopt.

Furthermore, even if you accepted that the manufacturing share of employment was not going to dramatically increase as a result of industrial policy (which I’m not necessarily prepared to increase), I think there would still be a strong argument that countries that want to have a strong and thriving manufacturing sector need that sector to be supported by industrial policy across a whole range of areas. Research and development, workforce development, the whole set of questions that surround siting and permitting are all bound up with supply chains.

I can answer that in two parts. When we’re talking even strictly about industrial policy and especially when we’re talking about an industrial policy for the energy sector as a whole, manufacturing is a key part of it, but it’s not the only part of it. There is an enormous amount of work on the construction and skilled trades side of things. We’ve already seen enormous surges in employment related to things like factory construction but also in the deployment of clean technologies.

So the IRA, Bipartisan Infrastructure law, and the CHIPS Act have contributed to increases in employment across all of those parts of the economy. On the construction side of things, I think you can point to some key aspects of the policy itself that have contributed to really notable increases in job quality. The most cited and I think the most genuinely important provision is the clean energy tax credits. These are credits for either installing or producing electricity from zero-carbon technologies, including but not limited to solar and wind.

A developer can get a 6 percent tax credit if they just pay whatever they want, but if they pay prevailing wages and utilize a registered apprenticeship for their workers, then the credit becomes a 30 percent credit. At least anecdotally, there’s a strong sense that the 30 percent credit has been vastly preferred to the 6 percent option. And what that means is that there’s notable increases both in pay and workforce development accompanying the role out of clean energy in the US since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

As far as the question of a broader social policy, certainly the BlueGreen Alliance and many others supported the overall package that Democrats attempted to pass through reconciliation in 2021, which included some really enormous and badly needed investments in key parts of the service sector workforce.

For example, there was a gigantic provision around home-based care mostly for the elderly through Medicaid. That’s obviously a workforce that is badly underpaid and heavily exploited in many ways. That investment would have been a direct investment in improving the quality of those jobs. So yes, it was a big disappointment that the Democrats were not able to pass its more ambitious legislation, for reasons that I think have been amply documented. I don’t think that anybody would claim that all of the ills of the American economy can be addressed through a manufacturing revitalization. But we would argue that manufacturing revitalization is a key part of addressing some of the fundamental problems of the American economy.

I think it’s not yet clear what the attitude of the Republican Party will be toward industrial policy and manufacturing. It is quite clear that they do not believe that reducing carbon emissions should be a policy goal. So that aspect of what has been one of the motivations for industrial policy on the Democratic side is not driving Republican thinking and Republican strategy. It does appear that more and more Republicans seem to have an explicit interest in bolstering American manufacturing.

What set of policies they ultimately support? It depends, I think, on which Republican you ask. It does seem that there is a growing support for the use of tariffs as a strategic tool on the Republican side, and there is, of course, the classic Republican preference for deregulation and their view that less regulation would support American business of all sorts, including manufacturing. They believe that environmental regulations, permitting regulations, things like that, are a hindrance to manufacturing. I think that what we are witnessing in real time is Republicans trying to make a determination about whether or not they would like to keep the Inflation Reduction Act in place.

What you have seen is several very prominent business lobbies, including, for example, the National Association of Manufacturers, openly on the record favoring the preservation of those tax credits. Their belief is that these tax credits are directly benefiting American manufacturers and the energy sector. Republicans are grappling with the fact that Donald Trump in his campaign really took aim at electric vehicles in particular, and policies that have supported both the manufacturing of electric vehicles as well as the sale of them.

This seems to be a point of some tension because it is very clear that a lot of the investment in electric vehicles and batteries and their supply chains is happening in Republican districts, and in fact it’s a really giant exercise in onshoring. This is a policy goal that, broadly speaking, at least some Republicans say that they support.

What we’re seeing in the context of the debates, especially in the House of Representatives, is that Republicans have a large number of major policy ambitions at the moment that they wish to enact. Many of them are extremely costly from a budget point of view. Republicans are looking for ways that are acceptable to their coalition to offset some of those costs. There have been documents that have been circulated by key House Republicans that take the form of menus of so-called pay-fors or offsets for the fiscal policy measures that Republicans wish to undertake.

IRA provisions, including IRA provisions that are directly and indirectly supporting American manufacturing, are among the things that are on those menus, alongside more traditional Republican ambitions like making quite drastic cuts to the welfare state through Medicaid or through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. So that is the context in which we should think about how far the Republicans are willing to go along with elements of the Biden agenda.