{"id":15077,"date":"2025-07-17T00:40:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T00:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/15077\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T00:40:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T00:40:11","slug":"the-ira-lives-on-in-obligated-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/15077\/","title":{"rendered":"The IRA Lives On in Obligated Spending"},"content":{"rendered":"

Current conditions: The National Weather Service is advising<\/a> Americans in 11 states affected by heat waves to avoid coffee and alcohol due to dehydration risk \u2022 There have been more wildfires in London this summer than in all of 2024 \u2022 We\u2019re at the halfway point in climatological summer and the United States\u2019 hottest day of the year \u2014 124 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, California, on Monday \u2014 may now be behind us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

THE TOP FIVE1. Here\u2019s how much money the IRA actually spent<\/p>\n

It has long been a \u201cbig mystery<\/a>\u201d how much grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act the Biden administration ultimately got out the door before leaving the White House. Previously, the administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants. Still, it wasn\u2019t until Republicans in Congress began their rescissions of the bill\u2019s unobligated funds that a fuller picture began to emerge.<\/p>\n

According to reporting by my colleague Emily Pontecorvo<\/a>, the Biden administration spent or otherwise obligated about $61.7 billion before leaving office, with President Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill clawing back $31.7 billion from 47 IRA programs. Programs that had the greatest proportion of their funding obligated include:<\/p>\n

The Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (99.9%)EPA\u2019s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (98.2%)Interior\u2019s National Parks and Public Lands Conservation and Ecosystem Restoration (98%)Interior\u2019s National Parks and Public Lands Conservation and Resilience (97.2%)Interior\u2019s Endangered Species Act Recovery Plans (93.6%)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot more in the data to dig through, too, which Emily does here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

2. Vote-a-rama on rescissions package expected to begin this afternoon<\/p>\n

Senate Republicans voted narrowly Tuesday evening to advance President Trump\u2019s $9.4 billion rescissions package, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. Three Republican senators \u2014 Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska \u2014 joined Democrats in opposing the package. Congress must vote to approve the rescissions by Friday to meet a statutory 45-day deadline that began when President Trump sent his proposal on June 3. The vote-a-rama is set to begin<\/a> Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n

The proposed package would eliminate $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, as well as large portions of foreign assistance programs. (A controversial plan to cut $400 million from the country\u2019s AIDS relief program, known as PEPFAR, was ultimately removed to convince Republican holdouts.) But as I\u2019ve written before<\/a>, the package also takes aim at $1.7 billion of the $3.6 billion appropriated for the Economic Support Fund, which has historically been used to work with international partners to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as $125 million from the Clean Technology Fund, which provides financial resources for developing countries to invest in clean energy projects. The White House has said the programs do not \u201creflect America\u2019s values or put the American people first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:<\/p>\n

3. China moves to protect its inexpensive EV technology from being transferred beyond its borders<\/p>\n

China announced Tuesday that to protect the valuable breakthroughs that have allowed it to produce inexpensive electric vehicles, it will begin to restrict \u201ceight key technologies for manufacturing [EV] batteries,\u201d The New York Times reports<\/a>. The move, which is effective immediately, will require a license from the Chinese government before any technologies can be transferred overseas \u201cthrough trade, investment or technological cooperation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The move follows pressure by the European Union on Chinese EV and battery manufacturers to build factories within the bloc. As I covered in Heatmap AM yesterday<\/a>, electric vehicle sales are booming in China in large part due to their affordability, with the nation being the \u201conly large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,\u201d BloombergNEF has found. Though lithium-ion phosphate battery technology originated in the United States more than three decades ago, Chinese companies BYD and CATL have \u201cfigured out a way to further increase the number of recharges, making it comparable to more traditional battery chemistries,\u201d in addition to advances in mass-production and capacity, the Times adds.<\/p>\n

4. Q3 expected to have record EV sales as buyers rush to beat tax credit expiration<\/p>\n

The third quarter of 2025 will \u201clikely\u201d see record sales of electric vehicles in the United States as would-be buyers rush to use the $7,500 tax credit before it expires on September 30, Cox Automotive\u2019s Kelley Blue Book reported<\/a> this week. Electric vehicle sales were lower in Q2 of 2025 than in 2024 by 6.3%, with 310,839 new EVs sold, marking \u201conly the third decline on record, and a sign of a more mature market,\u201d Stephanie Valdez Streaty, senior analyst at Cox Automotive, said in a statement. Additionally, sales of used EVs \u2014 only a third of which had qualified for government incentives anyway before those were eliminated \u2014 are up, with 100,000 units sold in Q2. But the real story will be what happens in Q3, where there\u2019s \u201cabout to be a fire sale\u201d as consumers race against the clock, Andrew Moseman writes for Heatmap. If you\u2019re among the shoppers, he\u2019s got the scoop on EV deals here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

5. Wright: U.S. could \u2018withdraw\u2019 from IEA over perceived renewable energy bias<\/p>\n

The United States will either \u201creform\u201d the International Energy Agency or \u201cwithdraw,\u201d Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg<\/a> Tuesday during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University. The IEA, which was originally established to focus on oil security during the 1970s, has been characterized by Republicans as becoming a \u201ccheerleader\u201d for the renewable energy transition, in the recent words<\/a> of Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. Wright echoed those concerns in his conversation with Bloomberg, telling the publication that the IEA\u2019s projections that oil demand will plateau this decade are \u201ctotal nonsense.\u201d Despite the threats, Wright stressed that his \u201cstrong preference\u201d for handling the IEA is \u201cto reform it.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE KICKER<\/p>\n

Several major beauty brands, including L\u2019Or\u00e9al Paris and Neutrogena, are set to include environmental impact ratings on their packaging. \u201cThe EcoBeautyScore\u201d \u2014 which runs from A to E \u2014 \u201cindicates the environmental footprint of beauty products based on its entire lifecycle, from ingredients to packaging and how it is disposed of,\u201d Cosmetics Business reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Current conditions: The National Weather Service is advising Americans in 11 states affected by heat waves to avoid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[28,1687,101,5040,1708,147,530,111],"class_list":{"0":"post-15077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-climate","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-electric-vehicles","12":"tag-homepage","13":"tag-personal-finance","14":"tag-personalfinance","15":"tag-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}