OPINION:
This month, Republicans are taking control of the House, the Senate, and the White House for only the third time since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. This is a historic opportunity to bring change to the federal government on everything from securing the border to reducing the tax burden on the middle class. And as conservatives take over Washington, Congressional leaders are focused on winning principled victories rather than partisan victories.
Rather than repealing the Biden agenda wholesale, President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican allies should repeal the worst parts of it, which is the vast majority of it, while fixing a few key parts to make them actually work, turning a Biden blunder into Trump triumph. Just as President Biden kept Trump’s tariffs on China in place when he took office, Mr. Trump should keep a few Biden-era laws and make them his own.
The best examples come from the legislative grab-bag known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which Mr. Biden signed into law in August of 2022. The bill was negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and moderate West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, with backroom horse trading on everything from prescription drugs to corporate taxes to wind energy. The bill contains a lot of bad ideas that should be eliminated completely, like expensive tax credits for electric vehicles. After the IRA passed, EV prices soared, canceling out any net benefit to consumers, most of whom are wealthy and do not need the extra cash. Even the man who made EVs economically viable, Elon Musk, thinks these credits must go.
But the IRA also included sweeteners to win over the moderate Mr. Manchin. Those sweeteners are just as sweet today as they were back then, and Republicans should leave many of them in place. For example, Mr. Manchin succeeded in including a provision mandating offshore energy lease auctions into the IRA, a beneficial policy Joe Biden had been dragging his feet on for years. No Republican wants to repeal that. Likewise, the bill includes financing for mining projects in the United States at a time when China is weaponizing critical minerals against us. Left-wing activists howled at these parts of the bill in 2022 but accepted them as a quid pro quo to get the billions in spending they wanted. Now President Trump can axe the wasteful spending and keep supporting America’s hard-working miners.
The IRA also includes a tax credit for advanced manufacturing, codified at 45X of the tax code. Mr. Trump ran successfully on a message of bringing back manufacturing to Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan. Pro-American manufacturing provisions should be preserved or reformed to make them work better.
Fortunately, this seems to be the approach of Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has said, “You’ve got to use a scalpel [on the IRA] and not a sledgehammer because there’s a few provisions in there that have helped overall.” Republican leadership has balked at outright IRA repeal even after two years of controlling the House of Representatives. Instead, House Republicans have voted to repeal parts of it and to fix others. This is exactly the right approach, and now they will have a Republican Senate and Mr. Trump to help them finish the job.
Bear in mind that the only places things get built anymore are Republican. Democrats might have cut a huge check with America’s credit card two years ago, but it will likely get cashed more often in red states than in blue. America’s leader in clean energy is not California; it’s Texas, something that climate activists ought to think about more often. IRA-funded energy projects will be a win for red state governors and Mr. Trump, not for Mr. Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Biden’s spending binge was larded with woke DEI requirements that have slowed their implementation. Mr. Biden recently signed a bipartisan bill to waive environmental reporting requirements on semiconductor chip spending. This provides a model for how Republicans can reform some of Mr. Biden’s spending into something that would build stuff and not just pay off the Democratic base. President Biden and the Democrats refused to put any guardrails in place to ensure chip spending didn’t end up in China; Republicans should force Democrats to vote on these requirements on day one.
Incoming Sen. Majority Leader John Thune and Mr. Johnson have previewed next year’s legislative actions, focusing on two blockbuster funding bills that will principally be written by the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. As these committees get to work, they should remember that even though voters just threw out Mr. Biden and the Democrats, Republicans shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
• Chris Johnson is a GOP strategist who organizes the next generation of conservative leaders. He also serves as a senior advisor to the National Federation of College Republicans, focusing on energy issues.
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