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House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies Chair Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and ranking member Mike Simpson (R-ID) preside over a markup on Capitol Hill, June 21, 2022.
The White House did not press for financing a key plank of its plan to bring down soaring energy costs, in the latest oversight by an administration that has been criticized as slow to react to surging gas prices.
Earlier this month, President Biden invoked the Defense Protection Act (DPA), a tool that gives the White House broad authority to steer industrial production. The White House said it was invoking the authority to speed domestic manufacturing of green technology such as solar panels, building insulation, and critical parts for the power grid.
The move has limited potential without capital to back it up, however, so the president must secure funds for those priorities. Funding can come through the congressional appropriations process. Yet as late as June 15th, the House was set to finalize the relevant Energy and Water Appropriations bill without setting aside funding for the Department of Energy to follow through on those commitments.
The president announced his intention to use the DPA for green technology after releasing his recommended budget. And with the Subcommittee on Energy and Water well on its way to finalizing a proposal by mid-June, a person familiar with negotiations said, the White House did not press to add a line item for using DPA authorities to build clean energy.
Instead, progressives wrested the funding from Democratic leadership through late-stage negotiations. Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) led the push to secure $100 million for the goals outlined in Biden’s order by organizing offices to threaten to withhold votes on H.R. 7606, the Lower Food and Fuel Costs Act.
In response to the effort led by Bush, a staffer familiar with the discussions told the Prospect, the White House contacted one of the offices holding out on H.R. 7606 to thank them for pushing for the funding. That is further evidence, the staffer said, that the White House had no prior plan to finance its use of the DPA.
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), chairwoman of the subcommittee on energy and water appropriations, ultimately touted the addition of the funding in a press release.
The White House’s early failure to insert a line item for the DPA led some observers to question its seriousness about deploying renewables to combat rising gas prices driving headline inflation, a top issue for voters.
The $100 million in expected funding could be an important foothold for climate action, as the window closes to pass even a whittled-down and rebranded reconciliation bill, a version of the Democrats’ failed Build Back Better climate and jobs legislation. While $100 million is a tiny slice of the sum needed to accelerate the energy transition, securing a fund at the Department of Energy is a big win for environmentalists.
“The procedural precedent is as important as the financing precedent,” said Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, who has worked on using DPA authorities for climate.
During COVID, Congress created a DPA fund at the Department of Health and Human Services to boost manufacturing of vaccines and medical supplies. That model bypassed the Defense Department, which has traditionally signed off on uses of the authorities. The creation of this fund at the Department of Energy is further precedent for using the DPA to further national-security objectives beyond traditional defense, such as energy security.
These funds could also be bolted onto facilitating existing research and development efforts at both departments, through the ARPA-E and ARPA-H initiatives. ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Energy and Health programs were modeled on the Defense version, known as DARPA.
