- Hill Heat
- Posts
- Killing The Green New Deal Before It Was Born
Killing The Green New Deal Before It Was Born
After releasing 940 pages of the One Big Brutal Bill Act at midnight, Senate GOP begin votes this afternoon
Brad Johnson
June 28, 2025
Following days of furious wrangling to fit their multi-trillion-dollar omnibus through parliamentary guiderails and their own caucus’s discomfort with its venal cruelty, the Senate Republican leadership released the full text of their version of the One Big Brutal Bill Act (H.R. 1) at midnight. Hill Heat stayed awake for hours poring through the text.
Debate has now begun on OBBBA on the Senate floor, without any senator having had time to read its 940 pages. The table of contents alone for the 315 sections of the OBBBA is 13 pages long. The first votes are about to begin.
The Big Brutal Bill’s guiding purpose is to kill the Green New Deal, the sweeping legislative vision of climate, social, and economic justice that President Joe Biden disavowed, even as his Inflation Reduction Act made moves in that direction. The bill kills essentially all of the IRA’s programs except for those provisions supported by the fossil-fuel industry. Moving the nation towards fascism, the legislation slashes over a trillion dollars in public welfare programs, expands Trump’s military and police state, renews and deepens Trump’s expiring 2017 oligarchic tax cuts by several trillion dollars.
The legislation will authorize an increase in the national debt by $5 trillion (Sec. 72001).
Title VII - Finance: Chapter 5—Ending Green New Deal Spending, Promoting America-First Energy, and Other Reforms
Although there are assaults on climate justice throughout the omnibus, it’s concentrated in a few titles. Here’s the section-by-section descriptions of the provisions in Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s (R-W. Va.) Environment and Public Works title, Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) Energy and Natural Resources title, Mike Crapo’s (R-Idaho) Chapter 5 of the Finance title, and John Boozman’s (R-Ark.) Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry title. Lee is still pushing a massive sale of public lands, but has excluded Montana in his final text (Sec. 50301) in an attempt to get around Rep. Ryan Zinke’s (R-Mont.) strong opposition. Lee’s title also mandates the doubling of the cutting down of our national forests (Sec. 50302).
The Senate text includes several provisions that the Senate parliamentarian has ruled violate the Byrd rule limiting budget reconciliation, including Sec. 71114, which prohibits Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from paying for what the bill calls “gender transition procedures,” described in creepy detail. Senate Democrats will have to raise points of order against these sections and provide at least 41 votes to kill them. Republicans think these provisions, even though Democrats have the votes to sink them, are political winners for them and losers for Democrats.
There’s also $46.5 billion for Trump’s border wall (Sec. 90001), $300 million for local police to protect Mar-a-Lago (Sec. 90006), a ten-year moratorium on AI regulation (Sec. 40012), and a massive new tax break for spaceports built by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (Sec. 70309).
That is only a brief look at the hundreds of provisions in the One Big Brutal Bill Act.
Demand your senators read the bill before casting any votes on it and demand that they kill the bill.
Hill Heat’s U.S. Climate Politics Almanac is made available to the public thanks to our paid subscribers. Join their ranks today and grow the movement:
Reply