WASHINGTON, DC – As part of its “welfare for the wealthy” agenda that will shower high earners and corporations with taxpayer handouts, the Biden Administration unveiled a regulatory proposal Friday on critical mineral and battery component requirements for the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The proposal fails to counter China’s critical minerals supremacy, ignores domestic content requirements, and gives legitimacy to legally dubious trade “frameworks” negotiated by the Biden Administration.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) released the following statement:

“The Biden Administration is sacrificing America’s economic and national security for the sake of writing as many green corporate welfare checks as quickly as possible, leaving America’s key supply chains in the control of the Chinese Communist Party. While the Biden Administration is putting taxpayers on the hook to send money to foreign countries – in violation of a law President Biden championed and signed himself – it is also throwing up roadblocks to bringing more of our critical mineral supply chain to the United States.

“To add insult to injury, the Administration is using this rule to justify their ‘go-it-alone’ approach that negotiates fake trade agreements in secret without approval by Congress or consideration for the interests of American workers and taxpayers.”

Key Background:

Biden Pursuing Dubious Critical Minerals Deals to Send Taxpayer Dollars Overseas

• The Biden Administration is creating trade “frameworks” and is doing so in flagrant violation of the domestic content rules in its own Inflation Reduction Act just to send more American tax dollars outside the United States.
• Earlier this week, the Administration announced a plan to smuggle its corporate green welfare scheme through a new critical minerals agreement with Japan.

Democrats Packed their Inflation Reduction Act Full of Green Welfare for the Wealthy

• $391 billion in originally scored taxpayer-funded green welfare to subsidize corporations and the wealthy, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
• According to more recent analysis featured in the Wall Street Journal, these subsidies will now total $1.2 trillion – three times what Democrats initially claimed.
  • The report estimates the clean vehicle tax credits will be a $393 billion (28 times the original estimate) taxpayer subsidy to encourage the purchase of luxury EVs by individuals earning up to $300,000. In response to the enactment of these subsidies, one automaker announced that the price of their electric vehicles would go up exactly the amount of the new tax credit.
  • “Green” energy manufacturing credits are projected to cost upwards of $193 billion (over 5 times the original estimate).
  • “Green” home and building credits now clock in at $44 billion (22 times their original estimate).
• A separate analysis of the IRA’s battery manufacturing credits projects a cost to taxpayers of over $196 billion – a 542 percent increase from the law’s original sticker price.
• Not surprisingly, a third analysis shows the Inflation Reduction Act adding $308 billion to the deficit over the coming years – yet further evidence that Democrats sold themselves and the American people a bill of goods designed to advance their radical agenda, not help working families battling the worst inflation crisis in a generation.

Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act Enriches China

• Ford is exploiting a loophole in the law to qualify for taxpayer-funded credits using Chinese workers and technologies.