GOP senators place holds on Treasury nominees over solar, wind credits

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Curtis (R-Utah) have placed holds on three of President Donald Trump’s nominees to the Treasury Department over the implementation of renewable energy tax provisions in Republicans’ sprawling tax and spending law.

The actions follow a so-far unsuccessful effort by a handful of moderate Senate Republicans to meet with the Trump administration to discuss forthcoming Treasury guidance that will determine how strictly to implement the phase-out of tax credits for wind and solar power deployment.

Grassley, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, recently announced in the Congressional Record that he placed holds on three Treasury nominees: Brian Morrissey to be general counsel, Francis Brooke to be assistant Treasury secretary and Jonathan McKernan, who is nominated to become an undersecretary at the department.

A person familiar with the effort granted anonymity because the move was not made public told POLITICO that Curtis has also placed holds on the same three nominees.

The pair, alongside other GOP senators, have escalated their pressure on the Trump administration in recent days to back off its efforts to strangle new solar and wind energy projects, warning that potential cancellations would make it harder to meet growing power demand, as POLITICO has detailed.

Grassley said he would object to consideration of the nominees until he can be “certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent.”

His comments follow a July executive order from Trump that injected new uncertainty for solar and wind developers facing already onerous new deadlines under Republicans’ mega tax and spending law, H.R. 1 (119).

The order called on Treasury to “strictly enforce” the termination of the production and investment tax credits for wind and solar facilities, including by issuing new guidance related to when a project is deemed to have begun construction — a potential outcome that Grassley and other GOP senators said they sought to safeguard against.

While the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ends the tax credits for projects that start producing electricity after 2027, those GOP senators added a last-minute compromise to offer more time for projects that begin construction in the next 12 months.

“What it means for a project to ‘begin construction’ has been well established by Treasury guidance for more than a decade. Moreover, Congress specifically references current Treasury guidance to set that term’s meaning in law,” Grassley said in the Congressional Record. “This is a case where both the law and congressional intent are clear.”

Trump’s executive order targeting the long-standing metric followed pushback by hard-right House Republicans who briefly withheld their votes for the tax and spending package over the Senate’s easing of the clean energy credit rollbacks.

The White House and Treasury Department did not immediately provide comment.