The outcome of the 2024 election could be felt most strongly, in some corners of the energy sector, through executive branch agencies rather than from new legislation, Milbank project finance partner Allan Marks tells Infralogic.

Strong benefits to red states and districts from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and other major legislation passed under the Biden Administration that supports the renewable energy sector, would make any whole-sale repeal efforts in the next legislative session an uphill battle, even if green energy-skeptic Republicans were to achieve an electoral rout of Democrats in the November elections, Marks said in a recent appearance on Crossroads: The Infrastructure Podcast.

But policy and staffing objectives floated in influential Republican policy circles point to an executive branch under a prospective second Trump administration that would have significantly less capacity to operate renewable energy incentive programs established under Biden, and they would not be driven by the decarbonization objectives laid out by relevant agencies under Biden, Marks said.

Marks pointed to the GOP 2024 platform and Project 2025, a proposed personnel and policy agenda produced by a coalition of conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation, as clues to how regulatory agencies would operate under a second Trump administration. Those documents, he said, point to an executive branch that would largely roll back federal agencies’ capacity to rein in carbon emissions.

“Even if you imagine that every provision of the Inflation Reduction Act stays intact, there’s still a large question mark, I think, over how the government would function, what the government’s policies would be from the regulatory side, and from an enforcement side, and you would have to see how that plays out,” he said.

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