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So he kneecapped the agency.
The chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Manchin refused to hold a confirmation hearing for the reappointment of Richard Glick, the agency’s chair and a key ally of President Biden, after Glick’s term expired at the end of the year. That has effectively stripped the board of its Democratic majority, leaving it deadlocked and limiting its ability to advance renewable energy projects.
Manchin isn’t the essential tiebreaking vote for Democrats in the Senate anymore, but a year after the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act — which wouldn’t have passed without his support — he’s irate at the way Biden is implementing the law. And he’s fighting back: Besides his pressure on FERC, Manchin has vowed to oppose appointments to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. He is even publicly flirting with running for president in 2024, an unlikely prospect but one that could be devastating for Biden — and a situation that senior White House officials are closely monitoring.
“I’m so absolutely in disagreement with how they’re trying to promote an energy policy … It’s just not all about, ‘All green and clean,’” Manchin said on a West Virginia radio show earlier this month. “I’m in disagreement continuously with them.”
Now Biden and his aides are in the delicate position of trying to agree to Manchin’s demands where they can to avoid antagonizing him more, while still advancing a climate agenda that the senator strongly opposes — even though his vote last year made it possible in the first place.
Publicly, the White House has resisted hitting back at Manchin.
“We appreciate the senator’s work on this. The president and Senator Manchin have been partners in developing an approach that led to the passage of the IRA, and we’re extremely thankful of that,” John Podesta, a senior adviser to Biden on climate change, told reporters Wednesday. “We’re trying to implement it based on what the Congress passed. … Now, he has disagreed a little bit with some of those interpretations, but I think we are operating in good faith to get guidance out as quickly as possible.”
It took more than a year of painstaking negotiations, marked by bitter and personal rifts, for Manchin and Biden to agree on the Inflation Reduction Act. But rather than ending the tensions between the president and his party’s most conservative senator, the law has yielded new disagreements.
Manchin has attacked the Biden administration at nearly every turn over its execution of the law — from rules on electric vehicle tax credits, which he says don’t do enough to force automakers to move their supply chains to the United States, to its implementation of a methane fee program, which he and other Democratic senators say unfairly punishes fossil fuel companies. He has told Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen that her work on the law is “out of [her] wheelhouse,” accused the administration of pushing a “radical climate agenda” and even threatened to work with Republicans to repeal his own legislation. On Wednesday, he skipped a first anniversary ceremony at the White House.
Biden aides can’t afford to alienate Manchin entirely — they need his vote to pass legislation, and he’s widely viewed as the only Democrat who can keep his Senate seat from flipping to the GOP. And yet White House officials are also wary of ceding to too many of Manchin’s demands, which they believe would dramatically undermine the climate impact of the legislation that gives them the best shot at combating catastrophic planetary warming.
Biden administration officials believe Manchin has at times misunderstood provisions of the legislation he wrote, and in some instances see his demands as requiring them to violate the law, according to three people familiar with the administration’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private deliberations. Their skepticism is compounded by the suspicion that Manchin benefits politically from attacking Biden in deeply conservative West Virginia, where he is up for reelection next year, and that therefore no number of substantive concessions will stop him from bashing the White House.
“As much as they and the Democratic caucus are befuddled and frustrated and want to hit back at him sometimes, the reality is they know they still need him,” said Jim Manley, who was a top aide to Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the former Senate majority leader.
The fights emerge from diverging interpretations between Manchin and Biden over the purpose of the Inflation Reduction Act. Manchin has been clear that he sees the legislation as primarily crafted to spur U.S. energy production — largely regardless of what kind of energy and how it warms the planet. But to many administration officials, the legislation’s main goal is to fight climate change — an imperative highlighted by this summer’s natural disasters, and a central promise of the president’s — even as they also try to increase overall energy production and bring jobs back to the United States. (Manchin has said he also wants to support clean energy, even as he is wary of the scale of the transition advocated for by Biden.)
“Manchin sees this as a balanced bill to accelerate energy innovation without driving up energy prices and costs. And the Biden administration wants to maximally interpret IRA to achieve emissions reductions as fast as possible,” said Ted Nordhaus, founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank. “Manchin, with the leverage he has, is trying to rein that in. But there’s a sustained effort at the White House to work around it, and get what they wanted anyway.”
One of the most heated debates surrounding the law is how to award a very lucrative tax credit — valued at billions of dollars — to manufacturers of a new fuel called green hydrogen. The fuel can be used to power factories, trucks and planes without creating any carbon emissions. But it requires an immense amount of energy to make. If it is made with polluting energy such as natural gas or coal, researchers warn, producing large amounts of it could ultimately make global warming worse.
New rules being considered by Treasury could require makers of green hydrogen to bring online enough new zero-emissions electricity to power each project. Manchin has fumed at that prospect. He’s taking point in fighting those regulations, leading pushback that played a role in the administration’s decision to delay release of its guidelines for the tax credit, initially due Aug. 16, until at least late in the fall.
“It would put the whole green hydrogen industry back on its bum,” said Andrew Forrest, an Australian mining magnate who has met with Biden and Manchin on his plans to start several clean hydrogen plants in the United States with backing from the Inflation Reduction Act.
Manchin tacked language onto a major budget bill warning that the Senate Appropriations Committee “is concerned that the Department of the Treasury is considering imposing additional limitations or restrictions that are not authorized … in order to qualify for the clean hydrogen production tax credit.”
But the provision was not binding, and senior White House officials have told multiple outside advocates they understand the importance of ensuring that clean hydrogen subsidies do not lead to an increase in emissions, according to three outside advocates, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
“If we don’t make sure the energy that is powering these asserts is squeaky clean, we will be increasing emissions substantially,” said Rachel Fakhry, who leads hydrogen work at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The two sides have also squabbled over the Treasury Department’s implementation of a new tax credit for electric vehicles.
Manchin has been angry that new requirements for domestic production do not apply to commercial electric vehicles — a requirement that administration officials, as well as many independent legal experts, have said was outside the scope of the law. Manchin has also fiercely objected to Treasury’s guidelines determining which batteries qualify for the credit, although the administration used the definition created under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which Manchin voted for. (Manchin’s team argues that the Inflation Reduction Act included a stricter definition the administration should have used.)
The disagreements also reflect a deeper philosophical dispute, with Manchin more concerned about moving supply chains back to the United States than he is with rapid deployment of electric vehicles. (At the same time, the administration also faced criticism from automakers for making the laws too stringent, which environmental groups have feared would slow the deployment of EVs.) Manchin has been furious at Treasury’s initial interpretation of the law, and he may be further inflamed by coming regulations that will determine to what extent EVs built with batteries produced in part with Chinese materials qualify for the credit.
White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa said in a statement, “We are implementing the Inflation Reduction Act as written.”
The West Virginian has also fumed that the administration is not sufficiently focused on the deficit. But on other questions, he’s pushed to shower large companies with bigger subsidies.
For instance, pressure from Manchin helped push the Biden administration to reverse the initial rules of an ambitious $3.5 billion program to fund projects that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Initially, the rules for these carbon vacuum projects were drafted to prohibit a controversial process in which oil companies compress removed carbon dioxide and pump it into oil wells, which pushes crude toward the surface — enabling more fossil fuel production in the name of scrubbing greenhouse gases from the air. Manchin and several other Democratic senators signed on to a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in July that in part led the administration to allow this kind of pumping.
“You end up using this technology to pull carbon dioxide from the air to produce more fossil fuels, which put greenhouse gases right back into the atmosphere,” said John Fleming, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It becomes an effort by the fossil fuel industry to prolong its own life. You are not solving the problem.”
Now that the Inflation Reduction Act is law, many of Biden’s allies in the climate movement believe it is time for the White House to stop giving Manchin concessions.
“The administration has yet to really walk away from a partner that has not upheld his part of the bargain and continues to ask for additional pounds of flesh and act as a hindrance and obstacle to implementation of this climate law,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club. “I don’t think they need to kowtow to Manchin continuing to be an obstacle.”
Since voting for the Inflation Reduction Act, Manchin has seen a dramatic decline in his poll numbers in West Virginia. As the administration seeks to emphasize its role in spurring a clean energy revolution, Manchin says Biden is misleading the public on the true intention of the legislation.
“This bill that I wrote was done about energy security — truly producing more gas, more oil, more coal, than we have in the past consistently,” he said on the radio in West Virginia. “I think the business of politics … has gotten so absolutely toxic that he’s playing to the base.”
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