While families across the country struggle to afford groceries, electricity bills, rent, and healthcare, fossil fuel CEOs are getting taxpayer money to pad their massive profits.
Republicans snuck several new and expanded Big Oil loopholes into their tax and budget bill, signed into law in July 2025. That bill enriches billionaires and wealthy corporations while enacting devastating cuts to food assistance, clean energy rebates, and affordable healthcare.
The Republican budget and tax bill includes $20 billion in new handouts to the fossil fuel industry over the next ten years. That’s the same amount of money originally intended to help families switch to affordable clean energy through programs like $21 billion to promote energy-efficient electric heat pumps. Under this misguided legislation, fossil fuel corporations get sizeable new handouts, including:
- $14 billion in additional tax incentives to promote carbon capture greenwashing schemes that help companies produce more oil
- $3 billion in new giveaways to pipeline owners investing in carbon capture, hydrogen, and other false solutions
- $447 million in tax cuts that will allow oil and gas drillers to minimize a 15% corporate minimum tax signed into law by President Joe Biden, allowing a handful of domestic oil and gas firms to avoid paying their fair share
- $1.5 billion for exports of metallurgical coal used to produce steel in overseas factories
- $1.5 billion in eliminated fines for methane gas pollution by repealing the Biden-era methane fee, which penalized fossil fuel companies that do the most climate damage.
These corporate subsidies are part of an ugly, regressive Republican bonanza of giveaways, adding to existing handouts to the fossil fuel industry, which is now on track to be propped up with $190 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies over the next decade.
The Republican legislation delivers huge tax breaks to the wealthy and harms those at the bottom rungs of society. It’s a dramatic shift that will make energy more expensive for those most vulnerable at a time when a quarter of low-income households already spend at least 15% of their income on energy bills, which have been rising around the country.
But that’s not all. The budget bill opens up more than 200 million acres of public lands to oil and gas drilling. It allows fossil fuel companies that drill on public lands to rip off taxpayers through artificially low royalty rates as well as insufficient mandates to guarantee the cleanup of old wells. The bill also gives a slew of general corporate tax breaks worth hundreds of billions to all giant corporations including oil and gas giants. These tax credits subsidize corporate titans while everyday Americans pay the price. In addition, the bill:
- Sabotages the clean energy transition by stalling the advancement of renewable energy technologies and ending electric vehicle tax credits to pay for handouts to the oil and gas industry, even though Republican-leaning states have benefited from these programs;
- Provides an instant tax cut for pipeline companies, gas exporters, oil refiners, Big Tech companies, and other big corporations by extending a corporate tax break for major capital expenses known as ‘bonus depreciation,’ which has been a major priority of Big Oil and Big Tech lobbyists; and
- Cuts fees for drilling on public lands and waters, which could cost taxpayers $6 billion over the next decade.
At the same time, the budget bill expands costly, unworkable false solutions to the climate crisis long favored by the oil industry, including capturing carbon from power plants and other industrial sources. While the oil and gas industry claims that carbon capture technology would lead to decarbonization, captured carbon is often used to stimulate even more oil production. The bill raises the tax credit for injecting carbon dioxide to extract more oil, making it equivalent to a credit for carbon captured and stored underground.
The budget bill harms American jobs. This bill could result in 830,000 lost jobs and $2.7 trillion in lost investment through the cancellation of major clean energy tax credits. Already, companies have announced $14 billion in canceled projects from the threat of these tax credit repeals. The budget bill also slashed a $44 billion tax credit to promote the production of renewable energy components in the United States.
Oil executives are the winners in this big, ugly bill. Several Big Oil CEOs attended an April 2024 dinner in Florida, where Donald Trump asked for $1 billion in campaign cash. One month later, Trump again asked fossil fuel executives in Houston to fund his campaign.
The Families Over Big Oil campaign is organizing working families and everyday Americans to fight back. We’re taking action online and in the streets to demand an end to polluter handouts and a budget that puts working people first, not fossil fuel executives.
Join us as we push back against this rigged system. Together, we can build a clean energy future that serves working families, not billionaires.