Lisa Murkowski Suddenly Realizes She Got Played on Trump Budget Bill
'I feel cheated,' Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. 'I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.'
Ahead of the bill's passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska's Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas.
Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to 'end market distorting subsidies' for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to 'strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.'
Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. 'Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,' she told the Anchorage Daily News.
She torched Trump's order as 'reckless,' claiming that it directly 'goes against' what he signed into law earlier this month with the budget.
Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' through the Senate, green-lighting the gutting of social programs such as SNAP and Medicaid while extending tax breaks for the rich, and agreeing to add trillions to the national deficit. She'd sent the bill back to the House with the hopes that lawmakers would continue to refine the massive tax and spending bill, only for it to be immediately passed and then signed into law.
But under the Trump administration, which regularly skirts congressional authority to withhold federal spending and obliterate government agencies, lawmakers should know better than to think the president actually cares about the law of the land.
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