Democrats Descend Into Circular Firing Squad Over Biden-Era Electric Car Credits

Democrats hoping to win back Congress are split over whether to revive a Biden-era tax break for electric car buyers.

Rank-and-file House Democrats want to restore the $7,500 credit Republicans ended in 2025, but party leaders have not committed to it, Politico reported Monday. Democratic Ohio Rep. Greg Landsman introduced a bill Oct. 22 to double the credit to $15,000 and make it permanent, according to his office.

“The credit is not good policy,” Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Michel said estimates of the Inflation Reduction Act-era credits indicate roughly seven in 10 recipients would have purchased an electric car without one.

He noted the Joint Committee on Taxation’s projection that repealing the old credit would save more than $19 billion in fiscal 2032, the last year of projected savings.

“If we simply double that figure and multiply it by the budget window, a credit twice as large as the one Congress repealed could cost about $380 billion over a decade, possibly more,” Michel said.

Ending the credit for buyers of new electric cars is projected to save the federal government $77.8 billion from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2034, according to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates cited in a December 2025 Congressional Research Service report.

“Repealing it was the wrong decision,” Democratic California Rep. Mike Levin told Politico. “The whole thing is a giant self-own by this administration, and it does no good for the American auto industry.”

A Democratic adviser who works on energy, granted anonymity by Politico, said the credit has “become kind of synonymous with elite, liberal, coastal, kind of out-of-touch policy and politics.”

The credit has gained a reputation for helping Americans who could already afford an electric car, party insiders told the outlet.

“The credit primarily benefited high-income households, those making over $150,000 annually,” Jonathan Lesser, senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics, said in a statement to the DCNF.

“If the subsidy were revived, it would mean lower-income Americans would be again forced to subsidize higher-income ones,” Lesser added.

Mark Mills, the center’s founder and executive director, said in a statement to the DCNF that “high-income households are the overwhelming majority of electric vehicle (EV) buyers and thus the subsidy to those households is a reverse Robin Hood.”

Peter Z. Grossman, a visiting fellow at the center and a professor of economics emeritus at Butler University, said in a statement to the DCNF that his understanding is most of the credit’s beneficiaries were “wealthy people who bought an EV as a second/third/fourth car as a virtue signal and (if it was a Tesla) a status symbol.”

“For taxpayers it would continue to be a subsidy for the wealthy although it would depend on how the subsidy was structured,” Grossman said.

Levin and Democratic Illinois Rep. Sean Casten’s Energy Bills Relief Act, which Casten introduced March 18, would repeal the part of the 2025 reconciliation law that ended the clean energy tax credits, including the electric car credit, according to the bill text.

The bill was referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and eight other committees, according to the Government Publishing Office.

More than 160 House Democrats back the bill, but House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York is not a cosponsor, Politico reported.

In March remarks to the League of Conservation Voters, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called for restoring clean energy credits for sources such as wind and solar but did not explicitly mention electric cars, Politico reported.

Neither Schumer’s nor Jeffries’ office answered the outlet’s repeated questions about their positions on the electric car credit.

“We’ve made unbelievable progress just from the momentum that we’d already created from 2020 to 2024,” Hickenlooper said, according to Politico. “We’ve got to assess how much momentum and how much benefit we got from it.”

Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin said she is “open to tax credits” but wants “a comprehensive strategy” on energy, Politico reported.

“There are still elements within the Democratic coalition who are still fighting the last battle of the [Inflation Reduction Act],” said Tré Easton, vice president for public affairs at the Democratic think tank d Institute, according to Politico.

The centrist group Third Way has proposed a $7,500 point-of-sale rebate aimed at “working and middle-class families,” criticizing the old credit for allowing “wealthier households to use the credit to buy luxury vehicles,” according to Politico.

“We need to incorporate lessons learned and the reality of the 2026 and 2027 economies into the proposals we’re offering,” Josh Freed, Third Way’s senior vice president for climate and energy, said, according to Politico.

Half of the benefits of the credit’s predecessor went in 2022 to taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or more, the top 8 percent of taxpayers by income, according to a separate Congressional Research Service report.

Democrats have also cooled on electric cars themselves. Forty-seven percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they would give serious thought to buying one in a Pew Research Center survey of 3,524 U.S. adults taken March 16 to 22, down from 58 percent in 2022.

The question went to about half the sample, and the margin of error for Democrats and Democratic leaners who were asked it is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, according to Pew.

Sixty percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners said the federal government should encourage electric car use, down 10 points from 2022, according to Pew, which gives a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points for that group.

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