Rahm Emanuel recently took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to blame President Trump for rising electricity bills, claiming that the costs families are seeing today are a “direct result” of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which cut federal subsidies for wind and solar.
Blaming President Trump for today’s electricity costs is like blaming the bartender for your hangover.
Electricity prices are painfully high — hitting a record in June 2025. But government data show the surge started long before OBBBA: from January 2021 through Trump’s return to office in January 2025, prices rose 27.5 percent.
Families deserve an energy policy that puts affordability and reliability ahead of political virtue-signaling.
Here’s the fatal flaw in Emanuel’s logic: OBBBA, passed in July 2025, didn’t retroactively cancel subsidies for projects already built or under construction. That means it has zero impact on today’s rates. The higher bills families face today are the binge drinking; phasing out endless subsidies is the Alka-Seltzer that helps us sober up.
According to a recent CATO analysis, the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy subsidies would have cost taxpayers $4.7 trillion by 2050. That wealth transfer to private firms wouldn’t have lowered costs — it would only have delayed the hangover by shifting who pays the bill. Subsidies don’t make wind or solar cheaper; they simply disguise the true costs until they reappear on our tax returns, higher utility bills, or both. OBBBA’s rollback forces policymakers to face reality: the subsidy bender was unsustainable, and families can’t afford the tab forever.
The real drivers of rising bills are state-level mandates and policy decisions made five to 10 years ago. To comply with renewable portfolio standards, utilities across the country shut down reliable coal and natural-gas plants, built new wind and solar facilities, and added costly transmission lines to tie them together. Those expenses show up years later in rate cases. Consumers are now paying the bill for capital spending approved long before 2025.
Take Minnesota. In 2023, the state passed a law mandating 100 percent “carbon-free” electricity by 2040. Utilities are already raising prices to meet the requirement. Xcel Energy, the state’s largest provider, petitioned regulators for a 13.2 percent rate hike over two years to fund nearly $500 million in projects to meet the mandate. That translates to $165 more per year for the typical family — money many households can’t spare.
Or Colorado. Since 2009, lawmakers have passed more than 120 energy and environmental laws, including a net-zero by 2050 mandate. Advocates promised savings because wind and solar are “free,” but reality tells a different story: since 2004, residential rates have surged past inflation, saddling Coloradans with the Mountain West’s highest electricity costs. Families now pay for stranded assets, costly backup generation, new transmission, and inflated utility profits. Meanwhile, coal plants are closing before reliable replacements are built, and the Governor’s electrification push could cost nearly $700 billion by 2050.
And then there’s California. With zero-carbon by 2045, the state’s June 2025 average residential rate was nearly double the U.S. average — 33.52 cents per kWh. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office confirmed renewable mandates raised retail rates by about 5 percent and warned that keeping backup gas plants on standby and building battery storage will drive costs even higher.
Families struggling with rising power bills deserve honesty. Today’s high prices are the direct result of policy choices that put emissions targets ahead of reliability and affordability. Beyond the mandates, costs are being driven higher by supply chain bottlenecks, costly lawsuits, and endless permitting delays. Construction timelines have doubled over the last two decades. And as coal and natural gas baseload plants are forced into premature retirement without equally reliable replacements, supply shrinks just as demand surges — pushed to the limit by energy-hungry data centers. OBBBA isn’t responsible for that.
Rahm Emanuel is right that Americans are angry about rising electricity costs. But pointing the finger at Trump and OBBBA is pure scapegoating from a man famous for “never letting a crisis go to waste.” The truth is, today’s crisis was baked in years ago by mandates, premature plant closures, supply chain failures, and endless regulatory delays — all of which created an expensive, unreliable energy system that families are stuck paying for now.
Families deserve an energy policy that puts affordability and reliability ahead of political virtue-signaling. Until elected officials abandon their emissions-only obsession, utility bills will keep climbing no matter how many scapegoats they find. The difference now is that President Trump is willing to confront those broken policies head-on and chart a course toward a grid that works for all Americans.
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Isaac Orr is vice president of research at Always On Energy Research, a nonprofit energy modeling firm. Amy Cooke is the energy fellow for the State Policy Network and Chairman of Always On Energy Research.