Elin Energy’s solar panel manufacturing facility in Brookshire, Texas on April 25, 2024. Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
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In President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, his executive orders, tariffs and attacks on clean energy have reversed momentum for clean energy jobs and manufacturing, which had experienced a boom over the past two years.
A new report from environmental advocacy group Climate Power shows that 95 clean energy projects have been delayed, threatened or canceled, representing 62,554 jobs and $71.24 billion in investments, a press release from Climate Power said.
Economic uncertainty surrounding federal investments has driven companies to reconsider, delay or reverse their investment in the United States, putting hundreds of thousands of additional jobs at risk.
“Trump’s war on clean energy and his chaotic policies have already caused a hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs in sectors that had been booming for two years,” said Executive Director of Climate Power Lori Lodes, in the press release. “Repealing clean energy investments would jeopardize hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs on its own. On top of this crisis of uncertainty, repeal would devastate American manufacturing — halting construction, sending jobs overseas, hiking energy costs, and forfeiting the future to China and our other competitors.”
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Before Trump was elected in 2024, the U.S. had experienced its largest expansion of factory construction investment in the country’s history, prompted in large part by clean energy tax credits established in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
“The manufacturing incentives that we enacted have supercharged economic development in Georgia, driving billions of dollars of private investment from electric vehicle manufacturing to semiconductor manufacturing, advanced energy, and solar energy manufacturing,” said Democratic U.S. Senator from Georgia Jon Ossoff, in the press release.
Since establishment of the tax credits, clean energy companies have announced more than 400,000 new jobs, mostly in manufacturing. But since the start of the Trump administration, the growth has turned around, falling from 406,000 clean energy jobs created between August 2022 and December 2024 to 399,000 at the close of this year’s first quarter.
“It is not an overstatement to say that the Trump administration has launched the worst White House assault in history on the environment and public health. Day by day and hour by hour, the administration is destroying one of the signature achievements of our time,” said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, as reported by Inside Climate News. “If this assault succeeds, it could take a generation or more to repair the damage.”
According to Atlas Public Policy, a record number of green manufacturing projects were axed in the first quarter of 2025, Climate Power said.
“The manufacturing losses from these early actions will only grow, but those remaining 399,000 jobs are at even greater risk from a legislative agenda that could roll back the clean energy tax credits entirely, through a phased-out repeal, or other attempts to sabotage their implementation,” the press release said.
Some of the states that have already been significantly impacted by Trump’s tariffs and assault on clean energy — and have the most to lose if the tax credits are repealed — are Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, among others.
“It would be a betrayal of the state of Georgia to vote against our state’s economic interests and to put all of that economic development at risk,” Ossoff said.
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