President Biden sold the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act as a cure for inflation. Critics warned it would make life more expensive. They were right. Housing, energy, and healthcare costs kept climbing. The law never reduced inflation. It financed a political industrial policy and called the bill “affordability.”
Inflation is not defeated by subsidizing favored industries or letting Washington set selected prices. It is driven by debt-financed spending — exactly what the IRA delivered. Price controls do not create abundance. They create a talking point. Someone else still pays: the taxpayer, the ratepayer, or the patient waiting for a medicine that never gets developed.
That is the IRA’s central failure. It promised relief while expanding Washington’s power to decide who gets a subsidy, which projects qualify for a tax preference, and what certain products should cost. Markets test ideas. The IRA tests loyalty to a statute.
Nowhere is that clearer than energy. Tax credits for wind, solar, electric vehicles, and favored manufacturing do not create wealth. They redirect it. Taxpayers absorb risks the market would have rejected. Companies chase eligibility rules instead of customers. A few subsidized products may look cheaper on paper. The rest of the economy pays in higher prices, weaker grids, and delayed investment in the fuels and generation that actually keep the lights on.
Energy independence is not a slogan. It is the ability to produce reliable, affordable power at home — coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and whatever else can compete without a permanent federal crutch. A nation that cannot power its own homes, farms, factories, and military is not independent. It is exposed. The IRA treated energy as a social program. It should have treated it as a strategic asset.
When government picks winners, entrepreneurs get the message. Do not innovate where the credit does not apply. Do not invest where the next Congress might change the rules. Build to the statute, not to demand. That is a tax on growth. It is also a tax on energy security. Intermittent generation layered onto a grid that still needs dispatchable power does not make America stronger. It makes reliability a political afterthought.
The same logic applies to prescription drugs. Americans want lower costs. Seniors should not have to choose between medicine, food, and heat. The IRA’s Medicare price-setting regime confuses a government number with a real reduction in what patients and the system pay. The hidden bill shows up as higher premiums, narrower formularies, more prior authorization, thinner supply, and subsidies shifted onto taxpayers. Compress the return on a decade of research and capital risk, and the next treatment, the better formulation, and the new use never arrive.
Price controls offer the easy illusion: change the cell on the spreadsheet and declare victory. The costs do not vanish. They move — to premiums, to access barriers, to future patients, and to the products that never reach the market.
Congress has already begun scaling back the IRA’s energy tax machinery. It should finish the job. Repeal the remaining subsidies and price-setting apparatus. Stop mistaking central planning for affordability. Strengthen the dollar. Expand production. Let competition — not a credit schedule written in Washington — determine what gets built.
If the goal is lower prices and a country that can power itself, the remaining Inflation Reduction Act should go. Energy independence is not compatible with a statute designed to ration investment by political preference. Repeal it, and let American producers do what they do when they are allowed to: produce.
Republican Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe represents House District 39 in Billings. She is the Vice Chair of the House Business & Labor Committee.