(The Epoch Times)—The first Senate adaptation of President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful” Fiscal Year 2026 budget bill retains the wholesale slashes and clawbacks in “green energy” allocations adopted by the House when it passed its version of the spending plan by a single vote on May 22.
Although some timelines are extended, the draft budget released on June 16 by the Senate Finance Committee largely replicates the House’s terminations of individual tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles, heat pumps, and energy-efficient domestic appliances, and for installing rooftop solar panels.
The senior chamber’s initial stab at the proposed FY26 budget, which the House laid on its table, also eliminates or dramatically scales back decades-old corporate wind and solar subsidies that were expanded under 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
It pulls the plug on most of the renewable energy subsidies Trump labeled “the new green scam.”
“This bill prevents an over-$4 trillion tax hike and makes the successful 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, enabling families and businesses to save and plan for the future,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said in a statement accompanying the 550-page budget outline.
“It delivers additional tax relief to middle-class families still recovering from record inflation under the Biden administration,” he said.
“The legislation also achieves significant savings by slashing ‘Green New Deal’ spending and targeting waste, fraud, and abuse in spending programs while preserving and protecting them for the most vulnerable.”
Democrats are expected to fiercely contest the across-the-board “green energy” cuts and are likely to restore some with the aid of dissenting Republicans in the 53–47 GOP-led chamber, before kicking the plan back to the House, where Republicans hold a slim 220–212 majority.
Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) aims to get the budget through Congress and on to the president’s desk by July 4, a tight timeline in narrowly divided chambers unlikely to be achieved without concessions on both sides of the aisle.
The first showdown for the energy components in the Senate Finance Committee’s tentative budget comes on June 18, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright presents the Department of Energy’s $46.3 billion FY 2026 budget request to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The department’s proposed budget trims spending by 7 percent from this year’s $49.8 billion plan, slashing allocations for non-defense energy programs by 26 percent, including more than $3.7 billion in “green energy” programs next year while pulling the plug on nearly $20 billion in dedicated funding for renewable energies through 2032.
Those cuts and rescissions in approved allocations through 2032 are incorporated into the budget passed by the House and into the Finance Committee’s alterations set to be debated in the Senate, beginning with Wright’s 10 a.m. June 18 hearing before the full 20-member Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, paced by 11 seated Republicans.
The Senate Finance Committee’s proposed spending plan outlines its energy components in Chapter 5 between pages 29–35.
The chapter features 15 sections, 10 in “Subchapter A: Termination of Green New Deal Subsidies” and five in “Subchapter B: Enhancement of America-First Energy Policy.”
The first subchapter includes sections terminating tax credits of up to $7,500 for electric vehicle purchases, energy-efficient home improvement credits up to $1,200, and rebates of up to $2,000 for heat pumps and biomass induction stoves.
Those incentives were to expire in 2032, but under the proposed budget, they will end six months after adoption.
While the Senate’s initial plan ended the EV credit within 180 days, the version ended it on Dec. 31, 2025, but extended the credit through the end of 2026 for automakers that had not already sold or built EVs.
The committee’s spending plan ends tax credits of $2,500 to $5,000 for homes built to Energy Star and Zero Energy Ready standards within a year of the budget bill’s enactment.
As with the House bill, the Senate measure essentially ends the “rooftop solar” credit for homeowners who install solar panels on rooftops.
Under current law, taxpayers may claim a credit for residential expenditures for solar electric property, solar water heating property, fuel cell property, small wind energy property, geothermal heat pumps, and battery storage property in service by Dec. 31, 2024.
The value of the credit is 30 percent of the expenditures through Dec. 31, 2032.
Both chambers’ proposed plans terminate the credit 180 days after their enactment.
Among energy-related tweaks in the Senate and House plans are long-standing wind and solar subsidies enhanced by the Inflation Reduction Act will be extended longer in the Senate’s proposal.
While the House pulls the plug with the president’s signature, under the Senate’s budget, wind and solar companies can still garner the full benefit if they begin planned projects within six months, 60 percent if they break ground in 2026, and 20 percent if they initiate in 2027.
Those built from 2028 will no longer receive tax benefits.
The Senate plan also preserves tax credits for companies that build nuclear reactors, geothermal plants, hydropower dams, or battery storage through 2033, which the House version trims.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
