Sponsors
Introduced September 4, 2025 by Richard Joseph Durbin · Last progress September 4, 2025
The bill pairs a national carbon price and substantial federal financing with direct cash rebates and targeted investments to accelerate decarbonization and support vulnerable communities, while creating higher near‑term energy costs, increased fiscal exposure, administrative complexity, and transition‑period distributional tradeoffs.
All eligible adults — especially low‑ and middle‑income households — receive regular quarterly carbon‑fee‑funded cash payments and targeted rebates that offset higher energy costs and provide direct income support.
Households, consumers, and firms face a statutory carbon price that creates incentives to cut emissions and steer investment to lower‑carbon energy and efficiency, helping reduce national GHGs toward the 2030 and 2050 targets.
State and local projects, clean‑energy firms, and manufacturers gain access to capital through a new Climate Change Finance Corporation (including $7.5B/yr start‑up capitalization) and credit enhancements that mobilize private investment and create jobs in clean‑energy and vehicle supply chains.
Households and businesses will likely face higher energy, fuel, and goods prices from the carbon fee before rebates, increasing living and operating costs — disproportionately burdening lower‑income families.
Taxpayers and the federal budget absorb large near‑term appropriations and mandated Trust Fund deductions that reduce general Treasury receipts, risk increasing fiscal pressure, and could crowd out other priorities.
Taxpayers are exposed to financial losses because the government backs high‑risk loans and credit enhancements intended to mobilize private capital; failed projects could generate losses.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Creates a carbon fee funding a trust that pays quarterly rebates, funds a climate finance agency, agricultural transition payments, community/workforce grants, and sequestration planning.
Creates a new federal climate finance agency to fund deployment of low- and zero-emission technologies, climate-resilient infrastructure, industrial decarbonization, and risky projects that private capital won’t finance. It funds those activities with a newly created carbon fee (added to the tax code) that feeds a Treasury trust fund used for quarterly per-person rebates, agricultural transition payments, grants for community and workforce transition, and funding for the finance agency. Also requires periodic independent studies of the fee’s performance, directs a federal planning effort to expand natural carbon sinks, and sets national emissions-reduction goals (45% below 2018 by 2030 and net zero by 2050). The bill phases in allocations, eligibility rules, means-tested program protections, and transition assistance for impacted workers, producers, and overburdened communities.