US President Joe Biden's climate and energy policies would likely be continued under a Kamala Harris administration and a divided Congress, energy analysts said, with Democrats focused on implementing and defending the $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act. If former President Donald Trump prevails against Vice President Harris in the 2024 race for the White House, election forecasters see greater odds of Republican trifecta control of government next year.

A GOP sweep would likely open the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to Republican efforts to eliminate or scale back the law's energy and climate measures to help pay for other priorities, such as extending Trump-era tax cuts through a legislative tool known as budget reconciliation. However, wholesale IRA repeal is viewed as highly unlikely, assuming GOP majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate remain slim.

A return to unified Democratic control of government, meanwhile, could allow the party to make marginal tweaks to the IRA as part of a broader budget reconciliation package. Regardless of the 2024 election results, the next Congress could also find bipartisan compromise on critical minerals legislation, according to industry experts.

Divided government is likeliest scenario

Divided government remains the most likely scenario, according to most projections. The 2024 Senate map is widely seen as more advantageous to the GOP, while Democrats have long been expected to turn a narrow House minority into a narrow majority.

Even if Democrats or Republicans win a governing trifecta in November, sweeping changes to federal energy policy could prove difficult to enact.

Contrary to heated rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail, experts believe policy changes that require congressional action will come as the result of tight governing margins and intraparty compromise.

"Particularly in Congress, I think many of the actual issues that could gain traction in the next couple of years will still move ahead regardless of the election outcome," Sasha Mackler, executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Energy Program, said. "It's going to be very tight and a very closely divided Congress, regardless of who's in control."

Logan Phillips, founder of Race to the White House, whose model predicted the 2022 midterms within one House seat, said the dynamics around the presidential race create a greater likelihood of one party sweeping the election than many specific race forecasts may account for.

"If you're winning the presidential election, that's a whole universe of results where things are already going well for your party," Phillips said. "We have three sets of elections that are really tight and winnable for both parties. You're more likely than not to see some correlation across the board there — especially if one party turns out at a higher level than expected, which happens more often than not."

Even so, Phillips' model gives various forms of divided government a combined 45.1% chance of occurring. Democrats have a 29.5% chance of securing a trifecta, the GOP 25.4%.

House Republicans wary of wholesale IRA repeal

If Trump returns to the White House with slim majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP will almost certainly take aim at certain aspects of the IRA, though experts believe the party will have less appetite for full repeal than campaign discourse suggests.

"It won't be day one root and branch repeal," Liam Donovan, senior political strategist at law firm Bracewell LLP, said. "It's just not something that's going to happen."

According to the nonpartisan policy group E2, 201 of 334 new clean energy projects spurred by the IRA are in Republican congressional districts, creating 77,102 jobs. In August, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) and 17 GOP House colleagues sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson arguing that while the IRA was a "deeply flawed" bill, "prematurely repealing energy tax credits, particularly those which were used to justify investments that already broke ground, would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing."

Rather, tweaks to the IRA — such as repealing the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, which GOP lawmakers have criticized — could be used to help offset extensions to Trump's federal tax overhaul of 2017, which is set to expire in 2025.

Democrats eye 'continued push' on IRA rollout

Meanwhile, a Harris administration with slim Democratic majorities would likely focus its energies elsewhere, implementing and bolstering the IRA while being mostly preoccupied, at least in the first 100 days, with raising the US debt limit and broader tax policy.

"They're going to have to deal with those same looming non-energy related fiscal items that I think are going to dominate the bandwidth that they have," Donovan said.

Against that backdrop, Democrats can be expected to focus on implementing the IRA's federal incentives for clean energy production and investment and advanced manufacturing, said Elizabeth Noll, a senior policy adviser at law firm Holland & Knight.

"If Harris wins, I think there's going to be a continued push to make sure that money is getting into communities with an emphasis on capital formation, workforce development, and community engagement," Noll said in an interview.

Noll, who previously worked on congressional affairs as a deputy assistant secretary at the US Energy Department in the Biden-Harris administration, noted that most of the direct spending included in the IRA's $370 billion for energy and climate measures remains uncommitted. For example, the IRA gave the DOE's Loan Programs Office up to $20 billion in authority to finance energy infrastructure projects, but early funding awards have been slow as the office adds commercialization expertise, Noll said.

"Until three years ago, the Department of Energy was primarily a research agency," she said. "Now it's a deployment agency."

Mary Anne Sullivan, senior regulatory counsel at Hogan Lovells, downplayed the prospect of another round of sweeping energy and climate legislation under a Democratic trifecta. "I don't see that as Kamala Harris' priority area," said Sullivan, who was general counsel for the DOE during the Clinton administration.

At the same time, Sullivan added that Democrats would "see any efforts to cut back on the IRA as a poison pill, unless we're really talking tweaks around the edges."

Bipartisan support for critical minerals

Metals and mining companies are likely to continue to receive some form of support regardless of which party controls the US government. Both sides of the aisle call for lessening dependence on countries such as China by boosting domestic supplies of metals crucial to the energy transition.

During a Sept. 13 speech at the Colorado School of Mines, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) announced the introduction of two bipartisan bills with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) that aim to kickstart "American dominance in critical minerals" by creating new entities and programs within existing government agencies to advance critical minerals development.

"We're behind, and we need to rapidly build a foundation that will be able to launch American dominance in critical minerals," Hickenlooper said in a press release.

Biden has led efforts to open up billions of dollars in potential funding for mining projects through popular legislative efforts such as the IRA and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. Harris has not discussed critical minerals during the early days of her campaign but has expressed support for both laws. A second Trump administration would also likely support the US mining industry. During his term, the administration issued an executive order backing mining and critical minerals projects.