A new report finds the United States’ clean energy buildout is still largely on track despite Trump administration rollbacks, but another shows those same rollbacks have already cost the economy nearly 470,000 jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), adopted in 2025, unwound a number of Biden-era supports for clean energy in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA was accepted as a landmark achievement for U.S. climate policy at the time, with climate advocates framing the OBBBA as a death knell for what would have been a strong trajectory away from fossil fuels across the U.S.

But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) use a glass-half-full or -half-empty metaphor for OBBBA’s impacts on U.S. clean energy. By comparing two projected scenarios of the U.S. power system, one in which the IRA proceeded as planned and the other under the reality of OBBBA, they find the glass is more than half full—that is, more than half of the clean energy trajectory in the first scenario is still projected to be fulfilled.

In the OBBBA scenario, 74% of new clean energy capacity, 71% of new clean generation, and 67% of emissions reductions projected in the IRA scenario during 2025 to 2035 are still on track. Fossil fuel capacity is only 4% higher under OBBBA, and fossil generation is 19% higher.

There are a few reasons for this. For one, while the OBBBA has ended potential clean energy projects, some of the projects promised under the IRA weren’t likely to be completed anyway, or would have been held up by transmission and other supply-side barriers. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry’s gains under OBBBA largely come from extended lifespans of existing facilities—rather than new capacity—and an emphasis on coal, making the U.S. fossil fuel fleet “older, dirtier, and slower to retire.” Gas capacity would actually have been 3% higher without OBBBA.

The researchers acknowledge their assessment is limited and unable to account for real-world dynamics, like executive orders to preserve fossil generation or undermine clean energy. The assessment also does not account for the recent rise in electricity demand brought on by data centres.

Noah Kaufman, a Columbia University economist and senior research scholar, told Heatmap that while the technical analysis makes sense, it cannot reflect how OBBBA undermined the U.S.’ larger strategy for reducing emissions, which he says was the main importance of the IRA.

But another report from Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), a non-partisan U.S. advocacy group, finds that OBBBA cancelled, closed, or downsized 216 major clean energy projects from January 2025 through May 2026. The economy-wide impact of this shift amounts to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, US$55 billion in lost GDP growth, $91 billion lost from cancelled construction work, $12 billion foregone in annual tax revenue, and $31 billion in lost annual wages for permanent workers.

“Add it all up and it’s clear that federal actions to stop clean energy are costing all of us— consumers, businesses and our national economy—big time,” E2 Executive Director Bob Keefe said in a release.