President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy package seeks to roll back the clean technology tax credits established under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 

As reported by CNN: “The bill could cost the US more than 830,000 jobs that would otherwise be created in the coming years, the think tank Energy Innovation found. The impacted jobs are mostly in construction and manufacturing, building factories and components for EVs, wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other clean energy products — the vast majority of which are in GOP states and districts.”

According to a June 2024 CNN analysis of data from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nearly 78% of Inflation Reduction Act-linked clean energy investments, totaling $268.5 billion, has gone to GOP-held districts, fueling electric vehicle plants, solar factories, and battery storage facilities across the country. 

The House version of the bill, passed last month, would eliminate the majority of clean energy provisions, as Republican leaders continue to falsely frame the IRA as the Green New Deal. According to NBC: “The Senate bill … swiftly repeals clean energy funding passed by a Democratic-led Congress in 2022, including an electric vehicle tax credit, while tilting the playing field back toward fossil fuels.”

Energy sector jobs have long been a preoccupation of Fox News, which has used them to promote fossil fuels and fearmonger about clean energy. 

When then-presidential candidate Joe Biden revealed his climate plan in the summer of 2020, Fox News maintained a steady stream of hysterical and misleading attacks against the proposal, including claiming that it would cause the loss of tens of millions of jobs in the energy sector.  

The network's hand-wringing over jobs in its coverage of the Keystone XL pipeline, the so-called “war on coal,” and fracking during the past two presidential elections stands in stark contrast to its silence in the pending loss of more than 800,000 energy sector jobs.

Keystone XL pipeline

On day one of his administration, President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, reversing Donald Trump's revival of the pipeline in 2017, after it was originally rejected in 2015 by then-President Barack Obama. 

The news prompted Fox News to swiftly dust off oil industry talking points promoting the pipeline, including those falsely heralding the project as a job creator. Over a nine-day period, Fox News rallied against the cancellation and pushed misleading jobs claims about the pipeline 74 times. 

Two days before Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Fox host Sean Hannity told his viewers: 

Even in the initial years of the project, job creation was a core talking point of the fossil fuel industry and its right-wing media champions as they campaigned for the Keystone XL pipeline. 

A 2012 Media Matters study noted that although the pipeline would create just a small number of long-term jobs, the media largely framed the pipeline as a jobs issue. A jobs number quoted by many media outlets — 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs in the U.S. — was based on a flawed analysis funded by TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, and was later revised downward. And the State Department concluded that the project would create 5,000 to 6,000 temporary construction jobs. 

At the time, Fox News pushed even more exaggerated numbers than the company did, claiming in one instance that the pipeline would create “up to a million new high-paying jobs.” Later estimates showed that the pipeline would create only 50 long-term jobs, mostly in Canada, to maintain the pipeline. 

Coal workers

Fox News promoted the narrative, starting with the Obama administration, that Democrats were waging a “war on coal” which would cripple the industry and kill the jobs that depended on it. 

In reality, coal industry jobs peaked and then started to decline in the mid-1980s, and they “fared far worse under the Reagan, Clinton, and George H.W. Bush administrations” than they did under Obama.

In one segment on Fox News in 2012, Martha MacCallum falsely suggested that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency was killing coal jobs: “In the swing-vote territory of eastern Ohio, EPA is something of a dirty word,” she said. “The Environmental Protection Agency blamed for many of the killing of some of the best-paying jobs in the region, mining coal of course.”     

The same claim was later lobbed at presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who was relentlessly attacked for proposing an economic plan to revitalize coal communities that were losing mining jobs. 

At the time, Fox host Laura Ingraham suggested Clinton wanted to “destroy” coal miners' “way of life” because she finds them “repugnant.”

The network also attacked former Biden’s clean energy policies as more of the supposed war on coal.  

But Vox explained why this narrative was always false, noting that “automation in coal mining and competition from other energy sources like natural gas and renewables have caused the sector’s decline; regulations have played only a small role.” 

Despite Trump’s attempt to resuscitate the industry during his first term, those market forces continued to chip away. Marketplace reported in 2024 that “about a quarter of a million miners worked in the American coal mining industry in 1980. That number has dwindled to 43,000.” 

Fracking jobs in Pennsylvania

During the last two presidential campaigns, Fox News has relentlessly tied support for fracking and related jobs in Pennsylvania to electability. 

During the week leading up to the 2020 election, the network overstated the role of the industry in the vote in Pennsylvania, saying it would likely be won or lost depending on how voters interpreted the candidates’ stance on fracking. For Fox News, the importance of fracking in Pennsylvania was, in part, built around a deliberate inflation of how many jobs the industry supports. 

For example, on the October 31, 2020, edition of Fox Report with Jon Scott, the Trump campaign’s Erin Perrine claimed, without any pushback, that Biden “wants to destroy the economy in Pennsylvania by banning fracking, which would cost 600,000 jobs and $261 billion from the Pennsylvania economy.” An explainer from the Breathe Project noted that “the total number of jobs in the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania never reached more than 30,000 over the last five years and is now less with the industry’s economic decline.”

During the 2024 election, Fox again centralized fracking as a top election issue. An analysis by Media Matters found that from July 27 through August 29, Fox News mentioned fracking 544 times, compared to CNN’s 201 mentions and MSNBC’s 30. 

During a September segment on Fox & Friends, host Ainsley Earhardt falsely claimed that the fracking industry supports “423,000 jobs in the state of Pennsylvania.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, gas industry jobs in Pennsylvania numbered about 12,000 in 2023. And earlier in the program, host Lawrence Jones suggested that the oil and gas industry makes job cuts at “election time” based on “who is winning in the election” and “what the policies are,” even though presidential policies have little impact on fracking that is done on state and private land, and evidence shows most energy-related job loss is due to automation in the industry. 

As Politico’s E&E News reported, “The United States is pumping out more oil and gas than any country in history. But even as production soars, oil field employment keeps shrinking.​ The decadelong decline isn’t driven by climate policy or the rise in clean energy. Instead, it’s the result of boom-and-bust cycles — and the fossil fuel industry’s relentless push for efficiency.”

The type of outrage around, and elevation of, energy sector job loss is nowhere to be found in Fox News coverage of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which would end the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy tax credits for wind and solar. While the network has sometimes suggested that some Republicans oppose eliminating the tax credits, none of those segments discussed the loss of jobs and other economic benefits that underpin the hesitation to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act. 

For example, Fox host Will Cain acknowledged that the clean energy tax credits are one of the sticking points for some Republicans who have yet to affirm their support for the package, noting:

But he didn’t mention the projected job losses or the increased energy costs expected. Repealing the tax credits would also increase energy costs for families, as The New York Times recently reported, “by as much as $400 per year within a decade.” None of Fox’s coverage of the clean energy tax credit rollbacks in Trump's tax package mentioned this fact. Yet for years, Fox News figures told its audience that implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act would raise costs for American consumers, while obsessing about energy costs under the Biden administration. 

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Snapstream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “OBBB,” “BBB,” “big beautiful bill,” “budget,” “pend,” “reconciliation bill,” or “tax” in close proximity to the terms “inflation reduction act,” “green new deal,” “green new scam,” “IRA,” “clean energy,” “green subsidy,” “low carbon,” “tax credit,” or “energy” from May 22, 2025, when the House of Representatives passed Trump’s agenda bill, through June 23, 2025.

We included segments, which we defined as instances when the IRA repeal within the budget bill was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of the IRA repeal as part of Trump’s domestic agenda. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a segment on another topic discussed elements of the IRA repeal with one another.

We did not include mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned the IRA repeal within the budget bill without another speaker engaging with the comment.

We then reviewed the identified segments to determine whether any speaker mentioned that repealing the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act would result in massive job loss in the clean energy sector or raise energy costs for consumers.