January 29, 2026

This week in the Echo Chamber:

🚨Read: Why candidates should start making the connection between ICE funding and rising utility bills. Read more.

🎥Watch: Maine Beer Company’s Dan Kleban on why investing in clean energy is a strategy to cut energy costs and grow local jobs while making American businesses more competitive. Watch the full Q&A.

💡Register: Our next Media Training Workshop is Tuesday, February 10. Sign up to learn how to sharpen your message and deliver crisp, quotable soundbites. You can register here. (Price increase Feb. 1).

By Chris Moyer

As the clean energy community fought last summer to salvage tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, some may have missed a massive line item that is more relevant today than ever: $170 billion in new spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).

Those dollars are now being used for “anti-immigrant enforcement, detention, and deportation,” according to the National Immigration Law Center. These funds are fueling the operations making headlines this week, most tragically in Minneapolis following the killing of two U.S. citizens.

The availability of this massive pot of money means that even if Democrats block the latest bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security—which is the talk of the town in Washington this week—the Trump administration’s immigration actions won’t skip a beat. They have plenty of funds available to them to keep their paramilitary force going.

$173 Billion in Clean Energy Funding Now Fuel ICE

So where in the federal budget did that $170 billion come from? Look no further than the IRA’s clean energy tax credits. We thought it was bad enough that the Trump administration and nearly every Republican in Congress was undercutting the clean energy industry, but it’s even worse when you consider how the funds are being allocated instead. If you add up the tax credit terminations and phase outs included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that decimated federal clean energy policy, you can find almost dollar-for-dollar the funds that are powering ICE and CBP today:

That’s a combined $173 billion, from programs that directly incentivize more energy supply—and thus lower voters’ energy costs—and provide direct energy savings for households. It’s just more than the $170 billion for the Trump deportation machine. This is the biggest, most immediate impact of the OBBBA, coming just six months after being signed into law.

Candidates Should Connect the Dots Between ICE and Energy Affordability

Of course, budget dollars are fungible and the money for ICE and CPB didn’t technically come from any one source. However, that shouldn’t get in the way of an effective message. Some members of Congress have made the connection between ICE funding and the recent expiration of health insurance subsidies. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez savvily framed the issue this way: “The cuts to your health care are what's paying for ICE to be doing this. Understand how these dots connect. You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.”

The same argument is available to candidates when it comes to energy affordability. Indeed, energy affordability affects even more voters than health care. Not everyone relies on Obamacare subsidies to afford health insurance, but nearly everyone—homeowners and renters alike—pay an electric bill each month.

Candidates should start making the connection between ICE funding and rising utility bills. They should say something like this: “The Trump administration cut funding for clean, affordable energy that could have brought down your electric bills so they instead could fund ICE’s terrorization of American cities and killing of US citizens.”

Republicans facing voters this year were already on their heels in large part due to voters’ energy affordability concerns. Cost-of-living remains their top concern, and the party in power today is viewed as insufficiently addressing high prices. Rising utility bills fall squarely into this bucket.

Now, anyone running for office against the party controlling Washington today has another powerful message at their disposal. They should use it.

Whether you’re facing a policy podcast, a skeptical reporter, or a high-stakes panel discussion, you cannot afford to miss the opportunity to communicate your core message. Echo Communications Advisors’ Media Training Workshop gives spokespeople in clean energy and climate tech the tools to develop and deliver messages with confidence.

What We’ll Accomplish: In this 60-minute, fast-paced workshop, you will learn to sharpen your message, handle tough questions, and deliver crisp, quotable soundbites—on camera and off. This session is designed for executives and advocates who want to ensure their values and strategy come through clearly and credibly in every public engagement.

Who: Executives, comms leads, and advocates in climate and clean energy.
When: Tuesday, February 10, 2026 @ 12pm ET.
Where: Virtual.
Fee: $99 per participant (Price increases Feb. 1).

Dan Kleban, co-founder of Maine Beer Company, is proving that doing what’s right is more than a motto, but actually it’s a competitive advantage. From leveraging solar panels to build brand loyalty to launching a pragmatic policy blueprint, Kleban argues that the clean energy transition isn't about sacrifice; it's about lower bills, local jobs, and winning the global race.

Catch up on the highlights below and watch the full interview here.

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On the philosophy behind Maine Beer Company:

“My brother and I kind of, looked around and at what was going on, we said, there's gotta be a better way to run an economy and a business. And so we started Maine Beer Company with a pretty simple motto of ‘Do What's Right’... We were gonna invest in our communities and maybe most appropriate for this conversation is we were gonna be part of a climate solution and not part of the climate problem.”

On why solar is a brand investment:

“It's a fairly busy road that we operate on that I get comments out in the community like, ‘wow, like, holy crap, like that's a pretty impressive solar array for you guys.’ And I can't help but think that that it engendered goodwill to our brand. I think, and at the end of the day, it's hard to quantify, obviously, but I'm pretty certain we sold more beer because we made that investment decision. So it wasn't just about the energy savings. It was also about just showing what kind of company you were and that you gave a shit.”

On the core of his new policy blueprint:

“I put out this blueprint because I think this is really an issue about lowering energy bills, it's about affordability for people. Electrons that come from wind and solar are the cheapest ones we're going to find. And it's about jobs. It's about creating good paying jobs here in the United States. These are jobs that can't be AI'd away in most cases.”

On the need for permitting reform:

“At the end of the day, I think we just need to make sure that we kind of have a neutral kind of approach that doesn't prohibit certain energy sources or artificially benefit other sources over another. But at the end of the day, we need to make sure that things are, projects are brought online, they're brought on quickly. And when they're brought on or when a promise is made by government that gives the green light to a developer that the government can't go back. No, business, small or big, is going to make an investment decision if they know that at any given moment, the rug could be pulled out from under them.”

On why candidates must focus on pocketbook issues:

“I think for too many years, decades actually, something that's annoyed me as a small business owner that's trying to be out there proselytizing the benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy, is that it was all about sacrifice. The messaging was: you had to give something up in order to make you know, the planet better, or, you know, it was going to be more expensive for you. That's just not true. I think we have to talk in terms of any candidates who are able to talk in terms of how this transition is going to lower electricity bills for folks, that this is going to create jobs in their backyard.”

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