Competing energy futures: Industrial policy, energy markets, and the global implications of Biden's IRA and Trump's 2025 fossil-fuel strategy

This article presents a comparative analysis of United States industrial and energy policy under the Biden administration and the subsequent redirection under the Trump administration's 2025 omnibus budget. Under President Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act together constituted a major federal commitment to clean-energy deployment and climate-oriented industrial policy. These measures embedded decarbonization goals into a broader strategy of place-based industrial revival, technological leadership, and supply-chain resilience. By contrast, the Trump administration's 2025 budget adopts a markedly different framework, phasing out many of these provisions and reorienting federal priorities toward expanded fossil-fuel extraction, regulatory flexibility, and tariff-based industrial protection. Rather than treating one approach as normatively superior, the analysis conceptualizes each as a distinct policy paradigm, rooted in different understandings of energy security, competitiveness, regional development, and technological strategy. Using an analytical framework that integrates policy objectives, energy-market instruments, regulatory design, and projected emissions trajectories, the article examines how this policy change has affected investment flows, altered expectations in electricity and fuel markets, and shifted the balance between emerging and incumbent energy technologies. Early evidence from project pipelines and firm announcements suggests a deceleration in some clean-energy deployments and a renewed expansion of oil, gas, and coal activities, although the long-term effects remain contingent on future political cycles and international market conditions. These domestic trends are interpreted in the light of global decarbonization pathways, declining costs of clean technologies, and geoeconomic competition around semiconductors, critical minerals, and clean-energy supply chains. The article argues that movement between a clean-energy industrial strategy and a fossil-fuel-centered model introduces significant uncertainty into U.S. energy markets and complicates planning for both low-carbon and conventional energy investments. It concludes that this volatility has implications not only for long-term innovation and international competitiveness, but also for the evolving architecture of global climate and energy governance, and that a full assessment of each paradigm requires attention to both its advantages and its structural risks.