Opinion: The cost of Trump’s economic chaos is being paid by Nevadans

Now President Trump’s war on clean energy and the economic chaos he’s creating are raising costs for Nevadans while damaging our state’s climate resilience and preparedness. Trump’s funding cuts have already threatened at least $18 million in investments that would make our electric grid more resilient to extreme weather events.

Trump’s funding cuts have also threatened a $2 billion conditional loan commitment from the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office to Redwood Materials to build and expand a battery materials campus in McCarran. The facility was expected to create approximately 3,400 good-paying construction jobs and employ approximately 1,600 full-time employees.

Meanwhile, Trump’s hugely unpopular tariffs are expected to raise electricity costs for Nevadans by increasing the price of steel and aluminum needed for energy infrastructure like pipelines and transformers. The threat of tariffs alone increased the price of steel by 30% and aluminum by 15%.

Utility companies will likely pass these costs onto consumers. One in four low-income households in Las Vegas are already “severely” energy-burdened, meaning they spend more than 10% of their income on energy bills.

Instead of helping these energy-burdened Nevada households, the Trump administration recently laid off the entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and now plans to end the program altogether, which helped low-income households pay their heating and cooling bills. In FY2023, Nevada received over $29 million in LIHEAP funding, helping over 12,000 households save on their energy bills.

This fits a pattern of Trump prioritizing billionaires over everyday people. In fact, economists predict that low-income households will bear the brunt of higher costs from tariffs as large retailers like Target, Walmart, and Best Buy plan to increase their prices to compensate for higher costs.

Trump’s tariffs will cost the average American household up to $2,600 per year, make-or-break money for families struggling to put food on the table and cool their homes during sweltering summers.

And that’s just the impact of Trump’s tariffs and his federal funding cuts. He’s also threatened to repeal federal clean energy tax credits that have helped create or advance more than 20,000 good-paying jobs and $15 billion in investment in our state alone.

Repealing the clean energy tax credits will jeopardize these jobs and investments, hurting Nevada’s economy at a time when we already have the highest unemployment rate in the nation. One study found that repealing the tax credits would decrease our state’s GDP by an estimated $95 million in 2030 and $38 million in 2035.

If federal clean energy tax credits are repealed by Trump and congressional Republicans, Nevada households will see an estimated average increase in energy costs of 4.7% in 2026 and 5.1% in 2029. There’s a reason why 21 House Republicans wrote in a March 2025 letter that repealing clean energy tax credits would “increase utility bills the very next day.”

And price hikes aren’t limited to consumer goods and energy bills. American families are already seeing higher home insurance rates because of climate disasters, a crisis Trump’s war on clean energy will only make worse.

There is a deep irony in the man who campaigned on his ability to “fix” the economy, capitalizing on many voters’ frustrations with the price of groceries and everyday items, spending his first 100 days in office tanking the economy by sending the stock market plummeting and energy prices skyrocketing while shrinking the US GDP.

Trump is trying to backtrack, claiming he’s negotiated 200 trade deals (but refusing to say who the deals are with) and blaming Biden for the current state of our economy. But the American people are rightly fed up with Trump’s lies: his rating on the economy recently plunged to the lowest it’s been since Navigator Research started tracking it.

We need to band together in defense of programs like LIHEAP and the federal clean energy tax credits. We need to keep speaking out against Trump’s tariffs and the economic chaos he’s causing. And we need to place blame for rising costs squarely on the one person who bears responsibility: Donald Trump.