This week, Sloan Speck (Colorado, Google Scholar) reviews a new work by Roberta F. Mann (Oregon, SSRN) & Tracey M. Roberts (Samford, Google Scholar), The Long and Winding Road: The Inflation Reduction Act’s Energy and Environmental Tax Credits, 78 Nat’l Tax J. 223 (2025) (download here).

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 introduced a generational suite of energy and environmental tax credits. Then, in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled back many of these credits, most notably for consumers, in an explicitly partisan rebuke of the IRA’s ambitious climate change goals. In this context, it’s worth revisiting Roberta Mann and Tracey Roberts’s recent National Tax Journal article, The Long and Winding Road: The Inflation Reduction Act’s Energy and Environmental Tax Credits, which details the history and political economy of these types of tax benefits to show both continuity and change in the IRA’s pathbreaking package.

From the perspective of Mann and Roberts’s insightful article, the OBBBA may illustrate yet another kink in the United States’ uneven path toward—and often-ambivalent relationship with—environmental stewardship. Published before the OBBBA, Mann and Roberts’s article treats the IRA’s tax credits not as a self-contained policy program, but as an episode in a longer story about the American state, the political economy of energy, and the tax system’s peculiar capacity to do public work indirectly. The OBBBA simply is the next chapter in this tale. More crucially, however, Mann and Roberts give a foundation for understanding the OBBBA as a predictable reversion to the policy mean—as a legislative move that preserves important parts of the IRA’s legacy while reinscribing the fiscal caution, entrenched interests, and political constraints that have characterized U.S. environmental policy since the 1970s.

Mann and Roberts’s article complicates the well-travelled (and triumphalist) premise that the IRA simply represents “the largest investment in reducing carbon pollution in U.S. history.” Through a detailed political and institutional history of how Congress has routed U.S. energy policy through the tax system, Mann and Roberts demonstrate compellingly that the IRA did less to break with the past and more to drag that past into the present. From durable benefits for fossil-fuel development to time-limited renewable-energy subsidies, tax expenditures have offered a well-traveled alternative to direct regulation and spending in environmental policy—and largely have displaced cleaner Pigouvian responses such as carbon taxes. Although the IRA’s expansive mix of production, investment, and consumer credits improved equity and efficiency outcomes, Mann and Roberts are candid that the IRA’s credits are less effective than a ground-up rethinking of U.S. climate policy instruments. The tax trench deepens, even as IRA innovations (such as direct pay to tax-exempt and governmental participants, outcome-oriented rather than modality-oriented benefits, and tailored place-based incentives) make energy and environmental credits more attractive.

The OBBBA, I think, sheds further light on the IRA’s credit regime, both in terms of Mann and Roberts’s long arc of environmental tax benefits and the structural innovations in the landmark law. By and large, the OBBBA didn’t end the IRA’s direct pay and credit transferability rules, or bonus credits for energy communities, or the technology-neutral nature of the § 45Y and § 48E credits. (Indeed, the OBBBA expanded bonus credits to nuclear energy facilities and imposed new prohibited foreign entity rules that doubled down on the IRA’s domestic emphasis and energy policy’s longstanding national-security valence.) What the OBBBA did was accelerate the expiration of many IRA tax credits, often by five or more years. Essentially, the OBBBA returned, with a twist, to the baseline legislative pattern of lapse and (potential) reauthorization that characterized decades of pre-IRA policy. In this way, the OBBBA emphasizes a point latent in Mann and Roberts’s analysis: the IRA’s most meaningful innovation may have been the long statutory duration of its credit regime, and the durability of this temporal innovation—and not the IRA’s other bells and whistles—should take center stage in evaluations of the legislation.

Moreover, the OBBBA changed tax rules outside of the credit regime that may undercut the IRA’s direct pay and transferability innovations. Mann and Roberts rightly stress the pre-IRA problem: nonrefundable and nontransferable credits pushed promoters towards complicated tax-equity structures, including partnership flips and sale-leasebacks, in order to monetize tax benefits. The IRA eased some—but not all—of these transaction costs. Movable credits matter, but tax ownership continues to determine deductions for depreciation and interest expense. These deduction-driven benefits are part of credit deals’ capital stacks, and elaborate and opaque partnership arrangements remain pervasive post-IRA. Then, the OBBBA enhanced expensing and loosened the strictures of § 163(j), which applies particularly stringently to partnerships. Any post-OBBBA (re)emphasis on non-credit tax benefits both has simplification effects and rebalances dealmaking power away from public and nonprofit promoters and towards the private accommodation parties conventionally associated with these types of transactions.

Finally, the OBBBA’s preservation of many of the IRA’s structural innovations reiterates Mann and Roberts’s point that, in the United States, environmental tax law exhibits a high degree of path dependency. The IRA leveraged familiar fiscal technologies for climate-transition goals, while navigating the political, interest-group, and institutional constraints that have plagued energy policy for decades. But these limitations are tempered by the persistence of incremental improvements post-OBBBA. Under Mann and Roberts’s long view of U.S. tax and environmental policy, the IRA carries some darker clouds, while the OBBBA might yield some sunshine. The counterargument, of course, is that policymakers can’t equivocate or meander in light of the climatological clock that’s currently ticking. But as Mann and Roberts demonstrate, holistic reform may prove impossible within current constraints, leaving stepwise change as the most promising—or the only—path forward.

Overall, Mann and Roberts’s article gives a rich and nuanced treatment of the IRA’s vaunted tax credit regime. Their article powerfully explains why the IRA took the form it did, with implications outside of environmental policy for the tax system’s role as a vehicle for state action. Legal scholars, political scientists, and policymakers all should find Mann and Roberts’s article of exceptional interest.

Here is the rest of this week’s SSRN Tax Roundup:

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan), Citizenship Taxation and Nationality Law, U. Mich. Law & Econ. Rsch. Paper (Apr. 1, 2026)

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan), Taxation and Birthright Citizenship, U. Mich. Law & Econ. Rsch. Paper (Mar. 31, 2026)

Yariv Brauner (Florida), Income and Territory: A Purpose-Based Reform of Income Sourcing Rules (Mar. 12, 2026)

Sarah Daxenberger (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Frank Hechtner (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) & Marius Weiß (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Tax Compliance Costs of Pillar Two—A Qualitative Study (Mar. 9, 2026)

William Demitia (U. Ghana), A Review of Ghana’s Thin Capitalisation Rule as an Anti-Corporate Tax Base Erosion Tool, 23 Knust L.J. 255 (2025)

Victory Ejim (Independent), From Compliance to Strategy: The CFO’s Playbook for Leveraging Nigeria’s Integrated Tax and Revenue Laws Reforms (Feb. 4, 2026)

Philip Hackney (Pittsburgh), Arts Tax Policy: Democracy or Plutocracy?, 60 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026)

Kathryn Kisska-Schulze (Clemson, Coll. Bus.) & Adam Epstein (Central Mich., Dept. Fin. & L.), Tax Equity in the Era of Paid College Athletes (Mar. 25, 2026)

Doron Narotzki (Akron, Daverio Sch. Acct.), Shadow Tariffs and the Executive Volatility Regime, Wash. U. L. Rev. Online (forthcoming 2026)

Rainer Niemann (U. Graz, Ctr. For Acct. Rsch.) & Anna Rohlfing-Bastian (Goethe U. Frankfurt), Carbon Taxes and ESG Compensation, TRR 266 Acct. for Transparency Working Paper Series No. 227

Seth Oranburg (New Hampshire), Exclusive Inclusion: How University Governance Produces the Discrimination It Promises to Prevent (Mar. 15, 2026)

Prafula Pearce (Edith Cowan U., Sch. Bus. & L.), Lex Fullarton (Curtin U.) & Joshua Aston (Edith Cowan U., Sch. Bus. & L.), The ECU Tax Clinic Template for Regional and Remote Taxpayer Assistance 27 J. Austl. Tax’n 58 (2025)

Prafula Pearce (Edith Cowan U., Sch. Bus. & L.), Understanding the Difficulties in Providing Tax Services to Remote Communities in Western Australia and Northern Territory, 27 J. Austl. Tax’n 4 (2025)

Brakeyshia Samms (Inst. on Tax’n & Econ. Pol’y) & Francine J. Lipman (UNLV), The “Black Women Best” Framework: Intergenerational Transfer Taxes and the Racial Wealth Gap, 23 Pitt. Tax Rev. 1 (2026)

Laura Snyder (Assn. of Am. Resident Overseas), Taxpayer Advocate to IRS: Your Task Is To Administer a Worldwide Tax System. Do It, 190 Tax Notes Fed. 1281 (Feb. 23, 2026).

Bret Wells (Houston) & Clint Wallace (South Carolina), Schanz Before Haig and Simons (Mar. 27, 2026)

Jian (Buck) Xiao (Hall Chadwick), A Critical Analysis and Evaluation of US And Australian Partnership Taxation Rules and their Intersection—Second Instalment, 29 Tax Specialist 117 (2026)

William Yoder (UNC, Kenan-Flagler Bus. Sch.), Do Taxes or Age Explain Retail Dividend Clienteles? (Mar. 31, 2026)