Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act approved last year by Democratic policymakers, the Biden/Harris administration announced an important investment a few months ago: $500 million will be spent to help General Motors convert a Cadillac plant in Lansing, Michigan, into a facility that will produce electric vehicles.
As HuffPost explained, it’s part of a larger $1.7 billion program “aimed at revamping 11 auto plants to make electric cars or components of them as part of the Joe Biden administration’s effort to speed up the conversion of Americans’ internal combustion-powered cars to more efficient and reliable electric ones.”
The question, of course, is what would happen to these investments in the event Donald Trump wins the election.
The answer is far from certain: Not only has the former Republican president vowed to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, he’s also effectively running on an anti-climate platform.
With this in mind, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, was asked last week whether the $500 million investment in Michigan would be revoked after the election. The Ohio Republican refused to give a straight answer.
This week, as The Detroit News reported, Vance said something a little different.
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance campaigned Tuesday in Detroit, where he described $500 million that the federal government is providing to convert a General Motors plant in Michigan for electric vehicles as “table scraps” compared with larger job losses he contends could be on the horizon.
In fairness, the senator did say that he and Trump “want to invest in Michigan auto workers as much as possible,” which was vague and unhelpful. But he also nevertheless characterized the pending $500 million investment — with several hundred jobs on the line — as “table scraps.”
That hardly inspired confidence in the future of the project, and it didn’t take long for Democrats to seize on this, as evidenced by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s remarks at an event in Michigan.
Gov. Walz: JD Vance just said if he and Trump win they might cancel Biden-Harris’ $500 million investment in a Michigan auto plant. He even called those jobs ’table scraps’. Tell that to 650 families who feed their families with those ‘table scrap’ jobs pic.twitter.com/UQJ2yhkn0z








