By Rep. Braxton Mitchell

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Years after its passage, the real-world consequences of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are clear. Rather than taming consumer prices through the market signals of supply and demand, the law imposed price controls in major sectors like energy and healthcare. By replacing price discovery with central planning, the IRA fueled faster inflation and suppressed innovation. These results were forecast before the IRA was enacted, and now four years later those predictions have proved correct. There’s no reason to allow Biden’s IRA to continue to drive inflation further—it’s time for Congress to repeal it.

In the energy sector, the IRA represents an aggressive experiment in federal central planning. By funneling hundreds of billions of tax dollars into subsidies, tax credits, and government-backed loans, Washington attempted to force an accelerated energy transition by picking technological winners and losers. This couldn’t have come at a worse time with global shocks to energy markets have surging demand for electricity.

By heavily subsidizing intermittent power sources like wind and solar the IRA distorted wholesale electricity markets. Reliable baseload power plants—such as coal, nuclear, and natural gas—are forced into premature retirement because they cannot compete with subsidized electricity that sometimes trades at negative prices.

Despite promises of lower utility costs, retail electricity prices have climbed sharply across the country. Federal subsidies do not eliminate real-world costs; they merely shift them onto taxpayers. True energy security and affordability require market-driven competition where all forms of energy—fossil, nuclear, and renewable—compete on reliability and cost, not federal favor.

While some of the IRA’s energy provisions were repealed or scaled back with 2025’s Big Beautiful Bill, more needs to be done to ensure true competition in our energy markets.

The IRA’s healthcare provisions applied a similar philosophy of government overreach to medical markets, relying on price controls and regulatory cost-shifting rather than genuine structural reform.

The IRA granted Medicare the authority to set maximum prices for top-selling prescription drugs—a policy that is, in practice, a system of mandatory price controls backed by punitive tax penalties. Price controls inevitably diminish returns on research and development. By curtailing the drug pipeline today, the IRA sacrifices the life-saving cures of tomorrow.

While the law capped out-of-pocket prescription costs for seniors at $2,000 per year, it did so by shifting financial liability onto private insurers and pharmacy benefit managers. Predictably, market forces reacted. Insurers have responded to these unmanaged cost shifts by dramatically raising monthly Part D premiums, restricting formularies, and reducing plan choices for seniors. A policy meant to deliver relief has instead increased baseline costs for millions of retirees on fixed incomes.

The Inflation Reduction Act was premised on the belief that government planners in Washington can manage complex, dynamic industries better than private capital and market competition. The results in both energy and healthcare tell a very different story: distorted pricing, reduced investment in core infrastructure, rising consumer expenses, and long-term supply risks.

Repealing the IRA is not about abandoning clean energy or ignoring healthcare affordability. It is about recognizing that lasting affordability and innovation come from market competition, regulatory streamlining, and transparent price signals.

Although inflation has cooled this year to about 3 percent, it’s still above the 2 percent target economists recommend, and affordability remains a top concern for Montanans. Congress needs to take meaningful steps to addressing persistent inflation, and that should start with repealing the IRA’s distortionary tax credits and price controls, returning to policies that empower consumer choice, protect grid reliability, and safeguard American innovation.

Rep. Braxton Mitchell represents House District 5 in the Flathead. He is the Chairman of the House Agricultural Committee.