Adam Forgie: Trump promised jobs, so why is he undermining the ones we already have?

Over the last three years, America has benefited from a clean-energy jobs boom, and now, President Trump and Congress are turning that boom into a bust. You wouldn’t know it, though, if you saw Trump’s speech in Pittsburgh last week. Despite the slew of promises he made about bringing new jobs to our area, he didn’t once mention the fact that his policies — including his repeal of clean-energy incentives — are jeopardizing many of the jobs we already have.

For decades after Westinghouse left Turtle Creek and the East Pittsburgh area, my town and neighboring communities struggled to attract businesses that could create jobs at the same scale. It wasn’t until the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included historic incentives for clean energy, that we were able to see the economic comeback we had long hoped for.

EOS Energy, a manufacturer of zinc batteries, had a small footprint in Turtle Creek, but after the Inflation Reduction Act became law, they were able to expand. They secured a $305 million loan guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Energy, and that guarantee was part of a program expanded dramatically by the IRA.

With this new funding, EOS embarked on Project AMAZE, which not only redeveloped the former Westinghouse site but also brought hundreds of new jobs to the area. These new jobs are paying family-sustaining wages, and many of the workers are unionized through the United Steelworkers.

Again, this is the kind of investment that we had been hoping for but hadn’t been able to attract. It was thanks to the IRA that EOS was able to engineer a manufacturing renaissance in Turtle Creek. And at the same time, Turtle Creek wasn’t the only beneficiary of IRA programs. In small towns throughout the Rust Belt, big investments in clean-energy manufacturing were made owing largely to incentives provided by the IRA.

Many of these towns were like our own: They had been abandoned decades ago by big corporations that had shut down local factories and shipped jobs overseas or to states unfriendly to labor, states where workers could be more easily exploited. The IRA was reversing all that, and then Trump took office and pushed Congress to repeal the IRA for purely political reasons.

Now, we’re seeing all this progress reversed. Companies that were planning to build new clean-energy facilities and create more jobs are canceling construction plans, and some have already announced layoffs. These cancellations and job losses didn’t come out of the blue: They are the direct result of Trump’s policy choices.

This is what happens when you withhold congressionally appropriated funds for clean energy. It’s what happens when you repeal almost all the incentives that spurred the clean-energy jobs boom that we’ve enjoyed in Turtle Creek, a boom enjoyed throughout the Rust Belt and across the United States.

I don’t say this to attack Trump but rather to highlight the emptiness of the rhetoric we heard last week. He came to Pittsburgh touting nothing but promises and announcements of future jobs, and this comes not two weeks after he cut incentives that created real jobs in our area. While he was announcing all those planned future investments, my mind was fixated on one question: What’s going to happen to investments that have already been made in my town and others throughout western Pennsylvania and the Rust Belt?

At best, the outlook is cloudy. Experts say that Trump’s gutting of clean-energy incentives will lead to job losses throughout the sector, but I’m still hoping that these predictions, though well-informed, don’t come true in our area. We’ve waited too long for good times to return, and we don’t want to see our economic comeback cut short because of politics.

Adam Forgie is the mayor of Turtle Creek.