Biden Turns to an Unlikely Ally to Help Protect His Legacy: Republicans

President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised to unravel President Biden’s major legislation when he takes office next month, but Mr. Biden is hoping to salvage his most prized policies with help from an unlikely source: Republicans.

With just weeks left in office, Mr. Biden and his aides have emphasized that his signature economic legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, overwhelmingly benefits Republican districts, in the hopes that Mr. Trump would face blowback from his own party if he repealed it.

The administration is also racing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations to lock in Mr. Biden’s economic agenda, including ramping up domestic manufacturing of clean energy products and semiconductors.

“They are not going to want to undermine those jobs and those businesses that we know for the first time are really strong in so many districts around the country that have been left behind under trickle-down policies,” Lael Brainard, Mr. Biden’s national economic adviser, said in an interview.

Roughly 80 percent of new clean energy manufacturing investments announced since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022 have flowed to Republican congressional districts, according to data from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm.

Mr. Trump and his allies have attacked the legislation, which provides at least $390 billion over 10 years in tax breaks, grants and subsidies for wind and solar power, electric vehicle battery production and other clean energy projects.