Behind the Scenes in the Senate, This Scientist Never Gave Up on Passing the Inflation Reduction Act. Now He’s Come Home to Minnesota

The “Never Give Up Caucus” got its name at a time when many people who cared about climate change were ready to give up.

In December of 2021, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) had announced that he would oppose the Build Back Better climate legislation. The bill looked dead.

But in meetings of Senate staff members, Pete Wyckoff struck the tone of a coach preparing his team for a fourth-quarter comeback.

“Things would fall apart,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). “And then Pete would be right there the next day saying, ‘Okay, I think there’s a way that maybe we can start to rebuild this bridge.’” 

Wyckoff worked on her staff as the top adviser on energy issues. She called him “Dr. Pete” because of his background as a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and because it helped to distinguish him from the other two Petes in the office.

Eight months later, after an all-night voting session, he was among the staff members who gathered at the outer edge of the Senate floor to watch the final roll call on a revised version of the bill.

“You have moments in your life that you’re never gonna forget,” Wyckoff said. “I felt like I was witnessing and had been part of a moment in history.”

The legislation, renamed the Inflation Reduction Act, was signed by President Joe Biden on Aug. 16, 2022.

Wyckoff possesses a combination of relentlessness and deep scientific knowledge, traits that you may find in a successful political staffer or scientist, respectively, but don’t often occur in the same person. Congressional staff members exist outside of the spotlight, but he became well-known to the elected officials and energy experts closest to the IRA debate. 

“Pete was simply tenacious,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University who advised on parts of the bill.  “He was one of the few Senate staff who refused to ever give up on the process, no matter how many times the legislation stalled or was declared dead.”

And now Wyckoff has moved onto another big challenge, this one back in Minnesota. Gov. Tim Walz persuaded him to come home to help lead the implementation of one of the most ambitious state energy laws in the country.

Wyckoff is unusual in that he rose to near the top of the world of federal energy policy and then left it behind to work at the state level. But he sees all of his work, from the classroom to various levels of government, as part of the big picture of dealing with the threat of climate change. Indeed, much of his current job involves finding ways for Minnesota to maximize its benefits from the IRA.

On a Friday afternoon in his downtown St. Paul office, he talked about his years in academia, helping to pass the IRA and why he decided to come back to Minnesota.

A Nerdy, Energetic Professor

Wyckoff, 51, grew up in a house steeped in politics and community organizing. His father, also Pete Wyckoff, was a Presbyterian minister who in the 1970s founded the Minnesota Senior Federation, an education and policy organization that worked on behalf of older Minnesotans on issues like prescription drug costs.

“His dad was an icon,” said Michael Noble, the longtime Minnesota environmental advocate, who now works on issues with the younger Wyckoff. “The Senior Federation was an important institution in Minnesota civic history, basically organizing people over 65 to have a voice and influence and a point of view. He was a very, very influential public policy figure.”

The family lived in Falcon Heights, the St. Paul suburb that is home of the Minnesota State Fair.

“I could watch from my bedroom window the fireworks every night, and could hear the bandstand,” said the younger Wyckoff.

He was valedictorian of his high school class and got a Ph.D. in forest ecology from Duke University. His 1999 dissertation was about how changes in the climate affect the growth and mortality of trees in Appalachia. While at Duke, he married Timna Odegaard, a fellow Minnesotan who was getting her Ph.D. in biochemistry. They had met years earlier at a high school science camp and then got reacquainted at Duke.

He and Timna returned to Minnesota in 2001 where both of them found jobs teaching in the biology department at the University of Minnesota-Morris, a small campus of a big state university in a rural county near the border with North Dakota and South Dakota. Pete later founded the college’s environmental studies program.

They raised their daughters there, both of whom are named after trees, Sequoia and Acacia.

Troy Goodnough, the university’s sustainability director, was a friend and colleague of Pete and Timna. He describes Pete as nerdy and energetic, the kind of person who always has a book recommendation.

One of Pete’s ongoing projects was to make his house as energy efficient as possible. He installed insulation himself and then maintained spreadsheets to show the decrease in energy use and savings on utility bills, Goodnough said. If you happened to visit him during this time, there was a good chance he would get out the spreadsheets.

“He’s an entrepreneurial person,” Goodnough said. “That’s really, really special anytime you find people who have that entrepreneurial spirit, and I think that entrepreneurial spirit in many ways defines kind of the arc, the trajectory, through his life.”

Wyckoff also was active in politics, serving as chairman of the county Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the Minnesota affiliate of the national Democratic Party.

In the summer of 2016, Pete and Timna went on one-year sabbaticals and were accepted into a fellowship program with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The program was designed to give scientists experience working on national policy, and also to give the government the benefit of the expertise of scientists.

They had a good life in Morris with secure jobs and good friends. But it would soon become clear that they weren’t coming back.

Working for Franken and Then DOE

Wyckoff made two stops in Washington before he came to work with Smith.

His first job, through the fellowship program, was serving as an aide on environmental and agricultural policy for Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota).

Once his one-year appointment was complete, he re-enrolled in the AAAS program and got assigned to work for the Department of Energy in the office that helps to produce the Climate Science Special Report.

It was 2017, early in the Trump administration, and Wyckoff said that career staff in the office were so far encountering minimal political interference. The office had just produced a report that was “really honest about how bad climate change is,” Wyckoff said.

While he was at the Energy Department, Franken had resigned from his Senate seat amid a sexual misconduct scandal. His successor in 2018 was Smith, a former lieutenant governor, and Wyckoff applied to be her office’s top staff member on energy issues.

He got the job and his family’s life in Washington gained some permanence. Timna moved from a fellowship at the National Science Foundation to the University of Maryland’s bioscience institute.

Smith had no seniority and no prominent roles on standing committees. But she found ways to get into the thick of discussions on climate and clean energy.

One thing she could do was introduce legislation. She was the lead Senate sponsor of the Clean Energy Standard Act of 2019, which would have required utilities and other electricity suppliers to increase their use of carbon-free electricity. She also became a member of Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, a group that Democrats had convened because Republicans had refused to be part of a committee on the topic.

The 2019 measure didn’t come close to becoming law, and the 2020 final recommendations of the special committee had no chance of being adopted in an evenly divided Senate and with a Republican president.

But the bill and the committee report gained significance when Joe Biden took office in January 2021 as a rough outline of what major climate and clean energy legislation might look like.

Smith still didn’t have much seniority, but she and her staff were now part of the conversation of figuring out what Democrats could do on climate during the window when they controlled the White House, the House and the Senate.

The Bill That Died a Thousand Deaths

For a year and a half, Senate Democrats’ push for a climate law came down to gaining the approval of one person: Joe Manchin. The Senate was divided 50-50, which was only a majority for Democrats because Vice President Kamala Harris had the power to cast a tie-breaking vote.

A set of climate and energy policies were part of a much larger proposal called the Build Back Better Act. Then the bill got split in two in 2021, with some of the most popular provisions being passed that November in a measure that became known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Most of the heavy lifting on climate and clean energy was left in the companion bill, still called the Build Back Better Act. Since no Republican senators were willing to support the bill, Democrats had to use the budget reconciliation process, which would allow it to pass with a majority instead of needing 60 votes to clear a Republican filibuster.

What followed was an often-agonizing process in which Manchin insisted that many provisions of the bill be jettisoned or reduced, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) tried to figure out how to get Manchin’s support without watering down the bill so much that other senators, the House or the Biden administration would balk.

Wyckoff said there were several levels to the negotiations. One was Schumer speaking directly with Manchin. Another was senators who got along well with Manchin, including Smith, trying to nudge him toward a compromise. And yet another directly involved Wykoff, with top staff members trying to figure out how they could come up with legislative language that all of their bosses would support.

Adrian Deveny, who worked on environmental policy in Schumer’s office, often took the lead, Wyckoff said.

Smith and Wyckoff remained active in the process even after their main contribution to the bill, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, got cut in October 2021 because of Manchin’s opposition. The program had incentives for utilities to shift toward using more carbon-free energy and penalties for moving too slowly, and Manchin objected to the penalties.

Even after the loss of the program, Wyckoff “worked down to the final buzzer” to work on alternatives in the clean electricity provisions and to build support for the bill among outside groups, said Jenkins, the Princeton professor.

Among the inner circle working on the bill, Wyckoff said, there was a sense through most of 2021 that something would eventually pass, even through several moments when it seemed like Manchin was going to walk away from the negotiations.

But this optimism was shattered in December when Manchin said he was done.

“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go back home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin said in a Dec. 19 statement. “Despite my best efforts, I cannot explain the sweeping Build Back Better Act in West Virginia and I cannot vote to move forward on this mammoth piece of legislation.”

As Wyckoff saw it, Manchin’s statement was a serious setback but not the end.

Around this time, Smith began to call her staff working on the bill the Never Give Up Caucus, and she said Dr. Pete was the group’s founding member. Others would use this name to describe the larger group of lawmakers and staff members who were refusing to give up.

“I think that focus which Pete really provided to all of us was essential,” Smith said. “As you know, the Inflation Reduction Act had many different forms and died a thousand deaths before it finally lived.”

This focus, or “pig-headedness” as Wyckoff describes it, often showed itself through the ways that he would respond to provisions being shot down by coming up with alternatives that still had substantial benefits in terms of reducing carbon emissions. The alternatives included new programs to reduce emissions in heavy industry, and increases in the amount of money available for grants and loans for clean energy projects.

He had a good idea of the emissions implications of various options because of his own background in environmental science and by keeping in contact with people at universities and nonprofits who were advising him and other staff members.

Wyckoff is reluctant to take credit, and said any description of what happened should emphasize that staff members for Schumer and Biden had a solid grasp of the science and the ramifications of different policy options, and were steering the process.

Smith is aware of Wyckoff’s discomfort with taking credit, but she thinks it’s unavoidable on some points. For example, she said he was an important part of making sure that key policies, like “direct pay” of clean energy tax credits, got into the bill. This provision says that nonprofits and government entities, which don’t have tax liability, can directly receive government incentives for investments in clean energy. This is a change from the longtime policy and has been welcomed by organizations that now have much more flexibility in their ability to do projects.

Conversations continued through the spring and summer, but there was little public awareness that Schumer and Manchin were hashing out the details on a revised version. As the talks progressed, even some senators and their staff were no longer in the loop, other than knowing that talks were happening.

Wyckoff remembers going out for drinks with a bunch of staff members who had worked on the bill in July 2022. Most of the people there, including him, didn’t realize Schumer and Manchin were on the cusp of an agreement. He later learned that several of the people there did know, but didn’t say anything for fear of disrupting delicate negotiations.

Manchin issued a statement on July 22 saying that he would support a new bill called the Inflation Reduction Act, which he stressed was different from Build Back Better. It contained much of what had been in Build Back Better, only with concessions to some of Manchin’s priorities, like allowing construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that would go through West Virginia.

“Holy shit,” Smith said on Twitter. “Stunned, but in a good way.”

The legislation provides a projected $391 billion in spending and tax incentives on clean energy, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which makes it the largest and most important climate  bill in U.S. history.

But the bill falls short of what many environmental advocates wanted. In addition to the gas pipeline, the IRA has a big increase in federal incentives for using carbon capture technology, which could lead to billions of dollars being spent to extend the lives of fossil fuel power plants.

The bill also relies almost exclusively on incentives for clean energy deployment, and has no penalties for companies that do little or nothing to move toward cleaner technologies.

Wyckoff agrees with some of the criticism of parts of the IRA and laments the loss of some provisions that were dropped, but thinks it is indisputable that the benefits far outweigh any deficits.

“The modeling and the science is extremely clear: The IRA is a huge net positive,” he said, adding that the bill is the “biggest emissions-reduction package ever passed by any government anywhere.”

Schumer highlighted the benefits and praised the work of Senate staff in a speech right after the bill passed, turning around to face the staff members gathered in the back. Wyckoff remembers feeling a combination of fatigue and elation.

“This bill is going to change America for decades,” Schumer said. “And you did it. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you should never forget how much you have helped to make the world and the globe a better place.”

Coming Home

A few months later, on Election Day, two things happened that would help to determine Wyckoff’s next step. Democrats did better than expected but they still lost enough seats in the U.S. House to lose control of the chamber, which meant divided government for the following two years. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Democrats gained enough seats for a majority in the state Senate to go along with their control of the House and the governor’s office.

Democrats, led by Gov. Tim Walz, were in a position to pass a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill after years of trying to do so under split control.

Walz signed Senate Bill 4 in February, which requires the state to move to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 and contains incentives and programs to help make that happen. It also has provisions with standards for high pay for employers that receive state benefits under the law, and seeks to steer some of the benefits to places where residents are predominantly people of color or have low incomes.

This is the first state climate bill of such magnitude to have passed after the Inflation Reduction Act. The state bill’s authors made sure to include language to maximize how Minnesota could benefit from new federal programs under the IRA. One example is how the state law provides funding for the state to pay a small portion of costs of projects that will be seeking federal aid, a provision written to fulfill federal eligibility requirements.

Walz and other top officials from the state government approached Wyckoff about returning to Minnesota soon after the November election.

He said he chose to make the move because there was an opportunity to do substantial work in Minnesota, while the Senate was unlikely to be able to do much in the short term. He recalls one of his colleagues in Smith’s office joking that he was “chasing blue” and going to wherever Democrats had control.

He started his new job in March. His responsibilities are split between serving in the governor’s office and as an assistant director of the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the office that will oversee most of the implementation of the new law.

Implementation is the hard part, and Wyckoff spends much of his time figuring out how to ramp up staff and organize more than two dozen new programs, which touch just about every part of the economy.

Noble, the longtime Minnesota environmental advocate, said the greatest opportunities in the state law are in the way it works in tandem with the IRA with rules and programs designed to gain access to federal money. This financing could be used to build heavy industry for the clean energy economy, for example, and Wyckoff has the background to make it work.

“Every state should have a Pete Wyckoff,” Noble said.

Wyckoff emphasized that, while he is a key person in this effort, there are many others in state government who are just as involved as he is.

“There are a lot of people who are burning the candle at both ends,” he said.

During the interview, he often referred to the thick stack of papers in front of him—a printout of the state energy law.

Suffice it to say, he has a special appreciation for the challenges of getting the right words in a bill and then passing it.