Corruption in Congress is padding pockets, spiking the state's electric bills
By: Cammie Croft
Your Turn
Guest columnist
..... Energy prices are crushing us in New Jersey, just like everywhere else in this country - 77 million households now say they have to choose between basic necessities like medicine or food to pay their energy bills. Small businesses are struggling just to keep the lights on.
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But instead of helping, congress has made it much worse by trying to destroy the cheapest and easiest-to-build sources of energy, demanding we exclusively use expensive gas and coal to appease members' donors.
..... This is a classic case of what's wrong with Washington, were we know what the solutions, but we can't have them because the highest bidders - in this case the oil and gas lobbies - are still getting rich off the broken status quo. And it's harming our state: We just got hit with a 20% increase in electricity bills in June, [2025] and thanks to the Republican budgets they could soar another 33% by 2035.
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I know firsthand how President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are driving our costs higher, because I helped build an organizational to help Cameroonians save on their electric bills through energy efficiency upgrades. That solution used to have bipartisan, commonsense support.
..... But by eliminating wasted household energy, we were interfering with the padded profits of Trump's energy industry donors, and Trump unleashed every attack he could think of to stop us form helping Americans save money - from lies in his State of the Union to phony investigations where senior Justice Department officials resigned rather than play along.
..... I recently left the organization I loved, and now I'm a mom here in Montclair. The cost of heating and cooling our homes was high, but federal programs to help us ad much cheaper, cleaner energy to the grid were starting to work, creating jobs and promising relief to weary ratepayers. In fact, last year, [2024] 9.4% of new energy capacity nationwide came form wind batteries that store their energy rain or shine.
..... But the oil and gas lobbies feel threatened by having real competition for the first time. So Trump and Republicans in Congress sided with donors, dismissing the "all of the above" energy approach that they promised, taking a "sledgehammer" to American wind and solar companies.
..... This is madness: Having real competition is what capitalism is all about, and these are the only energy sources that can scale at the pace we need, where AI and data centers are driving up energy demand exponentially. The only solution to high energy bills is to dramatically expand clean energy sources like wind and solar, along with long-term investment in new nuclear plants, as Representative Milie Sherrill has advocated for New Jersey.
How will Washington's retreat from clean energy affect NJ?
..... But Washington did the opposite. So how will this affect us?
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First, the average Jersey family's energy bill will go up an extra $110 next year [2026] and $180 by 2030. We're not alone in the Garden State - one of every six households nationwide is behind on their energy bills. with tariffs stretching family budgets, even more.
..... Second, since Trump's assured war on clean energy began, more than 80,000 clean energy jobs have been destroyed nationwide. New Jersey stand to sloe out on 10,000 jobs by 2030 good jobs producing affordable energy for all of us, from New Jersey entrepreneurs to the union members building projects to the diner waitresses who serve them breakfast.
..... third, record heat waves and new data centers are straining our electric grid, Blackouts and brownouts are on the rise. We had to endure 100 major outages per year between 2019 and 2023. Congress picked the dumbest possible time to shrink, not expand, our capacity to generate electricity.
We need to invest in energy generation in the Garden State
..... The Trump administration has poured salt in the wounds for low-income households, gutting the bipartisan LIHEAP energy assistance that nearly a quarter-million New Jersey households depend on. And, of course, the Republican budget bill will also kick 17 million people off of Medicaid and leave 800,000 in New jersey alone without health insurance.
..... Instead of tearing things down, we need to build, build build, including huge investments in clean energy and commonsense efficiency tools. it means getting new energy on the grid without yeasts of delay, and utility companies doing their part to connect new projects - Sherrill's pledge to freeze rates is the right response when they don't. It certainly doesn't mean absurd bans on wind power, as Trump and now his puppet Jack Ciattarelli have proposed.
..... Above all, it means policies guided by lowering costs for families instead of increasing profits for donors. We need new ideas and new urgency, not the same old corruption that Trump and Republicans in Congress have added to our electric bills.
..... Cammie Croft is a Democratic candidate for New Jersey's 11th District in the U.S. House and former vice president of Rewiring America.