In the past few days, I’ve started to wonder whether much of the Trump administration’s energy agenda is dead, and Trump officials just don’t realize it yet.
Trump dreamed of a new U.S. mining bonanza. But his tariffs are slowing economic activity and raising equipment costs, silencing that boom.
Trump called for the American oil industry to “drill, baby, drill.” But his trade agenda — plus his demand that OPEC increase its oil production — is smothering the Texas oil patch. The president’s trade war on China is also backfiring on America’s oil and gas producers, who export huge amounts of plastic feedstocks to that country.
Now Trump’s plan to revive nuclear energy is in peril, too — and the culprit, again, is the president’s own policies.
The Trump administration is planning to hollow out a Department of Energy office that has been central to financing almost every new U.S. nuclear project this century. That could kill the federal government’s ability to act as a financial backstop for new nuclear projects, which has been critical to the success of every recent American nuclear project.
It’s not clear that Trump officials realize what they’re doing yet — or that they care. (Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has been out of the country for much of the relevant period.) And while a coalition of centrist, conservative, and pro-nuclear groups is sounding the alarm, I’m not sure Trump officials are going to realize what they’re doing with enough time to stop it.
The long-held dream of a U.S. nuclear renaissance
For decades now, reviving nuclear energy has been a big aim of Republican energy policy. Republican lawmakers passed nuclear-friendly bills in Congress, and Republican presidents tried to advance pro-nuclear policies.
Nuclear was central to the Trump 2024 campaign, too. Many Trump-aligned figures — including Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance — suggested that the United States should significantly expand its nuclear fleet. (Vance mentioned nuclear during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s influential podcast and in the vice presidential debate.)
Then, on his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order seeking to loosen rules holding back nuclear energy. The Department of Energy, in turn, has lifted up the revival of nuclear energy as one of its goals for Trump’s second term.
“America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now,” Wright declared in late March, when he announced new funding for small modular reactors.
Bringing back nuclear power is the explicit goal. But when it comes to energy policy, announcing an aim is not the same as getting it done. Just ask the Biden administration, which struggled to build EV chargers despite $7.5 billion in funding.
It will take a lot of work to execute a project as big and complex as building new nuclear reactors across the United States, and simply wanting to do it will not make it happen.
That’s what the Trump administration may not understand.
DOGE is attacking the government’s key financial backstop for nuclear
The United States has started only four new nuclear projects this century. All but one of those efforts have received — or are now in the process of applying for — a federal loan guarantee by the Loan Programs Office, the Energy Department’s in-house bank.
The Loan Programs Office, or LPO, provides long-term financing to major American clean energy and industrial projects. The LPO is a small office — just a few hundred people — but it was a vital tool of the Biden administration’s clean-energy industrial strategy. The first Trump administration also used it to boost nuclear energy. (It’s helped Trump allies, too: Back in 2010, it made an early loan to build Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.)
The LPO has been the key guarantor for every new U.S. nuclear project this century, save one:
- The LPO provided more than $12 billion in loan guarantees to build two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. This includes more than $3 billion provided by the first Trump administration.
- The LPO made a more than $1.5 billion loan guarantee to reopen the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan — the first program in U.S. history to bring a shuttered nuclear plant back online.
- The LPO is also considering a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to revive another shuttered reactor, Three Mile Island, to serve AI data centers.
The only new nuclear project this century the LPO did not support is the new reactor at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Tennessee, which opened in 2016. But that project had the federal government’s backing through a different avenue: The facility is owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned power utility.
Despite that track record, commissars at the Department of Government Efficiency are now trying to gut LPO. The Musk-led efficiency team is seeking to slash more than half of the office’s staff, Heatmap News reported last week.
Seemingly seeking to ease those cuts, Energy Department officials have sought to winnow down the office’s headcount on their own. Energy Department officials have encouraged as many LPO employees as possible to accept an early resignation program under which federal employees can resign this month and get paid through September.
About half of Loan Programs Office employees have asked to resign from their positions, according to one person who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly. The Department of Energy told Heatmap News last week that it could reject some employees’ early resignation requests.
On Monday, a coalition of centrist, conservative, and pro-nuclear groups wrote a letter to Energy Secretary Wright urging him to “ensure LPO remains fully equipped to carry out its mission.”
The letter says that the LPO could lose so much of its staff — many of whom have special technical or scientific training — that it can no longer support development of new nuclear reactors, fossil power plants, or mineral projects.
“The office’s ability to underwrite and monitor large-scale energy projects depends on specialized technical staff and institutional capacity. Without them, the federal government risks slowing or stalling the diverse mix of energy projects that serve national priorities,” the letter says.
The letter’s signatories include the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s main trade group. Other signatories include American Compass, a Trump-aligned industrial policy group; Oklo, a nuclear energy company; and the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environmental group.
Losing the nuclear window
The letter is the strongest warning yet that the Trump administration could be blowing its nuclear agenda. In doing so, the administration will lose a rare window of opportunity to make progress on nuclear energy.
Americans are looking more favorably on nuclear energy. Earlier this month, a new Gallup poll found that the U.S. public’s support for nuclear energy has hit 61% — just one percentage point short of its all-time high.That has come as Democratic politicians — especially in swing states — have become more supportive of nuclear energy. As I wrote last year, Democratic candidates at the Senate and presidential level proposed pro-nuclear policies in the last election that until recently would have been unthinkable. At the same time, Republicans have maintained their support of nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy occupies a curious position in American politics. Think about it for a second. The country’s 54 commercially operating nuclear power plants are its largest source of zero-carbon electricity, generating more power than all of America’s wind and solar farms, combined. Second, nuclear power requires a large workforce of college-educated professionals, and those workers are unionized at much higher rates than the private workforce. Finally, nuclear power has never succeeded anywhere — not in the United States, not in France or Japan, and not in Russia or China — without huge amounts of public subsidy.
We are talking about a type of energy that is climate-friendly, that helps build a college-educated and unionized workforce, and that basically always requires government support. Yet nuclear energy has historically been beloved by Republicans and hated by Democrats.
I’m not convinced that will be the case for long — one of the two major parties might turn on nuclear energy in the next few years, driven either by political polarization or by the exigencies of events. (The American public’s support of nuclear power reached its all-time high in 2010, on the eve of the Fukushima disaster.)
Now might be the best window to build nuclear energy in this generation. Democrats in Congress — and the Trump administration — both say they want to do it. But the Trump administration is blowing it.
ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
