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Politico
2 days ago
- Business
- Politico
Trump's nuclear vision collides with Trump's actual policies
With help from Gabby Miller With a slate of splashy executive orders Friday, president Donald Trump promised to 'usher in a nuclear energy renaissance …providing a path forward for nuclear innovation.' By streamlining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, exploring building reactors on federal land and ordering the quadrupling of the U.S.' nuclear energy capacity, the administration moved to, as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement, 'unshackle our civil nuclear energy industry and ensure it can meet this critical moment.' That all should be music to the ears of the burgeoning pro-nuclear revival, which has seen energy and infrastructure wonks across the political spectrum advocate for nuclear energy as a cleaner, scalable alternative to fossil fuels. But it also raises a question that is becoming familiar in the second Trump administration: How is this all supposed to happen amid Trump's radical cutbacks to research — to say nothing of government oversight or safety rules? As with similar administration goals on supercomputing, or innovation, or artificial intelligence, these big promises aren't happening in a policy vacuum. They're happening amid an all-fronts rollback of America's massive research and regulation infrastructure. Even some of those cheering the nuclear EOs are worried that Trump's bone-deep cuts to the federal government could doom the nuclear revival before it kicks off. The Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit cheerleader for advanced nuclear reactor development, took the moment to urge GOP-controlled Washington to 'adequately resource and staff DOE to meet this moment.' President and CEO Judi Greenwald wrote in a statement that Trump's cuts — actual and proposed — at the Department of Energy 'undermine the Department's efforts and make it harder to implement these executive orders.' The progressive pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute, in its own response to the EOs, enumerated the new staffing levels it would require just to license new plants, and worried that the EOs focused on regulatory overhaul 'threaten to reduce the NRC's workforce, independence, and resources.' Many of these nuclear boosters have noted — echoing the Secretary of Energy himself, in a hearing last week — that continued nuclear innovation could hinge on Congress continuing to fund the Loan Programs Office, an increasingly high-profile sub-office of the DOE responsible for funding experimental nuclear projects. Thomas Hochman, infrastructure director at the Foundation for American Innovation, in a conversation with POLITICO claimed some momentum for the pro-nuclear cadre's cause of the moment, saying, 'if things go the right way in Congress [the LPO] will continue to have authority.' Some nuclear-watchers are more explicitly worried that the EOs could backfire — specifically, that the Trump administration's anti-bureaucratic mission of overhauling the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could lead to the kind of disaster that would threaten the fragile new bipartisan consensus around nuclear power. In an op-ed for The Hill published this morning, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite argued that the ADVANCE Act, passed in 2024, has already gone a long way toward overhauling licensing processes for new reactors and that the Trump administration risks gilding the lily. 'What Americans need is confidence that any nuclear power plant built and operated in the U.S. is safe, secure and ultimately beneficial to American and host community prosperity,' Dalton and Levite wrote, while concluding 'the net result of these executive orders, coupled with the additional impact of other administration actions to reform governmental regulatory processes to align with White House policies, is to risk public trust in nuclear energy.' The nuclear revival has largely been inspired by the massive thirst for energy that cutting-edge technologies carry with them, from enormous AI data centers to semiconductor manufacturing to even cryptocurrency mining. Nuclear is an attractive, relatively clean option for solving these problems, with an attractive retrofuturist sheen to boot. It's always been a risky bet, though, given its unique safety concerns and steep costs — and that was in the pre-Trump days of relative policy stability. As even its allies have pointed out, the Trump administration's lurching, unpredictable approach — taking big, sometimes contradictory swings at issues of 'American greatness' — could backfire in a major way, especially when public safety is a factor. But with so much wind at their sails, and relatively few bipartisan, technocratic wins to be had in the early Trump era, nuclear supporters are still willing to be cautiously optimistic. 'I don't think any of that stuff is sort of like, you know, so complex as to be unachievable,' Hochman said. 'The worst possible outcome is just that nothing really gets done.' Gabby Miller contributed to this report. doge as law Congress could finally attempt to enshrine some of DOGE's budget cuts into law. POLITICO's Meredith Lee Hill and Jennifer Scholtes reported today that the White House plans to send a 'small package of spending cuts' to Congress next week, formalizing $9.4 billion of DOGE's identified budget cuts. Two anonymous Republicans said the cuts will target NPR, PBS and the foreign aid agencies that the Trump administration has already cut deeply. The package will comprise only a portion of the $1.6 trillion in yearly discretionary spending planned by Congress, and it falls far short of the trillions of dollars Elon Musk promised to cut from the federal budget with DOGE. It's no guarantee that even these reductions will pass: Cuts to public media have proved anathema to many Republicans in the past, and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told POLITICO 'Nebraska public media does a good job so I'm not inclined … I'll consider it.' fda ai chief The Food and Drug Administration has a new AI chief. POLITICO's Ruth Reader reported Tuesday for Pro subscribers that Shantanu Nundy, physician and former chief medical officer for care navigator Accolade Health, will spearhead AI policy at the FDA. Nundy is a primary care physician in Virginia, and has worked for years in digital health startups. Prior to his work at Accolade Health, he directed the nonprofit arm of the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Human Diagnosis Project, which helped doctors provide expertise to one another. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
NDTV
05-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Is The US In A Constitutional Crisis?
Almost a month into Trump 2.0, with Trump's 'muzzle velocity' of Executive Orders (EOs) spreading more disquiet than even the worst-case scenarios had envisaged, the question increasingly looming among US watchers is whether the US is in a constitutional crisis. The US Constitution has stood out for its clear separation of powers among the three arms of the government: The executive (the elected President), the legislature (House and Senate), and the courts. But the trampling that the legislature has been subjected to by the Trump executive threatens to upend the constitutional system of checks and balances. Trump's flurry of EOs have targeted several offices and agencies established by Congress - USAID being the most prominent and well-known - and have terminated spending mandated by Congress, in executive overreach. Predictably, the many afflicted by the EOs have gone to court, and predictably again, the courts have stayed the execution of many of the EOs. Until now, the Trump administration has either abided by the court's restraints or submitted that it would like the court to review its order - in short, enter the process of thrashing the issue out in court. But Vice President JD Vance threw a 'curve ball' by tweeting that just as no court would try to tell a General how to run a war, courts do not have the right to curb the 'legitimate' powers of the executive. The Constitution's founders had not foreseen a situation where the polity would be so polarised that the Congress and Senate would lose sight of their constitutional salience. Rare is the legislator who has voted across party lines in recent years; under the vengeful Trump, rarer still. Hence the refrain: with Trump rampant, and the prospect very real that court orders could be disregarded or defied, how far is the US from a constitutional crisis? The Trump administration's mission is to restore the executive's powers which, it argues, were curbed post-Watergate by the weakened Nixon presidency. His two chief point men to effect this mission are Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. The OMB is the White House's gatekeeper, overseeing the actual spending of the programs passed by Congress. Vought is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian Conservative who believes it is his Christian duty to re-establish the primacy of the executive. The congressional outlays, Vought argues, were meant to be a ceiling; instead, they have become a floor. Federal bureaucracy in line of fire Worse, the Federal bureaucracy, he charges, has become a 'fourth branch,' an unelected mass of 2.4 million Federal employees, who are out of control. They are unaccountable and they can't be fired. They have to be brought to heel. Vought was quoted as saying at a conference in 2023: 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work... We want to put them in trauma.' Understandably then, a recent article in The Atlantic on 'How Hitler Dismantled Democracy in 53 Days in Germany' by Timothy Ryback, a historian who has written several books on Hitler's Germany, stayed in the magazine's 'Most Read' list for weeks on end. And a reading of 'Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run The World' by the vastly experienced and knowledgeable Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum, was almost delicious in the many moments of irony it evoked. The playbook followed by MAGA devotees to demonise USAID followed exactly the playbook used by propagandists of Russia and China, as spelled out by Applebaum, in their repeated attacks on US democracy. In the USAID case, it all began at 9 am on February 5 when an independent journalist posted an unsubstantiated claim online that USAID had paid $8 million to Politico, a Washington-based online newspaper. Politico immediately clarified that USAID had paid it only $24,000 for subscriptions, which the journalist acknowledged 10 hours later was indeed the truth. However, by then the post had gone viral. In the next 36 hours, it accumulated 15,000 posts, including from a Republican Representative from the House and from Viktor Orban, Hungary's autocratic Prime Minister whom Trump admires. Conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, had seized upon the online storm to allege that Democrats had used USAID to fund a 'fake news empire.' Orban followed this up with an allegation on X that Politico had financed the 'entire left-wing media in Hungary,' notching 27 million views. Then President Trump jumped in on his Truth Social account to criticize government news subscriptions to the likes of Politico as 'pay-offs' for talking up Democrats. 'This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history,' he wrote in all caps. The White House press office hurriedly announced the cancellation of its Politico subscription. Ms. Applebaum is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins, a long-term observer of Russia, and an acknowledged historian of authoritarianism. Her book is a primer on how the growing tribe of autocrats in the post-Cold War world are banding together to expand their sphere of influence. In it, she details how autocrats use the media to sow doubt and confusion about democracy itself. One example she elaborates is eerily similar to the USAID slur campaign. In February 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine, it alleged that secret US-funded bio labs in Ukraine were conducting experiments with bat viruses. The charge was immediately rubbished but not before conspiracy networks had spread the hashtag #biolab on Twitter, notching up nine million views. MAGA's favourite TV host, Tucker Carlson, played clips on Fox News of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesman discussing the allegation and demanded that the Biden administration should 'stop lying and tell us what's going on here.' The Chinese foreign ministry, Ms. Applebaum recounts, took the story further by declaring that the US controlled 26 bio-labs in Ukraine. Even as Xinhua ran headlines like 'US-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond,' media outlets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with content-sharing agreements with Xinhua and other Chinese media entities amplified the charge. China's motive, Ms. Applebaum details, was clear: It wanted attention to be diverted from the charge that Covid-19 had spread from its labs in Wuhan. But the story also appealed to conspiracy sites in the US like the Q Anon network, who are virulently anti-vaccination. In an eerie chorus, even as Ukraine joined battle with Russia, the Russian, Chinese, and 'extremist American' interests all repeated the Russian accusations justifying the invasion and parroted that Ukrainians are 'Nazis' and that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA. So successful was the echo chamber effect that, according to one poll, Ms. Applebaum recounts, one out of four Americans believed that the biolab story was true! Conspiracy theories abound The story does not end there. In March 2022, Ms. Applebaum writes, the Russian state media ran a story that Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery weapon for bioweapons, first infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread diseases. Russia's ambassador to the UN followed up with a statement about the 'biobird scandal,' warning about 'the real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine.' What is the larger game plan of autocrats? Ms. Applebaum argues that 'autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics (in democracies). They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.' Propagandists also leverage one established social truth: Smear campaigns work. No matter how quick, effective, credible, and resounding the denial, some odium still sticks to the individual or entity smeared. A week ago, President Trump had notched up the highest approval ratings ever for him: 53%. How many would bet that the bulk of his followers will not believe the smear campaign against USAID? President Trump had repeatedly vowed in the election campaign to seek 'retribution' from his enemies. What will happen if the US Federal government uses all the instruments of the state - legal, judicial, and financial - to target one of President Trump's personal enemies? Trump's critics charge this has already begun in the Justice Department, which controls the FBI, with line personnel who had investigated the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection being targeted. Ms. Applebaum's book came out on the eve of the November election with Trump's return very much on the cards. In it, she had forewarned: 'If he (Trump) succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete.' Her book's descriptions of the autocrat's playbook hold the promise of being a useful mirror to track the trajectory of Trump 2.0.
Hans India
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Hans India
Who will take the blame for Simhachalam mishap?
Visakhapatnam: Several flaws come to the fore in the wall collapse incident that took place at Simhachalam shrine during 'Chandanotsavam.' The contractor who built the wall in a short span, the engineering officials who supervised the work in progress, the officials who oversaw the arrangements, among others, are being probed by a three-member committee constituted by the state government for the purpose. Earlier, V Trinadha Rao was appointed as Executive Officer (EO) of Sri Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy Devasthanam by the NDA government. However, two months before the Chandanotsavam festival, he went on a long leave. Subsequently, K Subba Rao was appointed as in-charge EO of the Devasthanam. Also, D Bhramaramba was appointed as festival special officer by the state government. Despite being experienced in organising temple festivals, she refused to take the responsibility assigned to her, citing health reasons. Following which, Joint Commissioner of Endowments NVSN Murthy was appointed as the festival special officer. What draws the attention is that Subba Rao is inexperienced in hosting temple festivals, while the chief festival officer too has no prior experience in organising Chandanotsavam. As a result, the major responsibility rested on Endowments Commissioner K Rama Chandra Mohan and district officials. It is quite apparent that the officials focused largely on facilitating VVIPs' darshan. The 'Chandanotsavam 2025' reflects how officials miserably failed in assessing the impact of a natural calamity and evaluating its effect on the devotees who were expected to congregate in large numbers. It is certainly not unusual to rain during Chandanotsavam. But what went beyond the officials' purview was the intensity of the downpour coupled with gales that led to the collapse of the rain-soaked wall. To undo the mistakes committed during earlier editions, the state government involved five ministers to closely monitor the arrangements of the festival a month before Chandanotsavam. The question that lingers is what would have gone wrong despite the five ministers examining the festival arrangements from close quarters, convening meetings from time to time. Even earlier, the government was quick to form committees to investigate the incidents. Eventually, the EOs were held responsible and at the most they along with other officials would be transferred to other places. However, the Chandanotsavam this year not only failed in several aspects but also claimed seven lives. It certainly calls for a serious scrutiny so that such incidents do not recur in future. From the contractor who built the wall in haste to the supervisors who monitored the exercise, there are several who should be made accountable for the tragic incident. As days pass, anxiety brews over who would be held accountable for the Simhachalam wall collapse incident. In the meantime, YSRCP MLC Botcha Satyanarayana termed the incident as nothing but 'government murders'. He called for strict action against all those who are accountable for the wall collapse incident. With the NDA government seeking a preliminary report from a three-member committee constituted for the purpose, the investigation is taking place on a fast-track mode.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Trump Orders Could Almost Motivate Regulatory Housekeeping
A room in need of housekeeping to restore order Donald J. Trump is not the first president to express concern over the ever-growing stock of regulations that impose requirements and restrictions on businesses, workers, and consumers. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all issued executive orders (EOs) directing department and agency heads to evaluate the benefits and costs of existing, as well as new, regulations. President Obama issued two executive orders emphasizing the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and importantly, planning for ex-post evaluation at the time regulations are issued. Congress has shown bipartisan interest in retrospective review of regulations, as well. But so far, these have had little impact, and regulations continue to accumulate with each administration. This lack of focus on evaluation is likely due both to the difficulty of doing ex-post analysis well, and the limited incentives to evaluate actual regulatory impacts. Of course, predicting regulatory impacts before a rule is issued is also hard, but presidential orders require agencies to conduct ex-ante analysis before taking new actions. Once a regulation is in place, however, the motivation to review it just isn't the same, and agency staff are usually more interested in pursuing new actions than evaluating whether an existing regulation is working as predicted. Further dampening incentives, once regulated parties have invested to comply with regulation, they are often reluctant to lose any competitive advantage by seeing it removed. If implemented thoughtfully, several of Trump's recent orders could begin to alter agency incentives. (This is a big 'if' that I'll return to in a moment.) First, EO 14192 imposes an incremental regulatory budget on agencies. To issue a new regulation, they must both 1) identify 10 to remove and 2) more than offset the costs of each new rule with regulatory cost reductions elsewhere. I have noted before that the 10-for-1 component of the order can likely be met with creative accounting, e.g., by removing ten minor guidance documents to offset one significant rule. But even that could provide incentives to cull the stock of existing requirements to identify those that are no longer necessary. Finding real cost reductions to meet this year's incremental regulatory budget of less than zero will require a more genuine effort to identify existing regulations where costs exceed benefits. If taken seriously, that effort could yield savings. EO 14267, 'Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers,' directs agencies to identify 'regulations that reduce competition, entrepreneurship, and innovation—as well as the benefits they create for American consumers.' Agencies have three months to submit lists of such regulations to the White House, Department of Justice and Office of Management and Budget. Historical evidence suggests that such an initiative could unleash innovation to the benefit of consumers. The bipartisan deregulation effort of the 1970s and 1980s eliminated anticompetitive regulations that protected market power and posed barriers to entry, leading to dramatic increases in social welfare. Like the actions of 50 years ago, this initiative may enjoy some bipartisan support, as both the Obama and Biden administrations were also concerned with regulations that reduce competition. EO 14270, 'Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting To Unleash American Energy,' directs certain agencies to 'incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production to the extent permitted by law, thus compelling those agencies to reexamine their regulations periodically to ensure that those rules serve the public good.' Unlike agencies' on-budget programs, which Congress must reauthorize periodically, once a regulation is on the books, it stays in effect unless explicitly rescinded through the notice-and-comment rulemaking process. Observers have suggested that, by shifting the default such that regulations expire unless affirmatively renewed, sunset provisions could provide incentives for periodic review of regulations' actual outcomes and a more cost-effective set of rules. For this to work, agencies should establish the sunset date when the rule is issued, however, and commit to gathering information to determine whether it should be renewed. I have used 'if' a lot so far. These initiatives have the potential to change agency incentives to improve retrospective evaluation, but to be successful, they must be implemented with that goal in mind. These and other orders give agencies very tight deadlines for acting, and some even direct them to eschew seeking input that could provide valuable information about impacts on the ground. Meaningful review of regulatory impacts—both positive and negative—will not be easy. Once a regulation is in place, it is difficult to estimate what the outcomes would have been without it. To illustrate, would air emissions have increased directly with economic and population growth, or would technological change and citizen preferences have driven emissions lower? How did changes in air quality affect measurable public health outcomes? What activities or innovations were foregone to achieve regulatory goals? Alone, these orders are unlikely to force the kind of analysis needed. The incremental regulatory budget will likely slow the pace of new regulations, without forcing agencies to tackle the challenging task of seriously reviewing the impacts of regulations on the books. The competition order might identify some anticompetitive rules and it explicitly calls for public input. However, the timeline is very tight, and vested interests who benefit from anticompetitive rules may be the loudest voices who prevail in the end. The blanket sunset provision inserted into all existing energy rules will not incentivize careful review of each to understand whether they are having desired impacts at reasonable cost. Further, automatically sunsetted rules will likely face legal challenges, limiting the durability of those actions. While I hope that these orders can finally do what previous presidents have tried—to ingrain in regulatory agencies an evaluation mindset—I am not optimistic that they will without a more conscientious effort.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
DOGE staffer who resigned over past social media posts reinstated with higher access: Filing
A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer who resigned over racist posts that resurfaced on social media last month was reinstated to oversee the slashing of waste, fraud and abuse in March under the agency led by Elon Musk, according to court filings. Marko Elez, 25, allegedly relinquished access to sensitive systems being reviewed by DOGE in early February as divulged by the White House. However, he was listed as a staffer in a lawsuit that required the Trump administration to reveal the identity of the agency's hired workers. Legal documents categorize Elez as a Department of Labor employee detailed to the United States DOGE Service and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since March 5. Filings say he had access to the federal directory of new hires, general ledger accounting system and contract writing system at HHS. 'Mr. Elez was granted read-only access to the above-listed systems in furtherance of the DOGE EOs [executive order] directive to identify waste, fraud, and abuse and to modernize government technology and software to increase efficiency and productivity,' according to court documents. 'Mr. Elez's access to the above referenced CMS systems has been disabled. Mr. Elez has not modified, copied and shared with any unauthorized users, or removed any records from any of the systems he has actually accessed,' it reads. 'There are currently no pending requests to grant Mr. Elez access to other sensitive systems at HHS, nor has Mr. Elez been denied access to any systems at HHS.' The documents confirm that Musk's intent to rehire Elez as a staffer was affirmed. 'He will be brought back,' the tech giant wrote on X amid emerging reports of the 25 year old urging the public to 'Normalize Indian hate' in a deleted post. Vice President Vance, whose wife is Indian, also supported Elez's return. 'Here's my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez's posts, but I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life,' the vice president said on social platform X, referring to the staffer Marko Elez. 'We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.' 'If he's a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that,' he added. When Elez resigned from DOGE in February, the Treasury Department issued a statement saying that Elez was given 'read-only' access to the highly sensitive payment systems, despite numerous reports indicating that he had the ability to rewrite the payment system base code. The White House did not immediately respond to The Hill's requests for comment on Elez's reinstatement at DOGE. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
