An Energy Framework for the Common Good: Permitting, Capital, and Innovation
As with semiconductor chips and trade with China, the geopolitical and economic realities of a deindustrialized America in the twenty-first century appear to be slowly forcing national leaders toward a convergence around energy policy.
In modifying the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) maintained substantial federal financing for energy projects and tax credit eligibility for nuclear, geothermal, advanced manufacturing, and energy storage. There is bipartisan interest in expanding American liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity and reducing the ability of the executive to unilaterally shut down energy projects. Both Democrats and Republicans are signaling strong interest in permitting reform legislation. And the Trump administration has taken admirable steps to advance nuclear energy innovation, winning praise from parts of the Left. The passing of the climate hawk’s era appears to have recentered the conversation among America’s energy leaders around increasing electricity supply, onshoring production, and commercializing next-generation technology.
Energy obstructionism persists, however, as a substantial barrier to realizing an energy addition consensus. Continuing and expanding the tradition of earlier presidencies, the second Trump administration has enacted lawfare against disfavored energy projects and generation types. Citing unspecified national security concerns, the administration issued stop work orders against five offshore wind projects, and preliminary injunctions were issued for each. The Department of the Interior implemented policy last summer requiring all wind and solar energy project permits be reviewed by the Secretary himself, which also received a preliminary injunction in court. Both steps are reminiscent of similar climate lawfare from the Biden administration, including the pauses on new oil and gas development on federal land (citing “health, safety, and national security”) and on new LNG export terminals (citing increased costs for consumers and environmental concerns). Both were also blocked in court.
Presidential obstruction in cases like these has sown distrust in Congress around what would otherwise be bipartisan priorities. In permitting negotiations, Senate Democrats are citing the Trump administration’s obstruction lawfare as a dealbreaker. Obstruction seems to be a primary barrier to enshrining a bipartisan, post-climate hawk energy framework. Bringing that framework to fruition will require a new kind of energy politics that both emphasizes energy addition for the common good and recognizes the proper role of federal policy in achieving those ends: permitting quickly, crowding capital, and supporting innovation. Getting both the politics and the policy of energy right will be critical to meeting the energy challenges of our moment.
Energy Addition and the Common Good
Moving toward energy addition from obstruction demands two shifts in our national politics: first, an understanding that energy addition is foundational to human flourishing, and second, a recovery of federalism to negotiate energy considerations outside the national scope.
Across the aisle, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Senator Chris Murphy to Senator Todd Young to Governor Spencer Cox to Representative Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, elected leaders are appealing to the common good to orient their politics. Often, public figures invoke this concept when discussing areas with direct social interfaces: AI regulation, education, labor relations, and family policy. But no less foundational to the common good is the built environment, including energy infrastructure.
Human flourishing depends on the freedom of people to live the good life. Despite serious challenges today and in the past, the American republic has been unprecedented in fostering the ability of its citizens to build communities, form families, worship God, generate material abundance, and steward the natural world. This result depended on limited government, functional institutions beyond the state, and strong culture. But it also depended on access to large amounts of energy.
Abundant wood and hydropower fueled the nation’s heat and small-scale manufacturing in the eighteenth century. Coal largely powered the Industrial Revolution, which drastically increased America’s production capacity, laying the groundwork for the Allied victory in World War II. The harnessing and production of electricity catalyzed the expansion of healthcare, education, and computing power that both addressed the physical needs of American citizens and built the human and technological capacity of the modern economy. From the mid-twentieth century to today, innovations in oil and gas production, nuclear energy, and solar have transformed America into a powerful energy exporter, and thanks to such investments and innovations, the country now has the potential to deploy firm, dispatchable, and variable resources at home to maintain daily affordability and meet national imperatives.
The availability of energy in America has allowed citizens to use their security, freedom, and formation to advance the social goods of everyday life. Likewise, the future of the country will depend on the addition of large amounts of cheap energy, directed toward the right ends, to: lower the costs of family and individual life; build critical industries, including manufacturing, mineral processing, defense capabilities, and AI; and create the material prosperity needed to finance critical priorities ranging from servicing the national debt to basic research to social programs to conservation. Each of these ends is foundational to the national common good.
Making energy addition a cornerstone of common good politics is necessary, but moving beyond federal obstruction requires a recovery of federalism in energy policymaking.
An energy outlook that simply says all energy projects should be allowed is not only bad politics: it is also bad policy. Goods like landscape aesthetics are serious considerations that voters should and understandably do care about. The relevant question is whether the federal government and the president can or should be regulating those goods.
The federal government’s authority in energy policy is broad but limited within the Constitution’s enumerated powers. Those include the regulation of interstate commerce (including authorities like linear infrastructure permitting), imposition of taxation and tariffs (including fees on energy component imports), spending for the general welfare (including energy finance and innovation), federal land management (including energy leases), and the procedures governing these actions (including statutes like NEPA). As we discuss later, there are particular ways the federal government should exercise these powers to support energy addition, but actions outside of those areas of authority are delegated to the states and the people. Likewise, in almost all energy policy, the president is constrained by the authorities Congress grants to him.
And, in most cases of executive energy obstruction, they are instances of the president exceeding congressionally authorized powers. Courts have found the reasoning behind both Biden’s fossil fuel pauses and Trump’s attacks on renewables as arbitrary, and on these grounds, many of their actions received injunctions. While both administrations frequently cited national security and affordability as official reasoning for these actions, public rhetoric suggests their actions were motivated, in fact, by considerations not permitted by Congress like modest greenhouse gas emissions and landscape aesthetics.
In our view, Congress should generally leave these kinds of considerations to states in siting. This can include even vigorous deployments of state and local power, such as the recent moratorium on data centers and utility solar in Iron County, Utah (which we disagree with on policy), or state preemption of local bans like it. While there are exceptions, like using eminent domain or backstop siting as last resorts for nationally important and interstate energy infrastructure, those political fights should generally be waged at the state and local level. That will often require local leaders to make hard and unpopular choices in favor of addition for the good of their communities. It will also require private firms to play the hard art of politics in order to negotiate permissible agreements. But failing to give state and local governments sufficient power incentivizes federal leaders, particularly the president, to make national policy and wage lawfare on what are, at root, state and local issues.
Each of these changes in national energy politics, energy addition for the common good and energy federalism, would help the country move beyond federal obstruction. It will require a shift in mindset among national political leaders with courage to challenge erstwhile constituencies—and those changes will not happen immediately. But even incremental progress in the area of politics will help facilitate the needed work in the area of policy.
Toward a New Federal Energy Framework
As noted, the makings of a federal energy consensus focused on addition are already coalescing. For the federal government to play its role in facilitating energy addition, it must curb the ability to block energy projects, facilitate the financing of riskier critical projects, and partner with industry to catalyze innovation. In short, federal energy policy should focus on permitting, capital, and innovation.
Each of these steps require leaders on the left and the right to push back against longstanding constituencies in their own coalitions. On the left, politicians will face pushback from environmental groups and other activists who exploit procedures and litigation to block disfavored energy projects. On the right, parts of the conservative and libertarian political class will resist new government finance of any kind.
But developments like both the clean firm tax credits and Loan Programs Office (LPO) loan authority preservation in OBBBA and the negotiations around bipartisan permitting reform legislation point to a different possibility, one in which the Left and the Right are able to work around these dynamics, provided the right conditions. And, especially taken together, the three-pronged approach of permitting, capital, and innovation provides a framework for substantive energy addition policy.
1) Permitting: The first principle, technology-neutral permitting reform, recognizes the need to modernize federal law to facilitate speedy responsible development. The substantive protections provided by America’s foundational environmental laws have successfully made our water and air cleaner and prevented species’ extinction. But in the half-century since their passage, unintended consequences in procedure and litigation have led to obstruction and delay of critical energy infrastructure.
Consider the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA was passed in 1969 to assess the environmental impacts of “major Federal actions.” Projects on federal land and water, those receiving federal finance, and those regulated by a federal agency may be subject to NEPA. That includes all offshore energy projects, all resources developed on federal land, all commercial nuclear reactors, and all interstate pipelines. When projects require an environmental impact statement (EIS), the highest level of NEPA review, and subsequent litigation, this can add years to project delays. On average, an EIS takes 3.5 years to complete. Litigation of an EIS, frequently from environmental groups, adds another 3.9 years on average for energy projects. A remarkable 26 percent of new transmission lines from 2010 to 2020 were subject to an EIS.
While most energy projects that are actually built do not undergo NEPA assessment, the amount of energy infrastructure of all kinds that are not constructed in the first place for fear of NEPA delays is unknown but likely substantial. Gigawatts of solar and geothermal potential are available for development on federal land in the American West, but in the status quo, potential roadblocks related to NEPA make developers hesitant to invest in projects like these. Building the transmission, pipelines, geothermal, nuclear, and renewables required at this moment will require right-sizing NEPA.
Congress has begun to recognize the urgency of this problem. The bipartisan SPEED Act, which passed the House in December 2025 by a vote of 221 to 196, is an attempt to address some of the structural inefficiencies in the current permitting regime, particularly with respect to NEPA scope and litigation abuse. Furthermore, the Trump administration has allowed agencies to more narrowly interpret “major Federal actions,” and the Supreme Court has clarified the scope of NEPA review. But durable reform will require legislative action to properly scope the assessments required by NEPA and agency exposure to judicial review.
To be sure, NEPA is far from the only federal policy contributing to energy obstruction. Procedures and litigation related to the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act have been associated with long project delays and obstruction that frequently deliver little for, and sometimes actively degrade, ecological health. While preserving the substantive protections and helpful information these statutes were intended to provide, all should be modernized to deliver their relevant environmental and cultural outcomes without years of assessment or constant openings for lawfare. That will require Congress to clarify the scope of procedural environmental and historical assessment, digitizing paperwork, correctly staffing agencies or outsourcing review to contractors, and limiting judicial review to facilitate fast decisions. Additionally, Congress has an opportunity to curb executive obstruction, from pipelines to LNG export terminals to offshore wind, by narrowing the ability of administrations to rescind authorizations. Each of these steps will give not only the private sector, but also the government itself, increased certainty when planning needed projects for energy addition.
2) Capital: The federal regulatory reform alone is unlikely to be sufficient to catalyze the energy projects the nation needs. The second principle of our framework, capital deployment, recognizes the role of the federal government in helping finance nationally critical energy projects that the private sector alone cannot catalyze. As Alex Bronzini-Vender argued in these pages in an essay on the “Abundance” movement, private capital resists overcapacity, demanding rates of return that riskier critical energy infrastructure projects can rarely guarantee. This tendency is a feature, not a bug, for the efficient provision of private goods. But energy projects often have strong public good properties, where, as noted earlier, the benefits of cheap, reliable electricity and industrial capacity over decades frequently have enormous geopolitical and generational implications. Further, aggressive subsidy and trade policy from adversaries like China have created economic asymmetries where private financing for certain critical infrastructure is infeasible. Where cheap capital is needed to catalyze projects like these, federal finance is appropriate.
A federal financing model that still demands returns while willing to adopt larger risks has been critical to crowding in private capital to build the energy resources the nation needs. For instance, all commercial nuclear reactors built in this century—Vogtle 3 and 4 and Watts Bar 2—relied at least in part on federal-backed finance. As Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation has shown, the LPO has maintained a positive rate of return while catalyzing ambitious energy projects with very low staff overhead. Under President Trump, obstruction at what is now the Office of Energy Dominance Financing (or EDF, formerly LPO) has regrettably targeted a few politically fraught projects, including the Grainbelt Express transmission line. This has been the case even as Trump’s EDF has played a major role in catalyzing a new energy buildout, from financing the planned restart of a Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, transmission line reconductoring in the Midwest, and domestic solar manufacturing, alongside nuclear, transmission, and battery finance in the South.
Expanding federal energy financing instruments such as EDF should be a pillar of new energy addition policy. As Emmet Penney, also of FAI, argued in the Techno-Industrial Playbook, entities like EDF could offer competitive finance to support coal-to-nuclear conversions for communities near plants scheduled for decommission. And as researchers at the Breakthrough Institute have proposed, federal finance for new nuclear buildout could be structured as milestone-based incentives for firms to innovate low-cost ways to build reactors. With large amounts of private capital coming online to power data centers, effective public loan programs like EDF should work to catalyze new project capacity that is clearly in the national interest and which private capital alone would not finance. In doing so, it would continue to fund riskier critical projects that build energy and manufacturing capacity while, on average, still generating a good return for the federal government. More robust public finance would also help build long-term domestic supply chains for important industries such as solar, uranium, and critical mineral production that are currently dominated by adversaries like China and Russia.
3) Innovation: Streamlining permitting procedures and providing finance are critical for building existing infrastructure types. But technological innovation policy, the third pillar of our framework, will continue to be the factor that can generate energy revolutions. As Jeremy Harrell of ClearPath has argued in these pages, it was the deliberate partnership in policy between government and private industry that spurred the invention of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, which launched the shale revolution. The predecessor to the Department of Energy, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), was explicitly set up to support unconventional hydrocarbon production in the 1970s. And through federally-subsidized research and demonstrations, ERDA successfully collaborated with private industry to catalyze the shale revolution with developments including the invention of polycrystalline diamond compact drill bits. These policies helped turn America from a net hydrocarbon importer into the global market’s largest provider of liquefied natural gas. The monetary benefits to the American economy (including tax revenue) and the geopolitical benefits have been massive.
Similar approaches could catalyze future energy revolutions. As Harrell argues, steps like implementing IP protections, streamlining funding applications, early milestone-based rewards, and inter-departmental streamlining each represent mechanisms to advance department innovation avenues while keeping the primary focus on outcomes, not arbitrary technological preferences. This approach to early-stage efforts could help avoid obstructionist moves to target innovation programs based on technology favoritism.
Still, particular technological moonshots can be helpful in mustering political support for commercializing technologies that support ambitious national outcomes. These are worth pursuing too, especially when they have cross-partisan appeal and do not come at the cost of similarly important but lower-salience efforts. In this respect, the Trump administration has the makings of success in commercializing advanced nuclear reactors. As Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute observed, the administration’s comprehensive efforts on this issue may prove to be a major energy legacy of the second Trump term, if successful. Ambitious projects like this have been successful in commercializing transformative technologies like the Covid vaccine in Trump’s first term, in addition to the shale revolution.
Congressional support for innovation can include expanded funding for energy R&D, federal land permitting authorizations for demonstrations, and direction to and funding for administrations to explore innovative mechanisms such as advanced market commitments (AMCs), which enabled the Covid vaccine to become economically viable. Additionally, time-bound incentives such as the energy tax credits for clean firm resources can serve as late-stage commercialization policy by derisking deployment. This was the argument the Trump administration made when advocating for the preservation of advanced nuclear and geothermal incentives, and it would be applicable to other early-stage technology and supply chains too.
By facilitating the permission to build energy, the capital to finance it, and the innovation to sharpen and expand it, the federal government can increase the ability of industry, lower governments, and itself to not only meet market demand but also advance a flourishing and geopolitically advantaged American future. Each pillar has existing bipartisan support, but it will take ambitious leaders willing to spend political capital to realize them.
Building Energy for the Common Good
Interestingly, the policy levers of each of these pillars arose from political frameworks that are being tested at this moment. Permitting reform advocacy has historically been the purview of the libertarian Right concerned with reducing the size of government and deregulation on principle. Capital deployment and tax credits at the current scale arose under a climate hawkish Biden administration as functional reverse carbon taxes, explaining the large incentives for wind and solar, despite their technological maturity and relative bankability. Innovation policy under the DOE was first scaled in an even more distant political frame, when America depended heavily on hydrocarbon imports and many experts believed the world would soon run out of oil.
But each federal policy lever has been preserved in contemporary conversations, despite fewer appeals from leading politicians to libertarianism and climate hawkism on principle, and despite America’s secure place as a hydrocarbon superpower. The dynamism of contemporary politics has allowed Trump’s “energy dominance” to adopt capital deployment and the Left’s “abundance” to take up permitting reform. This suggests an opportunity. While we do not anticipate an about-face on obstruction from every policymaker in the current political moment, there are available avenues toward progress, from a permitting reform package to continued EDF deployment to SMR innovation. America’s leaders would be foolish to squander these opportunities, and regardless of what the political future holds, these policy levers will be available.
But if our politics are to move toward a more coherent common good orientation, the built realities of energy addition must be at the center, and a policy framework is available. Understood as the federal government playing a critical catalytic and supportive role in energy addition with states, private industry, and other institutions doing theirs, this framework could directly increase the capacity of Americans to live the good life, reducing prices for families, renewing communities, and spurring dignified work. This approach will also quietly help rebuild our industrial capacity for long-term geopolitical advantage, accelerate productive growth, and even naturally reduce emissions as a co-benefit. After this political moment passes, the next will likely offer an opportunity for daring leadership around energy addition for the common good. An ambitious leader would be wise to take it.