The Energy Department (DOE) considers more than 40 percent of its staffers to be nonessential — meaning these people could be on the chopping block — as mass layoffs loom at the agency and across the federal government. A document viewed by The Hill on Friday states that out of the agency’s current headcount of 15,994...
Chinese liquefied petroleum gas buyers have prompted a price surge as they scramble to replace US supplies of the widely used fuel following Beijing’s tough response last week to Washington’s punitive tariffs. Buyers are trying to swap US cargoes that have already been purchased with alternatives, including LPG from the Middle East, traders said. But...
The Trump administration identified 16 sites for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers Thursday on land owned by the Department of Energy. The centers comprise rows of servers providing processing capacity for machine learning, cloud storage and AI systems that require massive amounts of electricity and computing power. “The global race for AI...
The Trump administration, like the preceding Biden administration, is making liberal use of a little-known Cold War law called the “Defense Production Act” (DPA). Utilization principally goes like this: The administration identifies some sort of production deficiency (e.g., minerals, solar panels, heat pumps) and then invokes the DPA, declaring it an issue of national defense in order to...
Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill Monday designed to crack open the door to a new nuclear energy era in Colorado, disregarding a coalition of environmental groups asking for a veto. The legislation, HB25-1040, redefines nuclear as a “clean energy resource” since it doesn’t release large amounts of climate-warming emissions. The category was previously reserved for...
Innovation, investment, and the cleanest possible energy production thrive best in freer markets that encourage competition instead of having politicians pick winners and losers. That, in a nutshell, is the lesson of the latest Free Economies are Clean Economies report.
As President Donald Trump pledges to win the artificial intelligence race, send Americans to Mars and sustain U.S. military dominance, we would do well to remember a key reason the United States achieved its technological edge in the first place: federal investment in ambitious research and development. The U.S. is racing against its adversaries to...
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced an executive order on March 27, 2025, to improve the efficiency of the National Laboratories and to reduce bureaucratic kludge at these key federal research and development centers.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced new actions to ease burdensome permitting rules and regulations for construction projects at the Department’s 17 National Labs. These reforms will accelerate much-needed critical infrastructure improvement projects at DOE’s National Labs, enabling the Department to move faster on important projects while saving hundreds of millions of dollars...
As discussed previously, the series of 31 deregulatory actions recently announced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) contains enough content for a month’s worth of Low-Energy Fridays. But, today, we are focusing on one of the more high-profile actions announced: the elimination of the EPA’s so-called “endangerment finding.” The story began two decades ago during the George W....
