TOPSHOT – US President Donald Trump attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
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Demand for power is climbing to unprecedented levels. U.S. Energy Information Administration data reveals that July set a new record for electricity peak demand, driven by nationwide heat waves and increasing reliance on power-intensive artificial intelligence tools. And, given the state of the electrical grid in several jurisdictions, the U.S. The Department of Energy declared an emergency order on July 28 to secure the mid-Atlantic power grid. The situation could worsen as summer continues, although it has already been a long time in coming.
On day one of his second administration, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency. The declaration formalized the idea that economic prosperity, national security, and foreign policy are under threat due to an insufficient energy supply. While this claim may be intended to encourage leniency towards the fossil fuel industry, there are many issues with our energy infrastructure that do need urgent attention. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s aging electrical infrastructure a D+, a failing grade, in the organization’s latest annual Infrastructure Report Card. The aging grid is in dire need of infrastructure upgrades so that it is able to serve the increasing power demand as we see more frequent extreme temperatures and weather events due to climate change, alongside the expansion of data center power use and the electrification of buildings and transportation.
Currently, energy generation takes years to connect to the grid due to slow permitting processes and a patchwork of utility regulations and forecasters predict electricity use will increase 50% by 2050 in the US.
However, instead of creating a pathway to speed up the connection of new energy sources to the grid, Trump followed this emergency declaration with a budget request for fiscal year 2026 that kneecaps energy innovation. Followed closely after that was the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, in combination with severe budget and personnel cuts in government-funded science and technology research and development, will likely result not in energy stability or even dominance, but a true national emergency: a long-lasting rise in energy prices. It may also lead to a decline in the U.S.’s leadership in technology innovation and talent.
Investing In Innovation Could Help Address The Energy Crisis
Today’s ubiquitous GPS, computer chips, solar photovoltaic cells, and lithium-ion batteries didn’t arrive from the ether fully-formed and ready for consumers to use. Many of these innovations are thanks to the equivalent of $7.4 billion (in today’s dollars) taxpayers invested shortly after WWII ended to create the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Funds from OSRD eventually led to discoveries in the 1940s and 50s that resulted in the establishment of the National Science Foundation National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Atomic Energy Commission (later becoming the Department of Energy), and other science agencies.
Federal funding for research and investment in these agencies has resulted in trillions of dollars of economic benefit, resulting in the U.S. being a leading developer of technologies that have transformed our world.
Funding cuts to the DOE pose a threat to our energy system and leadership in energy systems like next-generation grid technology, AI, and clean energy development and manufacturing.
DOE is the largest funder of basic physical science research in the government. The DOE’s Office of Science’s annual budget is $8.2 billion for projects related to critical minerals, quantum computing, enhanced geothermal energy, and artificial intelligence. All are topics that the Trump administration has identified as crucial to U.S. economic competitiveness and “dominance.” Applied technology offices within the DOE – the ones that transform scientific research into commercial applications, like the Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chain Office, Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office— have funded projects across industries and sectors. These include the private sector, national labs, and universities, all of whose work has resulted in historically low costs for battery storage, solar photovoltaics, grid components, and critical infrastructure.
These investments have fed into a resurgence of our domestic manufacturing industry across the Rust Belt (Midwest) and the Sunbelt (southern states like Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas). The DOE historically has a positive return on taxpayer investment across its research and development offices. From its start in 1976 through 2015, DOE invested $12 billion in research, development, and deployment in EERE and found that its return yielded $388 billion in economic benefits, or an ROI of over 27% by conservative estimates.
The Building Technologies Office within DOE, which is known for developing energy-saving technologies that save consumers money on their utility bills, has estimated that for every $1 invested in its R&D, it has yielded between $20 and $261 in economic benefits. The benefits of these investments are in the form of job creation, consumer cost savings, and new technologies like horizontal drilling – yes, the technology used for fracking developed through the DOE’s R&D program on natural fracturing.
Given that context, it may be counterintuitive that the same officials touting U.S. leadership in innovation and discovery are proposing the largest financial cuts to DOE in history. The president’s budget request is proposing a 26% cut to non-defense DOE programs. The table below summarizes the cuts, with a heavy focus on programs that have resulted in the development and economic success of new energy technologies, especially clean energy technology.
Changes between Trump’s budget request and the current funding level of DOE offices that fund research and development
Table indicating offices at DOE and the accompanying percent change in their funding
Kelly Fleming
Slashing research and development programs across the DOE, all while Congress rolls back clean energy tax incentives and programs, is not going to solve the nation’s energy emergency. It makes our current challenges even worse.
The problems that the aging U.S. power grid faces are already compounded by historically high (and growing) consumer demand – a result of increasingly extreme temperatures and weather events, the explosion of data centers’ energy demand, and the electrification of even more transportation and buildings. Budget cuts and the insistence on using energy derived from fossil fuels may only exacerbate the problems the U.S. is already facing. In fact, defunding scientific research will most likely allow international competitors to slingshot ahead of the U.S. in new technology development and adoption.
If Americans become increasingly reliant on foreign intellectual property and technology, while the domestic grid continues to decay, the national energy emergency is likely to grow even more dire in the years to come.
