The administration has announced a $17.5 billion fund to support ten federally guaranteed loans, targeted for the construction of at least ten new nuclear power plants.
This raises a number of questions, as most government announcements should. It is the job of both the public and the press to pay attention to what the government does, to question it and sometimes push back.
Isn’t that a heck of a lot of money?
$17.5 billion is indeed a lot of money, but we’re talking about the federal government of the most consequential economy on earth.
Our federal budget is about $7 trillion per year, and almost $2 trillion of that is deficit spending (meaning, we only expect to raise in taxes about 5/7ths of the amount we intend to spend).
Look at it one way, and this means, we are overspending so much, we desperately need to cut back, so we certainly shouldn’t be spending any more. At all. Period.
But look at it another way, and we see that $17.5 billion is only about two and a half tenths of a percent of our annual budget, and contributes less than one percent to a year’s deficit.
So this package of loans is a rounding error. Why worry about it?
That conclusion, of course, leads to another of our nation’s spending problems: we spend so much, virtually every expenditure can be referred to as a rounding error, so we don’t pay attention to any of our spending at all. That’s how it’s been going for half a century or more.
That’s how we got in this mess.
How is this the federal government’s business?
Ah. Now this one is important.
The federal government is a creature of the Constitution of the United States, meaning, it is created by, empowered by, and governed by, the specific clauses of that document.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it provide for federal management or financing of any kind of energy production, not the kind available in the 18th century (primarily coal, wood, wind, hydro), nor the kinds available today (petroleum, natural gas, nuclear). The federal government should have no role in it at all, right? The Tenth Amendment specifically says that all powers not enumerated in the Constitution are reserved to the states, or to the people.
That being said, however, the federal government is empowered to help out in areas that cross state lines. While the Framers could not have envisioned the concept of the modern electrical grid, they did think ahead, and this is a perfect example.
The electrical grid crosses state lines; the Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8 takes care of this. Some involvement by the federal government is therefore legal. That doesn’t mean it’s always necessary or wise, but at least it’s legal, which is more than we can say for most of the federal projects undertaken over the past century.
Why is this even an issue today?
The power needs of early humanity were low, not because they didn’t want the comfort that technology provides, but because technology simply didn’t exist yet. They cooled themselves by swimming in the lake, or staying in the shade, or hanging out in a cave; they heated themselves by layering up in animal furs, and setting wood fires. It was hardly optimal.
As technology developed, we needed power to enable that technology. Windmills and watermills for grinding grains, coal fireplaces for heating homes, sailboats for transportation. As mankind progressed, our needs for power increased. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just progress. Advancement requires power.
In the 20th Century, we reached the pinnacle of technology. By the end of that century, practically every home and workplace (in western civilization at least) had a television for entertainment, a furnace for heat, a refrigerator for food, and even electric lighting so our productive hours were no longer limited by sunlight. In the United States, most homes and workplaces even had air conditioners (the French sure wish they had taken that step too, this miserable week).
In the 21st century, the need for power to enable our lifestyle has grown with our population. A household has multiple televisions, multiple electronic toys, cellphones to charge, and so many computers.
Everything we do today is more of a draw on electric power than it was before. And that shouldn’t be a problem for us, because concurrently with all these advancements in the 20th century, we had constant advancements in power production too: coal is cleaner than ever, oil fields are more productive than ever, natural gas is plentiful, and all these sources are oh, so much more efficient with modern methods.
Why Nukes; Why Now?
But most importantly, in the 20th century, we mastered nuclear power. Done right – and yes, that’s imperative; it must be done right – nuclear power is the most efficient, most productive of all known energy sources. In the age of cellphones, battery-powered appliances, and Artificial Intelligence, only nuclear power can meet our needs.
We need to bring back manufacturing to the Western world; we need new factories with computer-aided design (CAD) for the engineering, computer numerical control (CNC) for the manufacturing, and robotics for the assembly. Only nuclear power can meet the needs of a robust, modern economy.
At yet, for the past two generations, there has been a movement – actually, the intersection of several movements, from modern luddites to environmentalist extremists to the acolytes of the climate hoax – that has fought against nuclear power, tooth and nail. We went too many years without building a new nuclear power plant, and spent those years decommissioning not just existing nuclear plants, but coal and other plants as well.
The trend was to move away from productive energy sources that work well and safely and are cost-effective; the trend was to move toward the most ancient sources – solar and wind – which are terribly ineffective and which in fact, in most applications, will never even produce enough energy to pay for their construction, installation and operation.
The largely Chinese-made solar panel farms and wind turbine farms that now dot our landscape, in fact, not only permanently remove useful land from agricultural production, they kill or maim wildlife and can only pretend to be productive if massive government subsidies are applied up and down the supply chain.
Broken-down windmills, hail-shattered solar panels, and reports of dangerous blackouts now blanket our economy – with power outages causing the loss of refrigeration in food warehouses, causing mass spoilage, and the loss of power in factories, causing production shortfalls, and worst of all, a loss of power to hospitals, clinics and nursing homes, which literally and immediately jeopardizes human lives.
The verdict is in. Chinese bird choppers and squirrel fryers simply cannot support a modern economy.
The Autopen Regime and the Trump Administration Response
Recent Democrat administrations have wasted immense amounts of tax dollars on green energy scams, from Solyndra’s solar panels to Barack Obama’s ridiculous pond algae dreams. Under Secretary Granholm, the Biden-Harris Energy Department kept on shoveling out federal money to dubious green projects long past the 2024 election, pouring tax dollars down the drain until the January 20 inauguration finally pulled the federal checkbook out of their hands.
The Trump administration has recognized a genuine need to make up for lost time, by supporting federal loan programs that will give the country the dependable, affordable power it needs to advance.
America needs new housing, new manufacturing, new business; our GDP needs to grow, and our standard of living needs to catch up, after decades of stagnation.
The political issue of the year is affordability, and no single issue contributes as much to that as the cost and supply of energy.
So the Trump administration is rightly putting a return to nuclear power – along with the greenlighting of all other productive, efficient, traditional power sources – at the very head of the agenda. Opening up oil and gas drilling, removing the barriers to new petroleum refineries, and issuing loans to spur nuclear power plant construction – these are all keys to this crucial effort.
And best of all? Unlike Obama-era and Biden-era solar and wind grants, these nuclear development loans will actually get paid back, so, unlike most government projects, these loans likely won’t really be any cost at all.
Win-Win!
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA