The most revealing part of President Trump’s economic vision isn’t what he wants to build — but what he’s desperate to restore.
His trade policies reflect an outdated view of American manufacturing from the 1950s, ignoring how automation, global supply chains, and technological advancement have fundamentally transformed production over the last half-century.
This backward-looking view is also core to the White House’s approach to energy regulation, which is another area where Trump seems determined to revive outdated structures and technologies, regardless of their economic viability.
In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has launched the most significant overhaul of electricity regulation in decades. Through a series of executive orders, it is attempting to undermine energy regulators that have operated independently for decades — all while displaying a disregard for modern energy technologies and markets.
“Over the past few months, this administration has come in and tried to assert control over a range of institutions — so trying to control FERC’s agenda is certainly consistent with what they’ve been trying to do,” explained Harvard law expert Ari Peskoe, speaking on this week’s episode of Open Circuit.
The power grab
The first part of this strategy was a February executive order declaring that independent agencies — including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — must submit all “significant regulatory actions” to the White House for review.
Why does this matter? FERC was deliberately established as an independent commission within the Department of Energy in 1977, specifically to shield critical energy infrastructure decisions from political interference. “It was made independent so that it could be very focused on the mission, [and so] that it wouldn’t have the undue influence of the White House,” explained my Open Circuit co-host Katherine Hamilton.
As Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, observed, “This administration seems to be putting itself in the place of laws passed by Congress and precedents set by the courts establishing FERC independence.” The result is likely to be “a great degree of uncertainty and some bad decisions.”
The White House’s grab for control over FERC could slow or disrupt critical initiatives to reform transmission planning and interconnection rules — precisely when electricity demand is spiking due to AI and data centers, and when cheaper technologies like renewables and storage could help contain costs. Since the February order, former commissioners from both political parties have warned that these delays could impede the modernization of infrastructure necessary to maintain reliability.
But the White House wasn’t done. In April, Trump ordered energy agencies to add five-year sunset provisions to all regulations, an order that makes little practical sense.
As Peskoe explained, FERC regulations include “the accounting rules for every utility in the country, and state utility commissions use those accounting rules in every rate case across the country.” Having these fundamental market frameworks simply disappear after five years would create chaos in a system that requires long-term stability.
The order also contains basic factual errors. It lists a law that Congress repealed in 1987 as one of the statutes relevant to FERC. This suggests the drafters lack an elementary understanding of the regulatory structure they’re attempting to overhaul.
Asked if there was any charitable interpretation of the order’s purpose, Peskoe was direct: “I don’t think there is one.”
Pesko speculated that the idea likely originated from Elon Musk’s suggestion that all federal regulations should sunset. With little analysis, this offhand comment seems to have transformed into formal policy.
The third and most consequential order also came in April. Under the guise of reliability, it gives Energy Secretary Chris Wright unprecedented authority to decide which power plants can close. As a result, it essentially allows the department to force uneconomic coal plants to stay open and increase operating hours — with consumers footing the bill.
The legal basis is Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, which was designed for temporary emergencies like extreme weather events. But the Trump administration is effectively making it a permanent tool to override market decisions.
“This is a provision designed for short-term disturbances, not long-term resource adequacy challenges,” Peskoe explained. “Section 202(c) is a poor fit for what the administration is attempting to do here.”
The electricity industry already has mechanisms to assess resource adequacy and maintain reliability. This order bypasses those processes in favor of centralized control by political appointees — and the impact could be higher rates, and more local pollution.
It could also complicate interconnection, explained Hamilton: “If those coal plants don’t retire, it might be that that transmission capacity is still blocked up and they would need to redo interconnection studies, which just makes everything take so long.”
Project 2025 in action
The administration’s approach appears to draw heavily from Project 2025, which outlines a vision for moving away from competitive electricity markets, emphasizes a vertically integrated monopoly utility model, and seeks to devalue renewables.
“The folks that wrote that section, they really want to return our country back to sort of the Southern company type model,” explained Open Circuit co-host Jigar Shah. “They’re anti-deregulation, they’re anti-regional transmission operators, they’re anti-independent system operators.”
Peskoe agreed, adding that the vision is fundamentally “anti-technological progress,” because it appears to be premised on the belief that power systems should run exclusively on “traditional fossil and nuclear units that we’ve had since the 60s and 70s.”
As Peskoe noted, the administration’s approach would likely lead to inefficient spending: “We’re going to go back to old solutions because that’s sort of the status quo bias that’s embedded throughout the system, rather than trying to take advantage of new technologies and build infrastructure that can actually ultimately lower costs.”
This could lead to three possible outcomes.
First, electricity bills could rise if aging, expensive plants are kept operating through administrative fiat, rather than allowed to close due to market competition with cheaper resources. Electricity prices are already rising faster than the cost of inflation, primarily because the cost of maintaining the grid is increasing.
Second, we could see a slowdown in infrastructure investment. As former FERC Commissioner Nora Mead Brownell warned, investors will be “unlikely to risk hundreds of billions of dollars on investments regulated by politically influenced non-transparent decisions.”
Third, FERC’s ability to process critical regulatory filings could be compromised by staff reductions, instituted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency across the entire federal government. “Most of what FERC does is respond to industry filing,” Peskoe noted. “If you cut too much staff, you slow FERC’s capacity to adequately respond to those filings.”
Delays in FERC’s processing of rate changes, market rule updates, and infrastructure approvals could create significant bottlenecks across the industry just as electricity demand is spiking.
The bottom line
Like virtually every policy action from this White House, this approach to energy markets directly contradicts Trump’s stated goal of “energy dominance.”
A true energy dominance agenda would lean into market forces to drive down costs and accelerate infrastructure development — not artificially prop up the most expensive generation sources.
Like the administration’s antiquated views on manufacturing and trade, its energy agenda reflects a vision frozen in the past. It seeks to restore coal to prominence not because it’s efficient or economical, but because it represents an idealized industrial past. It seeks to dominate agencies like FERC not to streamline infrastructure, but to exert raw power for its own sake.
It’s still unclear how these actions will reshape federal energy regulation in practice. Executive orders don’t change statute, and implementing fundamental changes to FERC’s operations would require multiple steps beyond what we’ve seen so far. Much will depend on upcoming FERC commissioner appointments, potential legal challenges, and how courts interpret these directives.
But if these changes do take root, it will very likely have the opposite impact of Trump’s stated energy goals: raising costs, slowing infrastructure development, and stifling innovation.
For a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s energy regulatory agenda and its implications, check out this week’s Open Circuit podcast episode featuring Ari Peskoe. We also dive into a new report examining how utilities and tech companies may be passing the cost of serving data centers to ratepayers.
