The Department of Energy began 2026 much as it ended 2025, with a flurry of announcements aimed at boosting the administration’s priorities around nuclear power, power demand driven by artificial intelligence, and critical minerals. On Monday, DOE awarded $2.7 billion in contracts for enriched uranium — a historic investment in domestic nuclear fuel capacity — as well as an $11.5 million grant to Texas-based recycling company Amermin to bolster domestic supplies of key industrial and battery metals.
This week’s announcements follow a year of massive upheaval at the agency, which started with a blanket pause on all Biden-era awards, and closed with the Genesis Mission, an initiative focused on using AI for scientific breakthroughs, which the administration likened to the Manhattan Project. In between, DOE began employing the administration’s “energy dominance” framework more selectively, marking not only a pivot from the Biden-era climate focus, but also departure from the first Trump term’s focus on “energy independence” largely through deregulation. Trump 2.0 is using a suite of budgetary, regulatory, and administrative tools to reshape markets rather than simply unwind existing programs.
DOE has been undergoing an overhaul for months via mass firings carried out by the Department of Government Efficiency and billions in IRA-related funding cuts. The overhaul came to a public head in December, when the agency announced a reorganization eliminating the Grid Deployment Office and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, among others.
It was one of the largest overhauls the agency has experienced in recent history, said Joel Fetter, who served as an advisor to ARPA-E throughout the Obama, first Trump, and then early Biden years. The cuts, though drastic, are in keeping with the current moment in energy, he added.
The core questions around solar panel and wind turbine design, for example, are largely settled, said Fetter, who is now the managing director of energy and industrial technologies at Clark Street Associates, an advisory firm specializing in securing government funding and partnerships for hard tech companies. Meanwhile, critical minerals, advanced nuclear, and energy supply chains all have gaps in existing innovation, making them ripe for DOE support.
Despite the drama of DOGE cuts, funding freezes, and award cancellations that have plagued the agency and imperiled the careers of hundreds of career staffers, Fetter sees the mobilization signals that came in late 2025 as promising. Many in the nuclear and critical minerals sectors are particularly optimistic about the agency’s potential role further upstream in supply chains.
“For example, there’s been no innovation in smelting at all since the end of the 19th century,” Fetter explained. “For DOE to put a focus back on that space, and sort of challenge the research and development and early commercialization, and think more creatively about that, is really important.”
New year, firm power priorities
Foundational to DOE’s priorities is what the president has long referred to as “baseload” power, particularly nuclear and geothermal as well as fossil fuels.
Fetter pointed to both fission and fusion as emerging priorities, driven by both power demand from the AI race but by national security considerations. Throughout last year, DOE was particularly active in nuclear energy, from funding small modular reactors to a $1 billion loan to help Constellation Energy restart a Pennsylvania nuclear plant.
“America does really well when we’ve got a clear opponent,” Fetter said, pointing to fusion in particular. “China is moving out really aggressively in both the number of technologies they’re looking at but also the size of their facilities.” Melding DOE’s energy innovation and national stockpile stewardship roles, he added, could align resources for nuclear “in a way that is catalytic for our ability to maintain an advantage in that area.”
Fission is another key focus, and one where DOE could be instrumental in implementing artificial intelligence: “The Chinese are very good at building things, and we are just getting up off the couch with fission,” Fetter said. “The question we have to face is, how do we achieve innovations in the technology suite that enable things to advance faster?”
And as DOE made clear in its year-end roundup, titled “Promises Made, Promises Kept,” critical minerals also received significant attention. DOE restructured a loan with Lithium Americas to include a 5% equity ownership for the government, and announced funding opportunities including $134 million for domestic rare earth supply chains, $80 million to establish testing grounds for next-gen mining technologies, and $275 million for companies mining minerals from industrial byproducts. The latter is an area where recycling and urban mining companies say the administration could make a massive impact by using policy levers to create demand for domestic products, thereby spurring investment and technology maturation.
DOE’s new normal
The drastic policy swings between administrations may continue for the DOE, Fetter warned — but that doesn’t mean the agency’s role as a lender will diminish.
For companies that have had awards canceled for apparently arbitrary reasons, “the burns are serious,” he explained. They’ve made board-level decisions about things like where to locate factories, and then lost federal support overnight. But at the end of the day, Fetter said, the fact remains that DOE and the broader federal government “have really large checkbooks, and that money can be enabling.”
For nuclear and critical minerals in particular, he added, DOE is bringing in non-traditional players that haven’t previously been a part of the federal funding ecosystem. The involvement of major players is in and of itself is also a vote of confidence to smaller tech innovators in those sectors.
As far as which Biden-era projects will move forward under Trump 2.0, Fetter pointed to manufacturing projects located in politically important districts and backed by commercial fundamentals like offtake agreements. But the pattern isn’t fully coherent, Fetter acknowledged; for instance, the Trump administration pulled its conditional commitment for the Grainbelt Express transmission project, then turned around and finalized a $1.6 billion loan for a different transmission project with AEP. “They haven’t gotten it totally right…those puts and takes between the White House, OMB, and DOE, have resulted in some things that have gone forward that make sense, and some things that people are scratching their heads over why they haven’t moved forward.”
Under the first Trump administration, DOE focused largely on basic research, with commercialization work effectively out of bounds. But Fetter said that approach was unlikely to hold under the far more volatile geopolitical and commodities environment of the second administration, where new constraints are already pushing the government to engage more directly with markets and deployments.
While the Trump energy agenda may seem clear today, Fetter cautioned against assuming things will stay static. Things may get tense between the agency and its OMB and White House counterparts — neither Secretary Wright or his assistant secretaries are in Washington to “keep a seat warm,” Fetter added.
“I think we’re in for some surprises,” he said. ”Some of the doctrines that have been implemented now are going to get questioned, and new problems will come up….
If we have this conversation in a year, I would submit that there would be some different topics and subject matter areas on the agenda.”
