One year ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was an independent agency, setting safety standards without White House interference.
Those days are over.
President Donald Trump has overhauled the agency, firing a Democratic commission member, handing off some authority to the Department of Energy and requiring a White House review of all draft rules. Most recently, Trump replaced the NRC chair, completing his remake of a commission that now has a 3-2 Republican majority.
The moves have meant months of turmoil at an agency that is key to Trump’s push for a nuclear revival. The administration says the changes will mean less red tape and quicker nuclear plant construction.
But current and former NRC and DOE staff and officials paint a picture of an agency struggling to adapt as it navigates a controlling Trump administration, a surge in nuclear energy applications and a new generation of first-of-a-kind reactor designs.
Three current officials, granted anonymity to speak openly, told POLITICO’s E&E News that the NRC is no longer independent and only makes major decisions with the consent — and sometimes at the direction — of DOE or the White House.
“When other agencies, or the White House, are telling the NRC how to do its business, it’s not an independent agency,” said former NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane, a Democrat who served on the commission under the Obama administration. “That’s politicians and the industry influencing the regulator, which affects the safety of the public.”
Congress created the NRC in 1975, making it the independent safety regulator for commercial reactors. DOE was created soon after, with a mission to advance nuclear energy technology. The aim was to avoid a conflict of interest, separating the promoter of nuclear power from the regulator in charge of public safety.
Now, Trump’s vision for independent agencies — which he has said need to be brought “back under presidential authority” — is blurring the lines between a dichotomy that has held strong for 50 years.
DOE officials are now part of an NRC steering board focused on implementing Trump’s executive order to “reform” the nuclear regulator. That includes a “wholesale revision of its regulations” under White House leadership, a reorganization to ensure quicker licensing and new 18-month deadlines to review reactor designs.
“President Trump signed an executive order setting an ambitious agenda for the NRC that several dedicated and long-time experts at the Commission have been working around the clock to implement,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers wrote in an email. “The new and transformative leaders at the NRC recognize that nuclear energy has great potential to play a critical role in America’s energy dominance but has been stifled by the regulatory regime for decades.”
Trump’s overhaul of the NRC comes as a plethora of nuclear startups draw closer to major tech companies that need new sources of electricity for developing artificial intelligence. The NRC has been the target of some of Silicon Valley’s prominent venture capitalists and Trump allies who want to see faster permitting for new nuclear technology.
But safety advocates say the country’s virtually nonexistent build-out of nuclear power is due to competition from cheap natural gas, a lack of financing opportunities and other factors the NRC can’t control.
“What’s going on here is an experiment to test the tech bros’ theory that it’s been overregulation that has kept nuclear power from expanding in the United States,” said Ed Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We’re going to see if that really does have an impact on the nuclear industry’s growth or if it’s really due to other factors outside of the NRC’s control that have inhibited nuclear power.”
Regulatory slowdown
Advanced reactor startups have benefited greatly from the Trump administration: California-based Oklo’s stock ran up past $100 a share last year; startups are the main beneficiaries of a DOE program to build test reactors; and Congress just approved a $3 billion infusion for advanced reactor demonstration projects. TerraPower, a startup with backing from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has been able to move particularly fast, with a construction license from the NRC expected soon.
General Matter, a nuclear fuel startup with close ties to Trump ally and tech billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, said NRC “has been constructive and engaged as we implement our strategy to reassert US leadership in nuclear fuel.”
“The safe growth of nuclear energy is a post-partisan priority shared by the NRC, Congress, this administration, and industry. It depends on a strong, well-functioning regulator,” CEO Scott Nolan said in an emailed statement.
But the White House review of NRC rules has in some cases slowed the regulatory process.
In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order requiring that all “significant” independent agency regulatory actions go through a review from the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
In practice, that has meant draft rules — including routine ones — only become public once the NRC and OIRA agree on the proposal. If the two can’t agree, the president makes the final decision, the NRC told E&E News.
Steve Burns, another Obama-era NRC chair, said the requirement “led to less transparency in NRC’s process.”
It’s also slowing things down.
The long-awaited fusion rule, which would carve out a path that regulates fusion differently from nuclear fission, has been sitting in White House review since July. NRC commissioners were ready to publish the draft in May.
Judi Greenwald, CEO of the think tank Nuclear Innovation Alliance, said she is concerned that the review policy runs counter to the White House goal of expanding and accelerating nuclear power deployment.
“They’re introducing procedural hurdles that slow things down, like OIRA review, while cutting short the industry, stakeholder and expert opportunity for input,” Greenwald said.
Many believe the NRC is not independent while the White House reviews every NRC action and has the final say on changes to rules it deems “significant.”
“There’s no argument that this is not political interference at the highest order,” Lyman said. “The review of all regulatory decisions by OIRA means the ability of the public to observe intermediate decision-making processes at the NRC is being brought behind this curtain. So we can’t possibly know the degree of political influence.”
That’s largely the point, according to two people privy to the communications between NRC and OIRA who asked for anonymity discussing internal matters. One person said the goal of the regulatory review process, from OIRA’s standpoint, “was that there be no daylight between the White House and the NRC.”
The White House has already applied the review process to routine measures like certificates of compliance for storage casks and the annual rule to set the fee for NRC licenses.
NRC staff expect the White House review to delay or significantly alter big rulemakings, such as long-anticipated updates to environmental reviews and the “Part 53” rulemaking to provide a dedicated licensing path for advanced reactors.
Licensing advanced reactors is a priority for the nuclear startup industry, which has emphasized the need for a quicker regulatory process. Such reactors include small, factory-built ones, as well as models that don’t need enormous amounts of water for cooling.
Depleted staff
In the year since Trump took office, the NRC has lost more than 10 percent of its staff. Of those, roughly one-third accepted government-wide buyouts initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency — the office once helmed by billionaire Elon Musk — while the remainder either chose to resign or were fired.
The shake-up reached senior positions.
NRC fired the executive director of operations and promoted longtime NRC staffer Michael King into the position.
General Counsel Brooke Poole Clark resigned and was replaced by David Taggart, an energy industry attorney who arrived fresh from a brief stint as acting general counsel at DOE.
King and Taggart, co-founder of Louisiana law firm Bradley Murchison, now sit on a top-level “steering committee” with DOE senior legal adviser Seth Cohen, according to two people familiar with the agency, one of whom works at the NRC. The panel provides feedback to staff, recommends changes to the agency and proposes regulatory reform, with pressure on commissioners to take action.
As the White House depleted NRC’s ranks, Trump targeted the agency’s five-seat commission. When Trump took office, the commission had five members: three Democrats and two Republicans.
Trump fired Commissioner Chris Hanson in June 2025, after the Democrat spoke out against cuts to the federal workforce. DOGE’s later presence at the agency also may have led to the resignation of Republican Commissioner Annie Caputo, according to three people familiar with the agency, one of whom spoke directly with Caputo.
It began with Trump’s May 28 executive order calling for the “reform” of the agency — and assigning the NRC a DOGE lead. The position was soon filled by Adam Blake, the founder and former CEO of solar energy company Brightergy.
Two weeks later, on Friday, June 13, the White House sent an email to Hanson shortly after 6 p.m. saying his position was terminated. Hanson saw the email the following Monday morning and announced his firing on LinkedIn, calling it illegal.
Caputo would be gone by the end of the summer.
Power struggles
Caputo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
But Caputo’s philosophy and the Trump administration’s goals seemed a natural fit to many at the NRC and in the nuclear industry. She had advocated for the agency to relax safety standards that she considered over-the-top and to concentrate resources on getting quality nuclear developers their license approvals sooner.
Trump had appointed David Wright to NRC chair in January 2025. But on June 30, Wright’s term expired, and certain chair-like responsibilities were given to Caputo as the most senior commissioner.
Around this time, Caputo went to the West Wing of the White House for a meeting with Blake, then-White House Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.
At that meeting, Gor made it clear that the Energy secretary was in charge. The implication: Blake, being Chris Wright’s de facto proxy inside the commission, was in charge day-to-day.
Caputo muffled her dissent during the meeting but went “ballistic” shortly after, according to two people with firsthand knowledge.
Blake has not told commissioners how to vote on any specific items, according to two DOE officials. He serves as a bridge of communication and planning between the agencies. According to five federal officials, one of his overarching tasks is to execute the Energy secretary’s vision for federal nuclear power policy.
On July 28, David Wright was reconfirmed to the commission by the Senate. The next day, Caputo announced in an internal email that she would resign once Wright was sworn in, citing family reasons.
But two people with firsthand knowledge say that Caputo intimated in conversations that she felt spurned that she wasn’t made chair and was resigning either in protest to the administration or to preempt her potential firing by Trump.
House Energy and Commerce ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said Caputo resigned in “disgust.”
A rubber stamp?
Trump’s May executive orders imagine a system where DOE and the Department of Defense preclear commercial reactor designs for a less-intensive review by the NRC.
The agencies have been trying to map out a way to do that in the months since. One effort came in early June, when then-NRC Chair David Wright hosted a meeting that included Blake and three DOE officials: Cohen; Michael Goff, the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy; and Ted Garrish, soon to be the assistant secretary for nuclear energy.
A few months later, the meeting would become notorious, after Wright told lawmakers that Cohen said that NRC leaders “are basically going to put in a practice that’s going to sort of rubber-stamp what [DOE and DOD] do.”
Testifying in September before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Wright said he pushed back, telling Cohen, “We don’t rubber-stamp anything at the NRC.”
Another person familiar with the meeting, granted anonymity to discuss internal operations, asserted that Wright mischaracterized the comments. The person said that Cohen was proposing to integrate NRC personnel into a DOE process so that both agencies could effectively conduct simultaneous safety reviews.
That process was laid out in NRC staff guidance released in January.
The guidance allows the NRC to start “pre-application engagement” with nuclear reactor developers by detailing staff to observe a developer’s work with DOE and DOD. The memo reasserts NRC’s role as the country’s commercial nuclear regulator and outlines a process for NRC staff to ask questions and provide safety feedback to the other departments and the developer.
The departments would retain exclusive authority to authorize a reactor for their own purposes, according to the guidance, but the NRC staff’s participation could enable a quicker review should the same reactor developer look to bring their technology to the electric grid.
Burns, the former NRC chair, called the guidance a “good thing.” But the moment of truth, he said, will be the “outcomes of NRC consideration of reactor designs already approved by DOE or the military.”
“Is the NRC’s independent judgment still in play, or is it more a rubber stamp as an administration official suggested?” Burns said.
DOE’s influence
The Energy secretary has a significant role in the implementation of Trump’s nuclear regulatory overhaul.
One example is DOE’s decision to change its decades-old radiation safety principle, which Chris Wright approved in January. That standard required power plants to keep radiation exposure to the public and workers “as low as reasonably achievable,” but the industry argued it was overly burdensome and that higher radiation doses would still be safe.
DOE’s repeal of the standard was explicitly made to “advance those discussions” the department was having with the NRC to relax its radiation standards, according to a memo signed by Wright.
That same week, Trump appointed Ho Nieh as NRC chair. Nieh and Commissioner Doug Weaver — both Republicans — joined the commission in December, after the Senate confirmed their nominations. They joined David Wright and Democratic Commissioners Matthew Marzano and Bradley Crowell.
While the commission appears to have the same formal power it always did, DOE representatives like Cohen carry significant influence in the agency, including over the NRC regulatory restructuring that Trump mandated in one of his May executive orders. That overhaul — which the industry hopes will significantly streamline licensing, especially for smaller reactors — is scheduled to be rolled out over the next few months.
Greenwald with the Nuclear Innovation Alliance sees the past year as part of a learning curve for the Trump administration.
“Initially, the White House and DOE came in with the idea that NRC was the problem. They didn’t realize that NRC was already making a lot of progress, getting faster at licensing. They had to learn that NRC is actually key to the solution,” she said.
Greenwald said she would like to see the NRC succeed and endure. She sees signs, she said, that the administration is beginning to appreciate the NRC more and may even be willing to hire more staff, after forcing so many to leave last year.
“It’s not too late to fix this,” she said.
Correction: Due to an editor’s error, a previous version of this report incorrectly listed the composition of the NRC when Trump took office in 2025.
