Earlier this month, President Trump became the most pro-nuclear executive our nation has seen in over half a century when he signed four separate executive orders dedicated to quadrupling American nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Trump’s actions have already drawn comparisons to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech initiated America’s quest to master nuclear technology for civilian purposes. While Eisenhower sought to birth the nuclear power industry, Trump seeks to resurrect it. “The United States originally pioneered nuclear energy technology during a time of great peril,” reads one order. “We now face a new set of challenges, including a global race to dominate in artificial intelligence, a growing need for energy independence, and access to uninterruptible power supplies for national security.”
The comparison runs deeper than their support for nuclear power. Like Eisenhower, Trump sees America in a dead heat race for technological superiority with a global competitor. Whether or not he can succeed in massively expanding the American energy supply may dictate whether or not America can stay ahead of China in the race for AI dominance. Although there is bipartisan recognition of this challenge, Trump’s task may prove steeper than his predecessor’s, in large part due to the obstacles put in front of him by his own party and parts of his own administration.
Eisenhower rode to the White House after two decades of New Deal rule, which saw the federal government explode in scale and scope. To balance the budget, he decided, the government would beat a strategic retreat. Eisenhower calculated that he could pull off this gambit while keeping up the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Nuclear power emerged as a product of Eisenhower’s ambitions. To reduce the Navy’s budget, his administration terminated a program dedicated to developing nuclear propulsion engines for carriers, which Hyman Rickover had already developed for the submarine fleet. Rickover found himself reassigned to debuting the world’s first civilian nuclear power reactor in Shippingport, Penn. He brought the project to completion in just two years, turning the reactor on in 1957.
Shippingport stood for several things at once. First and foremost, it represented America’s technological excellence. The nation’s first nuclear plant came online just after the Soviet satellite Sputnik had wreathed its way around the earth. But the plant also reflected the Eisenhower administration’s approach to industrial development. As opposed to Democrats like Sen. Al Gore, Sr., who wanted to turn nuclear power into a New Deal-style public-works policy, the Eisenhower administration preferred to encourage nuclear development through vendors and utilities by offering financial support through the Atomic Energy Commission. It was through this process that the largest nuclear power fleet in the world was created.
Like Eisenhower, Trump inherited a troubled federal budget and a fierce global competitor, but he can’t rely on the US industrial base on its own to deliver on something as important as nuclear power. Eisenhower entered office when America stood alone as the industrial powerhouse of the world amid the wreckage of World War II. Moreover, America had accustomed itself to ever-increasing demand for electric power. This created a robust workforce of everyone from engineers to linemen capable of delivering complex engineering projects. At the time, America could also rely on a domestic supply of uranium to feed this new technology, whereas today the country relies on foreign producers despite its domestic reserves.
The shape and purpose of the administrative state has also changed radically since Eisenhower took office. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the American regulatory apparatus has shifted from a developmentalist footing to a litigious menagerie of environmental reviews policed by well-heeled environmental NGOs. Historically, it was the dawn of environmental law and the civil-society organs attached to it that ended the developmentalist stage of America’s relationship to heavy industry. Through this administrative regime, the American government encourages an economy of “bits” over “atoms,” as Vice President JD Vance recently put it.
If Trump means to rekindle the atom’s might in order to win the power-hungry race for AI dominance, then he must overcome all of these challenges. His executive orders—which address everything from regulation to nuclear energy for national security purposes to nuclear innovation to the nuclear industrial base—are aimed squarely at the staggering size of these obstacles. Unfortunately, EOs can prove fragile, prone as they are to reversal and lacking the power of congressional lawmaking. And it’s the latter that may block the president’s nuclear ambitions.
The order titled “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base” calls for “10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” Or as Trump glossed it in the press conference, “We’re also talking about the big plants, the very very biggest, we’re going to be doing them also.” The entity vested with the responsibility for achieving this aim is the Loans Program Office, the Department of Energy’s bank. Only the LPO is currently capable of offering the kinds of long-term loans with low interest rates that projects like large nuclear reactors need to succeed. And large nuclear plants are the only kind we know how to build thus far.
“Trump must handle factions within his own party and across branches.”
Whereas Eisenhower had to contend with a Democratic party and its New Deal coalition, Trump must handle factions within his own party and across branches. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s DOGE shrank the LPO’s staff by 60 percent. Now, the House reconciliation bill—the Big Beautiful Bill—before the Senate seeks to strip the LPO of its unobligated credit subsidy, the exact pool of money it needs to prioritize nuclear deployment per the president’s order.
A large faction of the GOP, it seems, is either unaware that the LPO is a remarkably efficient and profitable arm of the DOE or too dogmatically opposed to government spending to care. Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently pleaded with the Senate to keep the LPO’s funding, calling it “the most efficient tool we have in the department to help emerging energy technologies” in a recent hearing and asking lawmakers to “enact the budget you know we need.”
In order to pull off a nuclear renaissance, Trump needs to discipline the Republican Party. Sober, serious, and war-worn Eisenhower exuded a sense of command. Father really did seem to know best. Trump, on the other hand, seems to operate like both showrunner and star of a presidential media empire. Minutiae have never been his strong suit. To win his place beside Eisenhower in history, however, Trump will have to prove his doubters wrong. If he can do so, a legacy of multi-generational energy dominance is within Trump’s grasp.