Donald Trump’s twin-track approach to “golden age” growth policy unfortunately mixes bold reform with strategic misfire. His push to slash outdated nuclear-energy regulations is an overdue victory for both common sense and progress toward an America of abundant clean energy. But the president’s wrongheaded proposal to gut basic scientific research spending undermines the very engine of future technological breakthroughs that drives economic growth over the long run. The combo reflects an unwelcome dose of policymaking dissonance.
As Wall Street Journal economics columnist Greg Ip writes in a new commentary, the Trump administration has ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reevaluate its longstanding radiation safety rules—specifically, the “linear no-threshold” (LNT) model. This regulatory approach assumes there’s no safe level of radiation exposure. That, despite weak scientific consensus supporting it. (“Grand Central Station couldn’t meet the NRC’s radiation standards, which are often lower than natural background levels,” Ip quotes Energy Secretary Chris Wright.) Critics correctly argue that these ultra-conservative standards have helped paralyze US nuclear development for decades, slowing decarbonization and now leaving the country scrambling for abundant clean energy as the Age of Artificial Intelligence awakens.
By challenging the LNT model and associated “as low as reasonably achievable” radiation thresholds, Trump is offering the nuclear sector a chance to re-emerge after the country in the 1970s squashed attempts at expansion. From the piece:
Between 1954 and 1978 in the U.S., 133 reactors were approved for construction, according to the White House. Since then, just a handful have been approved. There are lots of reasons, but a culture of caution at the NRC, created in 1975, and reinforced by the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, is certainly one.
New technologies like small modular reactors and next-generation fast reactors have struggled to get off the ground in part because the regulatory regime is frozen in a risk-averse, post-Three Mile Island mindset. The administration’s directive promises that faster licensing, streamlined reviews, and cost savings for the sector could put nuclear power thoroughly in the mix as a scalable, clean energy solution. This is precisely the kind of energy innovation needed to sustain an AI-powered economy over the coming years and decades.
Clearing regulatory roadblocks, however, is only half the innovation equation that I outlined in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. The other half: the foundational research that makes breakthrough technologies possible in the first place, advances that historically have generated huge economic impacts.
For example: The recent paper “The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence from U.S. Appropriations Shocks” out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas finds that US government spending on nondefense R&D—especially basic research through agencies like NASA and NIH—has a big, delayed payoff for total factor productivity (TFP), a measure of the economy’s innovative capacity. It accounts for about a quarter of postwar TFP growth and delivers very high returns. In contrast, defense R&D has little long-term impact on TFP. The study argues that underinvestment in nondefense R&D has contributed significantly to America’s TFP slowdown since the 1960s. We should fix that, ASAP.
Yet as The New York Times reports, citing a new analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the administration’s proposed budget for fiscal 2026 would slash basic research funding by a third, with the National Science Foundation seeing a devastating cut of nearly 60 percent. The AAAS study, which “added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies,” found these reductions target the earliest stages of scientific discovery. These are just the kind of projects that rarely deliver immediate commercial payoff but can lead to transformative breakthroughs down the road.
From GPS to mRNA vaccines, the US has long relied on a symbiotic relationship between government-funded research and private-sector execution. Worse, it leaves a vacuum that China is eager to fill. And remember, government R&D focuses more on basic and early-stage research with uncertain commercial outcomes—again, laying the groundwork for future breakthroughs—while business R&D emphasizes shorter-term, market-ready innovations. The two are complementary: Public investment de-risks early discovery, enabling private firms to build and scale transformative technologies. This is the heart of the American System of science and technological progress.
Trump’s deregulatory instincts on nuclear power are right. But his cuts to science investment risk short-circuiting the very future he seeks to build. Deregulation is not a substitute for discovery. A true innovation agenda makes a priority of both.
source: American Enterprise Institute
