America has big plans. Getting permission to build a big project is another story. The new Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or BAAJA (pronounced like, and just as bold and refreshing as, Mountain Dew’s Baja Blast), aims to remove political barriers that keep projects on hold. Senators Capito (R‑WV), Lee (R‑UT), Whitehouse (D‑RI), and Heinrich (D‑NM) introduced the bill text—a whopping 417 pages—on September 30. BAAJA builds on previous reform efforts, such as Manchin-Barrasso’s EPRA in 2024 and this term’s SPEED and PERMIT Acts. Unlike earlier efforts, BAAJA is already gaining strong bipartisan support, giving it a fighting chance to clear the Senate’s 60-vote requirement when it reconvenes the week of November 9. 

This moment is different for myriad reasons—electricity demand growth is reaching levels not seen this century, costly Biden-era energy subsidies have mostly been cut or curtailed, and Democrats now understand how much damage a president can inflict when he despises certain forms of energy. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was the poster child for Democrats’ arbitrary cancellation of major energy projects under Presidents Obama and Biden, and Trump has spent his second term applying the same playbook to solar and wind projects. 

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The average price of diesel fuel in the US shot up from about $3.69 earlier this year to a high of $6.53 per gallon on Wednesday, September 23. Beyond the sticker shock at the pump, higher-priced diesel means the cost of transporting just about anything by heavy-duty truck, rail, or marine transport will rise, deepening the affordability crunch affecting American households. 

Politico reported that the Trump administration was planning to ban diesel exports for 90 days, while a White House official denounced the report as false. Although we understand the urge to address diesel prices, banning exports will do little to reduce prices in the short run and could backfire spectacularly in the long run. We support the view expressed by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who told a New York audience on Wednesday that banning diesel exports is a blunt tool that won’t work.

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At the end of August 1976, in the lingering patriotism of America’s bicentennial celebrations, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, a bill meant to rein in past delegations of emergency power and ensure that the legislature maintains control over the use of such authorities going forward. President Gerald Ford, who had turned back Ronald Reagan’s challenge at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City earlier that month, signed the NEA into law on September 14.

The law was the culmination of a years-long process initiated to study the implications of terminating a 1950 national emergency proclamation, issued by President Truman during the Korean War, that was still in force and in use throughout the Vietnam War. The special committee soon realized that there were, in fact, four extant national emergencies, the oldest dating back to 1933. Dismayed that a majority of Americans had “lived their entire lives under emergency rule,” the committee was clear-eyed about where blame belonged: “This dangerous state of affairs is a direct result of Congress’ failure to establish effective means for the handling of emergencies and its willingness to defer to Executive branch leadership.” 

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Last week, Williams—a natural gas company—hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a power plant called Socrates South that just began operating in New Albany, Ohio. Notably, this natural gas plant is fully disconnected from the public power grid, supplying the data centers of a Meta affiliate, Sidecat, without affecting anyone else’s electricity. 

Speed to Power

The New Albany site is part of a growing trend of data centers acquiring electric service more rapidly than traditional timelines of six, eight, or even ten years. The Socrates South plant came online in just 17 months, with the first filings made with the Ohio Power Siting Board in March of 2025. 

This is a big victory for the local community, the developer Williams, and their customer Sidecat, but also the Ohio lawmakers behind the legislation that made it possible: last year’s HB 15. That bill provided the regulatory certainty that a fully off-grid generation plant could avoid the long queue for grid connection and bring “speed to power” to customers who don’t want to wait. It’s aligned with a framework we’ve been advocating, called consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), which creates space for new, privately financed electric utilities to supply non-residential customers, such as data centers, without interconnecting with the existing grid.

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This week, Reuters and Politico reported that the White House plans to expand the Ratepayer Protection Pledge by encouraging utilities, data center developers, and Republican governors to join the effort. The pledge rests on a simple principle: The technology companies driving the AI boom should pay the full cost of the electricity infrastructure they require, rather than shifting those costs onto American families.

That’s the right objective. The next step is finding a policy that actually achieves that.

Public concern over data centers has grown rapidly, driven less by opposition to artificial intelligence than by fears of higher electricity bills. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently responded by imposing a statewide moratorium on new data center construction. Other states are considering similar restrictions. Whether those concerns are justified or not, the political reality is clear: If policymakers cannot protect consumers from rising costs, they will eventually protect them by slowing development instead.

America needs a better option. The Trump administration should champion reforms that accomplish both goals at once: accelerate AI infrastructure while ensuring American families never have to subsidize development. Consumer-Regulated Electricity (CRE) offers exactly that solution by allowing developers to build and operate entirely private electricity networks outside the traditional regulated grid.

President Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure landed last week showing more than $2 billion in income, roughly triple 2024’s figure. Cryptocurrency alone accounted for $1.4 billion, most from meme-coin royalties and token sales tied to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. Read against the deals cataloged below, the filing paints a sordid picture of self-dealing within the upper echelons of the White House—or at the very least, the appearance of such.

Tungsten and Kazakhstan

Let’s start with tungsten. Today, China controls roughly 80 percent of the world’s supply and has spent the past year and a half tightening export controls. This has caused the metal’s cost to grow from around $340 per ton to well past $3,000. The US hasn’t run a commercial tungsten mine since 2015. Given tungsten’s importance to a number of security-related products, including weapons systems, American policymakers are actively looking to break China’s chokehold.

Over the summer of 2025, the US Export–Import Bank and US International Development Finance Corporation issued letters of interest—non-binding but meaningful signals—for up to $1.6 billion in potential financing for a Kazakh tungsten venture led by Cove Kaz Capital: $900 million from EXIM and $700 million from DFC, against total development costs pegged at roughly $1.1 billion. The joint venture itself, pairing Cove Kaz with Kazakhstan’s national mining company Tau-Ken Samruk, was unveiled in November 2025 at the C5+1 summit by President Trump and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. President Trump personally worked out the deal with Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev; Commerce Secretary Lutnick was also heavily involved. The developer has since gone back to the well, asking the Pentagon for another $400 million.

The president’s two eldest sons found their way into the deal through a side door. According to Financial Times reporting, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump entered the picture in August 2025 through American Ventures, an investment vehicle holding a stake in Skyline Builders, a Nasdaq-listed firm, and they added to those positions on October 28, 2025. On October 31—weeks after Lutnick met Tokayev in New York with President Trump joining by phone—investors participating through a financing structure involving Dominari Securities, a Trump Tower-based firm partly owned by the brothers, acquired a 20 percent stake in the entity tied to the tungsten project. The US-Kazakhstan agreement was signed six days later. Skyline and Cove Kaz have since agreed to combine into Kaz Resources Inc., expected to trade on Nasdaq as KAZR. The Trump brothers’ precise financial interests have not been fully disclosed.

Cantor Fitzgerald, run by Secretary Lutnick’s two sons, helped raise $210 million for one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the deal—the kind of assignment that typically produces millions in fees.

The New York Times reported that it counted $18.6 billion in federal backing for 60 critical minerals projects since President Trump took office, with the Trump and Lutnick families having some ties to at least 14 of them.

The new disclosure shows this wasn’t a one-off. Trump reported capital gains of $100,000 to $1 million on shares of MP Materials, the rare-earth miner whose stock jumped roughly 50 percent the day the Pentagon announced it was taking a 15 percent equity stake. And Donald Trump Jr.‘s venture fund, 1789 Capital, bought into Vulcan Elements in August 2025—three months before the Pentagon handed Vulcan a $620 million loan that helped push its valuation from around $200 million to nearly $2 billion. Different metal, different shell company, same shape.

Semiconductors and the United Arab Emirates

The UAE side of the ledger runs on a similar mechanism, just with chips instead of ore. As the Wall Street Journal detailed earlier this year, four days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Abu Dhabi vehicle backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—the UAE’s national security adviser, director of the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and brother of the UAE’s president—bought 49 percent of World Liberty Financial for $500 million. Eric Trump signed the deal, and roughly $187 million landed in Trump-controlled accounts before anyone outside the deal knew it had happened. The CEO of World Liberty Financial is Zach Witkoff, son of Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and key member of the administration’s foreign policy team.

Meanwhile, White House AI czar David Sacks pushed hard to loosen Biden-era chip restrictions on the UAE despite his fund’s ties to Tahnoon’s own sovereign wealth vehicle. The one senior official resisting that push, National Security Council Senior Director David Feith, was fired within weeks. Days before it would have taken effect, the administration killed the Biden export rule; by May, Washington had agreed to sell the UAE 500,000 advanced Nvidia chips a year, with one-fifth earmarked for Tahnoon’s own AI company. That same month, another Tahnoon vehicle ran $2 billion through World Liberty’s stablecoin into Binance—the exchange whose founder Trump pardoned five months later.

These private profits for Trump administration officials and their family members sit downstream of specific US international trade and investment practices, including efforts to mitigate China’s chokehold on tungsten, other rare earths, and semiconductor export controls. None of these policy goals is necessarily illegitimate on its own terms, but the means of pursuing those goals are transforming ordinary policy into family enrichment schemes.

Update: This post has been revised to clarify the timing of the EXIM and DFC Letters of Interest, the structure of the Trump family’s financial exposure to the Kazakhstan tungsten deal and Cantor Fitzgerald’s role in the transaction.

Last week, the Trump administration announced it is offering $17.5 billion in financing to build five new two-reactor nuclear power plants featuring Westinghouse Electric’s AP1000 large reactor. The offer comes on the heels of last November’s Trump announcement of an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse intended to jump-start a fleet of new US reactors.

Government doling out money (and other breaks) to nuclear power is old hat. But the two announcements, taken together, put a new spin on the practice of politicians picking winners and losers in the marketplace: Under the November deal, Uncle Sam could get a 20 percent equity stake in Westinghouse if its nuclear business booms in the coming years. Writing at the time, I predicted that it probably won’t happen: Nuke makes lousy business sense, as energy economist Steve Thomas recently detailed in Cato’s policy magazine Regulation, and it’s doubtful energy companies would take on such risk. Apparently, my prediction’s been right so far, so the Trump administration is offering a sweetener to get things going. 

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