Tracking the DF Express: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Chinese Media and Public Data for Studying Nuclear Forces
Observers of Chinese nuclear politics and force posture are old friends with information challenges. Open-source analysts of China’s nuclear force drew heavily on published Chinese-language writings, footage, and interviews by official Chinese media or private Chinese citizens, as well as commercial satellite imagery. These powerful open-source tools enable scholars to gain insight into some of the Chinese government’s most closely guarded secrets, such as the construction of 119 nuclear missile silos. Reports from well-regarded institutions, such as the PLA Rocket Force Order of Battle report by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, offer open-source research that provides concrete data on the Chinese nuclear force, using thoroughly analyzed imagery and Chinese-language materials. Other studies, such as several reports by the RAND Corporation and the Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), extensively used Chinese military and technical writings to identify patterns in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s strategic thinking in its own words. Combined with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)’s annual report on nuclear forces, there is a growing and vibrant open-source intellectual community on the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF).
While researchers continue to dissect new information from China, obtaining reliable data has become increasingly difficult for two reasons. First, the Chinese government has curtailed foreign access to sources like academic databases that were previously fair game for scholarly use, complicating the already dense “information fog” over China’s political and military apparatus. Second, unverified, digitally altered, and AI-generated disinformation and misinformation are commonplace on popular social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter). Combined with the multitude of Chinese social media and video websites, weeding out the noise and distraction has become an increasingly challenging task for new researchers in this field.
This essay provides introductory guidance on the usefulness of Chinese social media and video platforms for observers and researchers of China’s nuclear force. This guide may assist researchers in identifying what to look for and on which platform, especially for those who are not advanced or native speakers of Mandarin. In the sections below, I compare a set of popular Chinese social media platforms and discuss the usefulness of each with respect to open-source study of the Chinese nuclear force. I also present a brief glossary of nicknames and vernacular terms related to nuclear matters in Mandarin, along with their translations. I conclude with a brief discussion of the use of AI-enabled translation tools for open-source research on the PLA.
Chinese media and OSINT: What’s good for what?
Sina Weibo (新浪微博)
Weibo is useful for providing timely, authoritative, and chronologically documented information on training exercises, operations, and policy changes that are of propaganda or morale-promoting value. The equivalent of X in China, Weibo is the biggest Chinese-language social media with over 500 million monthly active users as of 2024. It is likely the most influential social media platform in China, as indicated by the vast number of users and a highly agile and effective censorship system. Due to Weibo’s ability to rapidly disseminate information, all major state and military organs, including the PLA Daily, the Ministry of Defense, individual service branches, and all five PLA Theater Commands (战区), maintain official accounts on Weibo (Figure 1). These accounts are directly managed by dedicated propaganda or public affairs teams and authorized to post military content, which sometimes features approved footage and photos of training exercises. Details revealed in the footage or pictures may help researchers identify the unit leadership and the weapon systems used during the exercise. Additionally, Weibo is often the first platform to announce state media PLA news. The People’s Daily, CCTV, and the Xinhua Agency regularly post links to news articles and updates on Weibo to facilitate dissemination.
For researchers, Weibo contains a reasonably reliable search system. Researchers may use the Weibo search bar to look for mentions of “strategic deterrence,” “nuclear force,” or names of nuclear missiles and use the filter function to screen for content released by official accounts. For well-publicized events like a missile exercise, the topic may be included in the trending (热搜) section for real-time updates. However, a significant limitation of Weibo is that scholars must distinguish whether the content posted by the official accounts directly reflects the Party’s policy or simply shows a lower-level interpretation of the policy by individual units. These official accounts are likely managed by young, tech-savvy officers or civilian employees trained in public affairs.
Sometimes, these individuals might improvise and go beyond what they were prescribed. Some more active accounts, such as the Eastern Theater Command official account, have interacted with random Weibo users in the past and have eagerly implied their belligerent stance toward Taiwan. This led many Chinese netizens to interpret the official account’s posts as a sign of imminent military action, which thankfully was not the intention. Additionally, state-run accounts have also taken down content (primarily propaganda material) for reasons other than revealing unapproved or sensitive information. Again, since the accounts are likely managed by younger personnel at the lower level, contents could be removed when it was later found to be too politically sensitive or too unpersuasive. In 2019, the People’s Liberation Army Army (PLAA) official account posted a propaganda article on Weibo aimed at inspiring nationalistic fervor. It quoted a passionate patriotic poem written by Wang Jingwei (汪精卫), whom the Chinese government considered a “traitor (汉奸)” for cooperating with the Imperial Japanese invaders, most likely because the editor had known about the poem but not its authorship. The comment section quickly pointed out this “political mistake (政治错误)”, leading to the content’s prompt removal. As such, researchers should be aware that removed content does not necessarily suggest valuable information worth hiding.
It is also important to note that accessing Weibo sometimes involves more than typing in the URL. Aside from the content available on the front page (e.g., the trending section), the rich content of the platform is only accessible after logging in. One does not need a mainland Chinese phone number to create an account on Weibo. A virtual number from a trusted provider is also sufficient. Even without an account, researchers could still access the Weibo homepage of many accounts by searching the account’s name in a search engine (for instance, here is the direct link to the official PLA Eastern Theater Weibo page). However, Sina Weibo’s search bar will not be available for unregistered users.
CCTV.com (央视网)
CCTV.com is a webpage that gives scholars access to the state media’s TV programs without a registered account. In addition to live-streamed news stories, the webpage also serves as a large but incomplete archive of past TV programs. CCTV.com has high-definition PLA video footage and interviews, which may be particularly useful for open-source analysis. Some of the CASI reports made clever use of video footage released by Chinese state media to identify key information regarding training exercises and unit deployment, particularly the CCTV-7 channel dedicated to military content. Other open-source intelligence analysts were able to map out key personnel, location, and weapon system information from CCTV news broadcasts and military TV programs. The search bar supports keyword searches and includes government-sponsored TV programs from various channels. The search also returns results from CCTV webpages and the Xinhua Agency. This is the most useful for finding information related to specific missile systems. For instance, among the top results for “DF-26” include footage of a DF-26 missile from a documentary (Figure 2). The search result for “dual-capability” also returned a video by a Chinese military commentator who states that China’s hypersonic vehicle is dual-capable (Figure 3). For open-source analysis, having the ability to revisit footage that might contain useful information on the PLARF is a major advantage of this platform. At the same time, the search function is limited to the titles of the program, not necessarily the content. Furthermore, many of the videos available on CCTV.com are commentaries from Chinese military experts. While the commentary from the Chinese experts may be useful, the visual component may not always be the latest developments. Because of the length requirement of the TV program, the visual element may only have looped videos of known weapon testing or parade footage. Researchers may consider comparing the footage from different programs to remove the repeated material.
Bilibili (哔哩哔哩), Douyin (抖音), Kuaishou (快手)
Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishou are among the most used entertainment video-sharing and short-video platforms in China. Bilibili is a video service primarily for animation, comics, and games (ACG) content. It has a “bullet comment (弹幕)” function that allows users to inject text over the video content in real time. The platform attracts over 100 million daily users as of 2024. Douyin (the Chinese mainland version of TikTok) and Kuaishou are short-video platforms with a significantly larger user base than Bilibili, with Douyin content reaching over 1 billion active users monthly. Unsurprisingly, the PLA, the individual Theater Commands, and the Chinese government and Party organs maintain an active presence on these platforms for propaganda, news updates, and publicity programs, often repeating the same message sent across other outlets.
However, despite these platforms’ popularity, they are not great resources for open-source nuclear force research for two reasons. First, there is overwhelming noise from private click-farming content creators who would grossly overstate or fabricate China’s military capabilities to profit from nationalistic sentiments. A researcher may find many videos speculating about the capabilities of the H-20 bomber with no credible source to back up the claims. Private content creators typically have no privileged access to information. In the rare cases where some villagers filmed a rocket booster falling from the sky (some Chinese rocket boosters in the past landed in populated villages), the video is often quickly censored on these closely watched platforms. Second, official government accounts on these platforms almost always repeat information that has been released on Weibo and other traditional news platforms. Some Party organs, such as the Communist Youth League (共青团), which pushes propaganda to the younger generation, would convey the same approved message using CGI videos to boost nationalist sentiment, but the content itself is no more useful than reading the official news release. Overall, there is little added advantage of using the entertainment-based services for potentially useful open-source information.
Combining Sources
While Chinese video and social media platforms could assist OSINT research on China’s nuclear forces, researchers could also combine the visual element of weapon systems with textual data gathered from authoritative Chinese platforms like China Military Online (中国军网), PLA Procurement website (军队采购网), and Qi Cha Cha (企查查). The visual data can help identify many technical aspects of the PLA’s nuclear weapons, but the textual information can greatly inform the acquisition, production, and deployment of the weapon and support systems. Provinces with robust military and heavy industries, such as Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Shandong, and Shaanxi, sometimes release contracting and procurement information locally on provincial and municipal government websites. The information found on local government websites is admittedly sporadic, making broad, systematic collection difficult. Still, such information could serve as valuable first-hand sources for OSINT researchers. For more technical analysis of weapon systems, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (中国国家知识产权局) has a patent database that could be useful to track the development and ownership of certain enabling technologies for nuclear systems. This may be further enhanced by using the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (中国知网CNKI) to locate academic articles on the relevant technology, though access to CNKI articles usually requires an institutional subscription through a university library. Note that many of the Chinese government and military websites do not support a secure HTTPS connection. Some, like Qi Cha Cha, may require the user to access its content from a Chinese mainland IP address. Researchers should deploy cybersecurity tools to take full advantage of these resources.
Nicknames and Vernacular
In addition to the advantages and limitations of different social media platforms, researchers should be aware of the common nicknames and vernacular related to the Chinese nuclear force. Much like how the F-16 is commonly called “viper” instead of the official name “fighting falcon,” there are also nicknames for weapons and systems in the PLA. The table below summarizes several common terms and explains their meaning and primary usage.
A Note on Using AI Translation Services
There is little doubt that AI-enabled translation services like DeepL offer convenient and mostly accurate translations of Chinese texts. However, users should exercise caution when asking the AI to translate lengthy or complicated Chinese texts. Since the Chinese written language system is not space-delimited and often contains a mix of recently invented slang words, formal, and classical Chinese (文言文) phrases and quotes, the translation software sometimes cannot adjust properly to the context in which the classical phrases are used. This could easily lead to misinterpretation.For instance, translating and searching for the phrase “nuclear force (核力量)” may return results that contain the phrase “hardcore power (硬核力量)”, which is unrelated to nuclear weapons. In another example, a PLA Daily article uses the phrase “北约军费连增虚实几何” as the title, which mixes the classical grammar with modern Mandarin. DeepL would translate the word “几何” as “geometry” because it is the most used meaning in modern Mandarin, whereas the correct interpretation is “to what extent” or “by how much” in this context (Figure 4).
In a similar instance, DeepL entirely fails to translate the part that contains classical grammar and offers an incorrect translation (Figure 5). This is most likely because the software treats the original Chinese phrase as a statement, whereas the classical grammar indicates a question.
Therefore, it is prudent to cross-reference and look up phrases individually when using AI-enabled translation tools. Inserting complete paragraphs is likely less accurate than looking up difficult phrases or individual vocabulary.
Conclusion
This paper provides a preliminary guide on using Chinese social media and video platforms for nuclear-related open-source research by reviewing the usefulness and credibility of the content released by various official and privately owned platforms (Table 2). In sum, there is no singular most useful platform for information on the Chinese nuclear force, but some may help piece together interesting findings upon cautious review and cross-reference. While advanced Chinese language proficiency and cultural familiarity remain irreplaceable skills that can greatly enhance the accuracy and speed of open-source analysis, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for successful open-source analysis on China’s nuclear forces. Researchers can still make effective and efficient use of publicly available information by applying analytical due diligence and having context-specific awareness of Chinese sources.
This publication was made possible by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Barriers to Building: A Framework for the Next Era of Electricity Policy
The American power grid in 2025 faces a set of challenges unlike any in recent memory. The United States is deploying clean energy far too slowly to meet load growth, avoid spikes in electricity prices, and combat climate change. To get within striking distance of the Paris climate goals and plan for the lowest electricity costs, we must build 70 to 125 gigawatts of clean energy per year, much higher than the record 50 gigawatts built in 2024.
Grid upgrades, too, are proceeding far too slowly. To meet growing electricity demand and integrate new clean power at lowest cost, transmission capacity must more than double within regions and increase more than four-fold between regions by 2035. But large transmission projects frequently take 7 to 15 years from initial planning to in-service operation and only 322 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines were completed in 2024—the third slowest year of new construction in the last 15 years.
Even before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) gutted federal clean energy incentives, non-cost challenges like uncertain and lengthy interconnection and siting processes, local restrictions on development, and supply chain bottlenecks led to lower levels of clean energy deployment than projected and slowed down grid upgrades. Now, clean energy and transmission face additional cost and financing barriers from Congressional rollbacks and permitting restrictions from the Trump Administration.
Past federal and state clean energy policies, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) as well as state renewable portfolio standards, have leaned heavily on financial incentives to drive deployment and incentivize grid upgrades and expansion. These incentives successfully attracted massive investment in clean energy projects, but they largely did not grapple with non-cost challenges—like siting restrictions—to building projects.
Political challenges have made it difficult to pass, implement, and defend clean energy policies. A mismatch between public needs, government programs, and industry incentives has led to unsatisfactory outcomes and degraded public trust in the government.
Now, policymakers, industry, and the advocacy community are paying more attention to non-financial issues that can impede deployment, like siting and permitting. The abundance movement, for example, has identified two causes of America’s building problem: ineffective government programs and burdensome permitting processes. This diagnosis is incomplete. Getting to a world where we can build things quickly and make government work will require us to identify the full suite of problems, not just these convenient two.
To maximize clean energy deployment, we must address the project development barriers that slow down investment and construction. And to build more durable and effective energy policies, we must interrogate and address the political barriers that have held us back from smart policymaking and implementation that can withstand political change. Overcoming these challenges is necessary to address the climate crisis, rein in rising utility bills, and ensure that government can deliver on its energy promises to the public it serves.
In early 2025, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) set out to identify and categorize these barriers through research and interviews with experts and practitioners. Following this research, at the 2025 Climate Week NYC, FAS convened a group of researchers, advocates, industry leaders, and policymakers to solicit feedback on this framework.
The outcome of that convening allowed us to ground-truth the following report—which we intend to use as a rubric for state-level electricity policies and efforts to rethink federal energy policy. We should ask: to what extent do new policies under consideration reduce the major barriers to building clean energy and transmission while addressing the shortcomings that have made past policy less durable?
A future paper will detail the priority solutions that make progress on each of the project development barriers while improving our toolkit to overcome the political barriers that impede durable policy.
Contents
Project Development Barriers: Making it Harder to Build
Clean energy technologies are mature and cost competitive, if not least cost, across the country. Yet we are not building clean energy as fast as necessary, and in many places we are building new gas plants instead, raising costs for customers and intensifying the climate crisis. This trend is the result of several barriers that make it more difficult to build clean energy.
Interconnection
The Barrier
The interconnection process is one of the most significant constraints on clean energy deployment in the United States. At the end of 2023, nearly 2,600 gigawatts (GW) of generation and storage were queued, which is more than double the U.S. installed capacity (~1,280 GW). Today’s grid was built around a small number of large, centralized fossil fuel plants; the grid must now accommodate thousands of diverse, geographically distributed projects. Processes that were designed for a handful of large plants per year are now evaluating orders of magnitude more proposals, each with more complex grid interactions. These processes are not able to adequately handle the current grid, nor have they kept pace with development in grid planning and analysis tools. The result is a massive backlog of projects waiting to interconnect to the grid and a review system that is fundamentally misaligned with the scale and pace of the energy transition.
Developer experience confirms that interconnection challenges rank among the most decisive barriers to clean energy buildout. In the 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developer survey, respondents ranked interconnection delays and network upgrade costs higher than permitting, supply chain constraints, or workforce shortages as reasons for project cancellations or deferrals. Many projects face cost uncertainty on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars as interconnection studies shift responsibility for broad system upgrades onto single developers. Interconnection costs are rising, and it is difficult for developers to predict what their interconnection bill will be at the end of the process. This unpredictability increases financing risk, reduces developer participation, and leads to large-scale attrition.
Outdated processes for evaluating and approving new projects have led to enormous project delays, averaging 4-5 years from request to commercial operation. This delay has raised prices and led some grid operators to keep old, expensive coal plants online in lieu of new capacity. Both of these trends benefit incumbent transmission and generation companies, who have significant decision-making power over the entities that control interconnection, making it difficult to update the processes. Clean energy projects also face higher interconnection costs than gas projects because they are more likely to need transmission upgrades to connect to the grid, which increases the chances of project cancellation.
These barriers have direct system-wide consequences. Only about 15 to 20 percent of projects that enter the queue ultimately reach commercial operation, meaning most of the clean energy capacity counted as “planned” will not materialize unless interconnection processes are reformed. Long queue timelines and uncertainty also make it more difficult to finance projects. The result is slower emissions reductions, delayed IRA-driven investment and job creation, and higher costs for consumers as operators extend the life of aging coal and gas resources to meet growing load.
The Past Playbook
Federal interconnection policy has largely gone through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In 2023, FERC issued Order 2023, which made significant changes intended to speed up interconnection and increase certainty for new projects. The rule (1) replaced outdated serial studies, in which operators study projects one by one as their applications come in, with cluster studies, in which operators study projects in batches, (2) required grid operators to speed up study timelines and imposed penalties for failing to meet deadlines, and (3) directed grid operators to update rules to reflect technological advancements, like grid-enhancing technologies and hybrid solar-plus-storage projects. Some grid operators have gone further than Order 2023 to improve interconnection processes, and some states have pushed grid operators for more ambitious reform. In addition to FERC rules, the federal government has also provided limited resources to grid operators to improve interconnection processes.
To date, federal efforts have largely fallen short of what’s necessary to reform interconnection processes to enable adequate buildout of clean energy, and in most places states have limited tools. For one, FERC rules rely on effective implementation from grid operators, which has been a mixed bag. Order 2023 also strayed from making more fundamental changes to the interconnection process, like fixed entry fees that provide certainty to developers or proactive modeling and transparency of information to allow projects to connect quickly in places with transmission headroom. It fully does not address the fundamental problem that rising, variable interconnection costs are killing projects. The federal government has limited resources to support grid operators through, for example, funding for increased staffing or new technology to automate studies.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of energy policy must radically transform the way we connect projects to the grid to enable faster, greater deployment of clean energy, including through an expanded role for federal and state governments. Policy must shorten study timelines using automation and other new technology, enable smarter planning with proactive modeling and greater transparency for developers, increase upfront cost certainty, and reduce the amount that projects end up paying for interconnection. And in addition, the next playbook must address governance and decision-making structures that favor incumbents who benefit from a congested grid.
Siting & Permitting
The Barrier
Siting and permitting processes have become two of the most visible friction points in the clean energy buildout. While federal policy receives the most attention, most clean energy siting and permitting decisions are made at the state and local level, where zoning boards, planning commissions, county supervisors, and community members have significant influence over whether a project proceeds. In many states, local jurisdictions have adopted new ordinances that restrict or outright ban wind, solar, and transmission development. According to recent analyses, roughly one-fifth of U.S. counties now have formal restrictions on clean energy, and many more are considering them. Even in states with strong climate and clean energy targets, municipal-level land use rules can effectively halt projects that align with statewide goals.
These local barriers are often rooted in concerns about landscape change, perceived impacts on property values, agricultural land use, wildlife, or community identity. But they are also a reflection of who benefits and who bears the immediate impacts of clean energy development. Benefits like lower system-wide electricity prices, cleaner air, and national decarbonization progress tend to be distributed widely, while the visual and land-use impacts are concentrated locally. Developers may not readily have the resources to meet community needs to come to agreement on projects, and federal and state governments often do not have adequate resources to support community benefits. Misinformation and disinformation—spread by incumbent interests who stand to lose money with greater clean energy or transmission deployment—also seed opposition in communities.
Permitting requirements add an additional layer of delay and uncertainty. Most clean energy projects, particularly solar and storage projects—which make up the bulk of new planned capacity—rarely trigger major federal environmental statutes and primarily deal with state-level permitting. Developers must navigate state statutes governing clean water, conservation, and environmental impacts, which serve important purposes but are often still implemented through outdated processes (e.g., many states still require paper permits; in Arizona, digitization reduced timelines for one permit process by 91 percent) administered by understaffed agencies. Projects such as transmission lines, offshore wind facilities, pumped storage hydropower, nuclear plants, geothermal projects, and any project on federal land or receiving federal grants generally must also navigate federal permitting processes. When new projects trigger federal review, they must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and sometimes other federal permitting statutes, like the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Endangered Species Act. These reviews can take multiple years, particularly when agencies have limited staffing or when studies must coordinate across several state and federal entities and jurisdictions.
Delays from local siting and state and federal permitting translate directly into cost escalation and canceled projects. Developers report that siting challenges can add years to development schedules and millions of dollars in carrying costs before a shovel ever hits the ground. For technologies like wind and solar, where the business model depends on tight capital cost margins, extended pre-construction periods can be the difference between a viable project and one that never breaks ground. Transmission development is even more exposed: large lines can spend a decade or more navigating route identification, landowner negotiations, environmental review, and litigation. Without new transmission capacity, interconnection backlogs grow, power costs increase, and states are forced to rely on older fossil resources simply because they are already in place.
Yet, the challenge isn’t so simple. It is not simply “local opposition” or “slow permitting.” It is that the scale of clean energy land use today is fundamentally different from the past century of centralized fossil energy development. We are building more projects, in more places, at a pace that communities have not previously experienced.
The Past Playbook
Siting and permitting reforms have increasingly been part of the federal and state policy agenda. Reforms have largely focused on process changes and improving coordination across agencies, with some focus on building capacity for analysis and review in some federal agencies and states. In general, these reforms are insufficient and not widespread enough to match the urgency and scale of the U.S. energy transition.
The federal government has pursued a range of reforms over the past few years to improve the permitting process for projects that involve federal land, funding, or regulatory triggers. Key cross-agency initiatives include the Coordinated Interagency Transmission Authorizations and Permits Program, which made the Department of Energy (DOE) the lead agency for coordinating environmental review and permitting for transmission lines, and FAST-41, which aims to align multiple agency reviews and reduce duplicative permitting processes. Agencies have taken additional steps to improve individual permitting processes. For example, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) designated solar and wind energy zones on public lands to reduce conflicts and expedite approvals, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management modernized offshore wind leasing and programmatic NEPA reviews (although the Trump Administration overhauled these reforms by halting all offshore wind leasing).
Several states have attempted to reduce delays and uncertainty by centralizing siting authority and standardizing permitting rules. For example, New York’s Office of Renewable Siting and Massachusetts’ Energy Facilities Siting Board can override local opposition for large projects, while other states provide model ordinances to guide counties on setbacks, noise, and environmental protection. DOE has also helped states: the agency provided a small amount of technical assistance to states to help local governments with planning, siting, and permitting decisions and a larger tranche of funding for transmission projects to provide benefits to local communities to help with siting and community buy-in. In some places, these reforms have improved consistency across counties and reduced the influence of NIMBY-driven delays.
This playbook, while directionally correct, has fallen short of what is necessary. Local restrictions on clean energy continue to proliferate, siting power plants and large transmission lines remains a major challenge, and many state and federal permitting processes still pose significant barriers. Existing efforts have several gaps: (1) many states have not addressed local restrictions on development, (2) process improvements, especially at the state level, have happened in a piecemeal fashion and have not extended to the full suite of state-level permitting requirements, (3) existing efforts often do not cover the full set of solutions (e.g., broken permitting for customer-owned solar is a huge impediment that keeps U.S. solar costs much higher than other countries), (4) governments and developers have insufficient tools to ensure that local communities get what they want out of projects, and (5) efforts to increase state and federal government capacity (i.e., hiring and training the right staff and increasing analytical capabilities) have fallen far short of what is needed to have a fast, effective, and responsible permitting and siting process.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of energy policy must wrestle with the fundamental siting and permitting challenges and introduce new frameworks for planning, permitting, and building projects. That means upfront planning to make major decisions about tradeoffs between clean energy, water, conservation, and other goals, expanding the tools and resources necessary to ensure that local communities benefit from projects, dramatically improving government capacity to do siting and permitting well, and taking a holistic approach across federal, state, and local governments to prevent new bottlenecks from emerging.
Misaligned Incentives
The Barrier
Most clean energy and grid upgrade projects are financed by private capital and procured or built by companies, either utilities or independent power producers. The profit motives of those financiers and companies determines the solutions they invest in, within the bounds of policy requirements. Across states and regions, outdated utility regulations and market designs have created flawed incentives that have limited investment in some necessary solutions and resulted in overinvestment in others. Utilities have wielded significant political power, built by lobbying with ratepayer money, to maintain today’s incentive structure.
For example, in vertically integrated states, utilities are incentivized to prioritize capital expenditures that earn them the highest returns, within the bounds of commission approval. This incentive structure deprioritizes solutions like increasing imports of clean energy through new transmission and leveraging distributed resources like customer-owned solar.
Most commissions are often not well-equipped or willing to ensure that utilities pursue the full toolkit. In most states, utility planning is driven by the utilities, who conduct detailed analysis and provide proposals on planning and ratemaking to their commissions. Commissions have more limited capacity to conduct analysis and interrogate utility proposals.
Organized markets also have flawed incentive structures. For example, incentive structures in organized markets were generally designed around an electricity grid made up of a small number of large power plants. As a result, market rules and incentive structures provide limited to no support for distributed energy resources, which makes it harder to finance these projects. Governance structures exacerbate this issue. In some organized markets, incumbent generators have significant decision-making power in important determinants of clean energy deployment, including interconnection and transmission planning. Some organized markets have maintained rules that make it difficult to connect new power plants.
Misaligned incentives reduce the effectiveness of other policy solutions. For example, tax credits to reduce the cost of clean energy projects are most effective if utility companies have a profit incentive to build those projects instead of other generation types. The effectiveness of bulk transmission grant programs is limited by the willingness of utility companies to collaborate on projects.
The Past Playbook
Federal policy has largely ignored utility incentive structures and instead attempted to influence private-sector behavior by working within existing incentive structures (e.g., by making it easier for utility companies to use tax credits to build clean energy). Federal agencies have attempted to overcome misaligned incentives through regulations (e.g., pollution standards on power plants that require generation owners to make changes). Some efforts to change incentives structures (e.g., the Clean Electricity Payment Program included in the 2021 Build Back Better Bill) have gained momentum but failed to pass.
Many states have also used tools that operate within existing incentive structures, like renewable portfolio standards that require utilities to procure an increasing share of their electricity from clean sources. States have attempted to change incentive structures to varying extents. More than 15 states have adopted some form of performance-based ratemaking to align utility incentives with desired outcomes. However, these efforts vary in how comprehensively they have changed the dominant incentives for companies.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of energy policy must reform incentives to realign private sector interests with public benefit, including affordable bills, reliability, and decarbonization. To achieve the scale, speed, and depth of transformation needed to address the challenges facing our grid, policy must address misaligned incentives for distribution utilities, generation owners, and integrated utilities in different regulatory contexts. That requires a greater focus on realigning incentive structures at the state and regional level (through organized market reform) as well as creative federal tools to directly change incentives or help states and organized markets to do so. Increasing regulator scrutiny of utilities and bolstering capacity at commissions must also play a larger role moving forward to ensure that utilities are focusing on the best solutions, not just what is most profitable. Greater use of publicly owned or publicly financed projects can also ensure investment in solutions that are underutilized by private companies.
Financing
The Barrier
The federal government has created new financial barriers for clean energy projects. OBBBA’s changes to tax incentives and increased regulatory and permitting uncertainty make clean energy projects more expensive and harder to finance. Macroeconomic changes like persistent inflation and other uncertainty, including on tariffs and interest rates, have also affected investment.
While the clean energy industry has continued to move forward (2025 investment in solar, storage, and wind is similar to 2024 levels, and the industry is benefiting from demand growth, as many projects are able to find offtakers like tech companies willing to pay higher prices), the full effects of federal policy changes are likely delayed, as the tax credits have not fully expired. Moving forward, financing may become a larger barrier. In addition, rising utility bills have opened a conversation about the cost of private finance for grid projects and whether there are alternative approaches that come with lower costs for customers.
Financing less mature clean energy technologies, like advanced nuclear, enhanced geothermal, and aggregated distributed generation (i.e., virtual power plants), remains a major issue.
The Past Playbook
Financial support has played a dominant role in the federal energy policy playbook. Tax incentives, which were dramatically expanded by the IRA and pared down by OBBBA, have been central to energy policy for decades. Grant and loan programs, also dramatically expanded by the IRA, have also been a core driver of clean energy deployment, grid upgrades, and large-scale demonstrations and commercialization of advanced energy technologies. States have also used tax incentives, grant programs, and green banks to finance and incentivize clean energy and grid projects. This model has largely been successful at deploying mature technologies like wind, solar, and storage, but it has fallen short when it comes to commercializing some newer clean energy technologies. Gaps also remain in financial support for projects that struggle to get private capital.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Financing and financial support should continue to be a major pillar of clean energy policy. The next era must incorporate a broader, more diverse set of financing tools in the capital stack, including state-led public financing for more types of projects and state efforts to create demand certainty for clean energy by leveraging procurement and working with corporate buyers.
Grid Planning
The Barrier
Today, the U.S. bulk transmission system faces significant constraints that limit where new clean energy projects can be built and threaten reliability. Congestion already causes curtailment of low-cost low-carbon power, higher consumer electricity prices, and dampened investment in clean energy. Many regions with abundant clean energy resources simply do not have enough high-voltage transmission capacity to deliver that power to population centers. As a result, developers are increasingly unable to move generation projects forward even when siting, permitting, financing, and interconnection queue positions are in place.
These challenges stem in large part from fragmented and inadequate planning processes. Coordinated planning is essential to ensure that transmission is expanded in the right places and that new clean energy investments flow to areas with sufficient transmission capacity. Despite the need for coordination, the United States conducts virtually no interregional transmission planning, and regional planning has been lacking in many regions. The result is piecemeal grid planning, as transmission providers and developers focus on smaller lines which meet near-term needs and are profitable within their own footprint. Planning for these smaller lines is easier as fewer parties are involved. Where we have successfully built larger regional lines, they are the result of transmission providers conducting robust planning processes. And because no unified authority or planning framework exists to shepherd large, high-impact projects across regions, the U.S. has built essentially zero major interregional transmission lines in recent history.
Lack of coordination between transmission and generation planning also creates inefficiencies and prevents smart development. In deregulated markets (and some vertically integrated states), transmission and generation planning processes occur largely in isolation without systematic processes to align long-term clean energy expansion with major grid upgrades.
Together, these gaps make expanding the transmission system an inefficient process at best, and an unworkable process at worst, at precisely the moment when the need for additional capacity is growing most rapidly.
The Past Playbook
Policymakers have made progress in addressing transmission planning bottlenecks, but these reforms remain far short of what’s needed. FERC Order 1920 is the most significant recent step: it requires long-term, forward-looking, multi-value regional planning. It was designed to improve transparency in the planning stages and help regions identify beneficial projects earlier. Yet the rule stops at regional borders and thereby doesn’t meaningfully advance interregional planning.
A patchwork of state and regional efforts has emerged alongside federal reforms. New Mexico created a new entity called the Renewable Energy Transmission Authority to map and finance new lines. Similarly, Colorado created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority to plan and develop transmission lines to meet power needs, unlock clean energy, and lower costs. California conducts long-term transmission planning intended to incorporate transmission needs to accommodate clean energy deployment required to meet the state’s climate goals. Federal tools like National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs) were designed to accelerate siting of critically important lines, and part of DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) funding has helped bring utilities, states, and developers together to plan large projects. On the interregional front, DOE has conducted analysis to demonstrate where new capacity would create the greatest benefits and inform planning.
These efforts certainly make progress and will likely result in expansion of local and regional transmission capacity. The magnitude of progress will depend in large part on how transmission providers implement Order 1920—for most regions, compliance filings will be submitted this month (December 2025) or by June 2026.
However, this playbook had significant gaps and pitfalls. Lack of interregional planning is the most glaring gap, but other tools had limitations, too. GRIP had limited funding and power to solve cost allocation disputes. NIETCs did not translate into built infrastructure. In many places transmission planning will not take into account the long-term clean energy expansion required for deep decarbonization, leaving high-value opportunities—like pairing wind resources with long-distance transmission—unrealized. The result is a set of reforms that move in the right direction but still fall short.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of energy policy must tackle interregional planning, while following through on Order 1920 with effective implementation. We must require transmission providers to plan decisively for futures with significant load growth and levels of clean energy deployment necessary for deep decarbonization. Future federal policy must also expand the government’s tools to bring parties to the table for smart, effective planning. In parallel, states should continue to use creative policies, like Colorado and New Mexico’s transmission authorities, to strategically plan new transmission lines to maximize benefits. And the next era must also include national, forward-looking land-use planning for clean energy deployment, in sync with transmission planning.
Supply Chains
The Barrier
Grid components, such as electrical steel and transformers, are necessary to increase grid capacity to support additional generation and load. However, grid component supply chains are still suffering from disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and lack of domestic manufacturing capacity. The rising demand for grid components and battery technology have further stressed supply chains, drawing out lead times and increasing prices. For example, across transmission and distribution equipment, the lead time for components averaged 38 weeks in 2023, nearly double from the year prior, with costs escalating nearly 30 percent year-over-year. Bottlenecks in the supply chains from upstream suppliers to manufacturers among these components risk power system stability, the ability to deploy clean energy, and the ability to build new industrial production and technology facilities at scale.
The Past Playbook
Federal policy has increasingly focused on building secure supply chains for clean energy technologies. The IRA included tax credits, grant programs, and loan authority to build out domestic supply chains for clean energy and storage technologies. The federal government has also used demand-side pressure to bolster supply chains (e.g., through a bonus tax incentive for clean energy projects that use domestic content and Build America Buy America requirements on federal grant programs). These policies led to major investment in domestic supply chains.
This playbook was quite successful at building out domestic supply chains for some industries, but it had major gaps. For example, the IRA and BIL included no dedicated support for grid components, and the minimal support that was embedded in larger programs was insufficient. Federal demand-side programs were structured as incentives for downstream industries to use domestic content, but this design had too much uncertainty to sufficiently derisk upstream domestic supply chains.
Today’s programs have also struggled to respond quickly when conditions change. For example, the federal government had limited tools with which to respond when the utility industry faced a debilitating shortage of large power transformers or when it became clear that incentives were not large enough to drive domestic investment for some clean energy components.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of energy policy must build on the same financial tools to support secure supply chains that enable clean energy deployment and grid upgrades. The playbook must include policies that more directly create demand for domestic components to provide certainty for manufacturers and derisk new investments. Future policy must also provide more flexible and dynamic tools to rapidly address supply chain shortages as they arise.
Political Barriers: Making it Harder to Pass, Implement, and Defend Policy
Clean energy advocates have focused on economic competitiveness, climate, and public health benefits as the winning messages to support and defend policies. The BIL and IRA came out of this model, and the architects of those policies hoped that the industry that benefitted from these policies would step up to defend them. While this strategy has enabled passage of significant new policies, it has failed to withstand changing political dynamics. The swift rollback of major parts of BIL and IRA is the prime example. Our ability to successfully implement and defend clean energy policies—and make further progress—has been hampered by several key political barriers. The next era of clean energy policy must address these barriers to be successful.
Energy Affordability
The Barrier
Rapidly rising utility bills have become an urgent cost-of-living issue. People pay 13 percent more for electricity in 2025 than they did in 2022, and nearly 40 percent of households sometimes have to choose between paying for food and medicine or keeping the lights on.
Rising electricity prices are a political barrier to some clean energy policies. For example, states have struggled to follow through on procurement of advanced clean energy technologies like nuclear and offshore wind as prices have risen. New York recently cancelled a planned transmission line, using affordability as a justification. Clean energy opponents are using prices to oppose climate policies, even though deployment of wind and solar has generally reduced rates. Concerns about electricity affordability make it difficult to justify major grid infrastructure investments under current regulatory and ratemaking structures, as additional spending to update the grid will lead to near-term bill increases. High prices also make it difficult to replace direct fossil fuel use in vehicles, buildings, and factories with electricity.
The Past Playbook
Federal energy policy has largely dealt with affordability in two ways.
First, the federal government has provided important but limited direct assistance to struggling households through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps households pay for energy, and the Weatherization Assistance Program, which funds energy- and cost-saving home improvements. However, these programs are significantly underfunded and oversubscribed—many households that need support do not get it.
Second, federal financial support results in long-term savings. IRA incentives for low-cost clean energy were projected to reduce generation costs, which in the long term translates to lower prices. Tax incentives and grant programs for distributed energy resources and home energy improvements save energy and costs for customers that make upgrades. However, this approach falls short in two ways: (1) it does not address the root causes of rising electricity bills, which means bills will continue to rise, and (2) the benefits are long term and do not show up on peoples’ bills on politically relevant timelines.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of energy policy must provide sufficient and swift relief for customers that are on the edge of catastrophe due to rising costs, make it easier to deploy cheap, clean energy to reduce generation costs, and target the root causes of high and rising bills to unlock a sustainable utility ratemaking regime that allows for major new investments in the grid without harming regular people. The new playbook must also include more effective cross-sector tools to cut total system and household costs, including by transferring planned spending on gas infrastructure to home electrification and grid upgrades where possible.
Incumbent Interests
The Barrier
Many solutions, including adding new generation in organized markets, relying more on regional and interregional transmission, and deploying distributed and demand-side solutions, threaten the profits of incumbent interests under current market and regulatory structures. For example, utilities make money through a return on qualified capital investments in things like power plants and distribution infrastructure. Increasing bulk transmission capacity to connect the Southeast with other regions would lead to more imports of lower cost clean energy, which would reduce the utilities’ reliance on local generation. That makes it harder for the utilities to justify capital expenditures in new power plants, which is how the utilities make a profit, so new transmission poses a threat to the business model. As a result, Southeastern utilities are opposed to policies that would expand bulk transmission to better connect different regions, even though these policies would reduce costs and increase reliability. These dynamics make it politically difficult to pursue policies that expand transmission capacity.
The Past Playbook
Federal clean energy policy has largely avoided changing incumbent incentive structures or decision-making processes at the state and regional level. Instead, policymakers have used financial incentives to bring incumbents to the table and increase their investment in clean energy and grid upgrades. As a result, the misaligned incentives described above, combined with decision-making structures that reward incumbents over innovation, make it difficult to fully address the barriers to clean energy deployment and grid upgrades at the necessary scale.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of clean energy policy must address governance issues through reform of regional grid operators and public utility commissions. Strengthening the role of regulators is critical to reining in incumbent interests where they do not align with public benefit. It must also realign industry incentives (e.g., through performance-based ratemaking) where possible with affordability and decarbonization goals.
Delayed Impact
The Barrier
Another major political barrier is the lengthy time it takes to get from enactment and implementation to tangible benefits for people. Transforming major sectors of the economy is a time-intensive, multi-stage project, and climate advocates have accordingly focused on long-term goals, such as 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 or net-zero emissions by 2050. The IRA and BIL were made up primarily of multi-year (even some decadal) programs to drive major changes in the economy. As a result, the largest benefits were projected to come in the late 2020s and early 2030s, far outside the window of political memory. That mismatch makes it difficult for the public to understand the point of policies and in turn makes those policies hard to defend.
Where policies do have near-term benefits, those benefits have often been delayed by the implementation process. Successfully shifting the private sector requires precise policy and new programs, which take time to implement. Implementation of new programs can also run up against the government typically works, and that friction causes delays. Implementation delays make it difficult to connect the dots between policy and tangible improvements to peoples’ lives.
The Past Playbook
Policymakers have used three dominant approaches to overcoming this barrier. First, they tout near-term signs of economic change. For example, the Biden administration consistently cited private-sector investment in clean energy as a key metric to convince the public that the IRA and BIL were driving benefits for people. Second, they rely on the quickest economic changes to demonstrate impact. For example, the IRA and BIL drove a near-term increase in construction jobs. Real and announced job creation was the dominant message to support and defend these policies. Third, they cite projected benefits. For example, the Biden administration frequently cited the 1.5 million jobs and the $27 to $33 billion in energy cost savings that the IRA was projected to drive.
Attention to long-term impact is important for addressing long-term problems like climate change and load growth. However, politics runs on instant gratification. As of late 2024, only 39 percent of Americans had heard of the IRA. And federal energy policy failed to make a near-term dent in the issue that was most visible for people: utility bills.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The next era of clean energy policy must tangibly and visibly benefit people in the short term. The playbook must include a better balance of policies geared toward long-term transformation of the economy and policies focused on pressing issues for regular people. That means including programs that are designed for quick implementation and real-world change.
Conclusion: What’s Next?
The power sector sits at an inflection point. The challenges facing the grid are immediate, interconnected, and solvable but only if we confront the real sources of delay and dysfunction. Accelerating clean energy deployment requires moving beyond our old playbook—dominated by financial incentives and regulations that see-saw based on the political winds—toward a new approach that addresses both project development barriers that slow investment and construction and political barriers that impede durable policymaking. Building durable, effective energy policy demands a clear-eyed assessment of the barriers that have undermined smart policymaking and implementation.
In a forthcoming publication, we will move from diagnosis to action, detailing policy solutions that can unlock faster, more reliable project development while expanding the policy toolkit needed to overcome the political barriers that have prevented durable reform. Together, these solutions aim to strengthen grid reliability, rein in rising utility bills, and put the United States back on a credible path to decarbonization. These stakes could not be higher, and the opportunity to build a more affordable, resilient, and clean energy system has never been more urgent.
A Guide to Satellite Imagery Analysis for the Nuclear Age – Assessing China’s CFR-600 Reactor Facility
Satellite imagery has long served as a tool for observing on-the-ground activity worldwide, and offers especially valuable insights into the operation, development, and physical features related to nuclear technology. This report serves as a “start-up guide” for emerging analysts interested in assessing satellite imagery in the context of the nuclear field, outlining the steps necessary for developing comprehensive and effective analytical products.
What goes on in the mind of an analyst during satellite imagery analysis? Four broad steps included in this report – establishing context, collecting imagery, analyzing imagery, and drawing conclusions – serve as a simple outline for analysts interested in assessing satellite imagery with a particular focus on the nuclear field. This report uses China’s CFR-600 reactor site as a case study, providing a roadmap to the analytical thought processes behind the analysis of satellite imagery.
This report was adapted into an ArcGIS StoryMap, an interactive multimedia narrative. Click here to view the StoryMap.
Report: When Ambition Meets Reality — Lessons Learned in Federal Clean Energy Implementation, and a Path Forward
The Trump administration has scrapped over $8 billion (so far) in grants for dozens of massive clean energy projects in the United States. For those of us who worked on the frontlines of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) implementation, the near-weekly announcements and headlines have been maddening, especially at a time when many of these projects would have helped address soaring electricity prices and surging demand growth.
While some of these cancellations were probably illegal, they nevertheless raise fundamental questions for clean energy advocates: why was so much money still unspent…and why was it so easy to cancel?
In a new report, we begin to address these fundamental implementation questions based on discussions with over 80 individuals – from senior political staff to individual project managers – involved in the execution of major clean energy programs through the Department of Energy (DOE).
Their answer? There is significant opportunity – as our colleagues at FAS have written – for future Executive branch implementation to move much faster and produce much more durable results. But to do so, future implementation efforts must look drastically different from the past, with a ruthless focus on speed, outcomes, and the full use of Executive Branch authorities to more quickly get steel in the ground.
The risk of risk aversion
Take the grant cancellations example. The Trump administration has relied on one small clause in the Code of Federal Regulations (2CFR 200.340(a)(4)) as the legal basis for its widespread cancellations. This clause, traditionally included in most grants between the government and a private company, allows the government to cancel any grant that “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities” and essentially functions as a “termination for convenience” clause.
But including this “termination for convenience” clause was optional. DOE could have leveraged a different, more flexible contracting authority for many awards. It also could have processed what’s known as a “deviation” in order to exclude the clause from standard contracts. Leaders of program offices were aware of these options, with some staffers strenuously objecting to the inclusion of termination for convenience.
But in the end, DOE offices generally opted to keep this clause because it was the way the agency had always executed (primarily R&D) grants in the past, and because sticking to established procedures was seen as the best way to avoid the risk of Congressional or Inspector General oversight.
And yet, this risk-averse approach perversely increased the risk of project failure, by creating an easy kill switch for an administration looking for grounds on which to cancel particular projects.
This attitude toward risk – which saw defaulting to the status quo as the most prudent path – was a constant barrier to effective implementation. (In addition to opening up grants to cancellation, the embrace of 2CFR 200 regulations meaningfully slowed negotiations as companies bristled at the obscure accounting and other compliance measures the regulations would impose on them.)
Understanding this culture of risk aversion offers two takeaways for improving government: (1) rigorously question status quo decisions and avoid defaulting to agency precedent and (2) avoid excessive focus on eliminating every risk or avoiding external backlash or oversight (especially given that backlash and oversight are likely regardless of the approach.)
Speed is paramount
Of course, excluding the termination for convenience clause would not have been a panacea. It’s likely the Trump administration would have devised some other pretext for cancelling the grants that may have been just as successful, though perhaps legally shakier.
That’s why implementers also told us that speed is critical. The best defense is a strong offense. And the best way to prevent money from being taken back is to have already spent it on promising projects. The federal government has moved faster in implementation of large policies before. During the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority moved from passage of its founding law to beginning construction on a major dam in just four months. Operation Warp Speed delivered cutting-edge life-saving vaccines to millions of Americans in about a year. While the contexts and goals of these programs were different, we know from history that the federal government can move fast.
But at DOE, only 5% of the funds appropriated through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law had actually been spent (not just obligated) by the time the Biden administration ended three years later. In addition to making clean energy projects more vulnerable to subsequent cancellations, the pace of the rollout meant that the basic political hypothesis animating clean energy legislation—that the economic development projects brought, especially to red states, would create a durable bipartisan coalition for clean energy—went untested.
Practically everyone we spoke with expressed frustration at the slow pace of implementation. Interviewees highlighted many challenges associated with a relatively slow pace of BIL and IRA implementation, such as:
- “Too many cooks” dynamics at every level of implementation.
- A lack of coalitional policy prioritization.
- Overcomplicated award processes.
- Regulatory compliance issues that were at odds with industry realities. (Davis-Bacon, NEPA, Build America Buy America, and the Paperwork Reduction Act were those most frequently mentioned.)
The work begins now
One commonality between these and other issues identified in our report is encouraging: they are mostly within the Executive Branch’s power to solve. A sufficiently prepared future administration could address many of these challenges for future federal clean energy efforts without relying on the vagaries of the legislative process. But the work must begin now.
On contracting, for instance, a future administration’s DOE could make better use of Other Transactions Authority for clean energy. But it should be prepared with drafts of the basic commercial terms of agreements between the government and companies it works with. Similarly, a proactive future administration will come in with a clear view on how to streamline compliance with environmental, prevailing wage, domestic sourcing, and other cross-cutting requirements. On decision-making, a future administration can set norms pushing decision-making to the lowest possible level, clarify processes to elevate and execute major issues, and establish small, clear, and empowered teams that own frontline negotiations.
If pursued, this updated approach to federal clean energy implementation will look drastically different. But one way or another it will have to: the next time there is a federal government interested in accelerating clean energy, it is likely to be dealing with a private sector much more wary of working with the government, fiscal constraints that limit the likely scale of any clean energy funding, and a dramatically altered federal workforce and state apparatus.
Much can be done outside of the federal government — including at state and local levels — to prepare for those circumstances. It is possible for a future federal administration to achieve faster and more durable clean energy outcomes. But to make that possible, the work must begin now.
It’s not enough to say we need to make full use of DOE’s authorities; we need the drafted Secretarial directives and advance legal legwork to do it, and leadership well-equipped with the details and government-insider knowledge to execute on it.
It’s not enough to say we want more nuclear, transmission, or critical minerals projects; we need to have identified the priority projects and designed the strategies and programs needed to actually put them in motion on Day 1.
It’s not enough to say we should take a “whole-of-government” approach to an issue like clean energy; we need a detailed plan for how to use the $5 billion/year in electricity purchases and the PMA’s 45,000 miles of transmission lines—all under the direct control of the federal government—to achieve explicit policy outcomes.
And it’s not enough to say we need to rebuild the federal workforce; we need a roster of hundreds of people that can be brought on and trained rapidly to implement within weeks.
To live up to the spirit of the New Deal and Operation Warp Speed—the spirit that turned ambitious goals into massive real-world impact in a matter of months—the next administration must come armed not only with broad aspirations, but also with the detailed plans required to implement them.
Inspections Without Inspectors: A Path Forward for Nuclear Arms Control Verification with “Cooperative Technical Means”
The 2010 New START Treaty, the last bilateral agreement limiting deployments of U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals, will expire in February 2026 with no option for renewal. This will usher in an era of unconstrained nuclear competition for the first time since 1972, allowing the United States and Russia to upload hundreds of additional warheads onto their deployed arsenals if they made a political decision to do so. The removal of both the verifiable limits on nuclear weapons, as well as the agreed and proven mechanisms of information sharing about each country’s nuclear arsenal, will increase mistrust, lead to nuclear military planning based on worst case scenarios, and potentially accelerate a global nuclear arms race amid a worsening geopolitical environment.
Traditional nuclear arms control, including New START, relies on the availability of on-site inspections to verify compliance. However, Russia has suspended its participation in New START and opposes intrusive inspections, while political conditions make negotiating an equally robust successor treaty improbable in the near term.
The proposal: verifiable nuclear arms control without on-site inspections
This report outlines a framework relying on “Cooperative Technical Means” (CTM) for effective arms control verification based on remote sensing, avoiding on-site inspections but maintaining a level of transparency that allows for immediate detection of changes in nuclear posture or a significant build-up above agreed limits. This approach builds on Cold War precedents—particularly SALT II, which relied largely on national technical means (NTM)—while leveraging modern Earth-observation satellites whose capabilities have significantly advanced in recent years.
The proposed interim agreement would:
- Preserve New START’s central limits on launchers and warheads.
- Resume notifications and data exchanges.
- Uphold the principle of non-interference with national technical means of verification.
- Incorporate a set of cooperative measures to expose systems for satellite verification, making possible remote monitoring and counting of nuclear delivery vehicles and nuclear weapons.
Such a regime could either be a formal, legally-binding treaty or an informal political arrangement. A non-binding arrangement may also encourage the participation of other nuclear states willing to freeze the production and deployment of new nuclear weapons, including China, the United Kingdom, France, India, and Pakistan.
How would it work?
Significant increases in both the quality and quantity of state-owned and commercial observation satellites now allow global monitoring of missile silo fields, weapons storage sites, air bases, and ports at high resolutions, in different bands, and at actionable frequencies of observation. These developments make it possible to:
- Count strategic launchers. Missile silos, mobile launchers garrisoned in bases, submarines in ports, and heavy bombers at air bases are all observable by electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors. Large-scale silo construction is now nearly impossible to conceal.
- Assess deployment status. Cooperative measures—such as opening silo doors for satellite passes—could verify whether launchers contain missiles. AI-assisted SAR and EO imagery could detect, classify and count nuclear bombers. Unique markings or alphanumeric codes placed on mobile launchers and bombers could facilitate counting and identification from space.
- Estimate deployed warheads. New START counts every nuclear bomber as carrying a single warhead. A similar counting rule could be established for other delivery vehicles. Otherwise, exposing missiles’ re-entry vehicles (RV) during coordinated satellite overpasses could allow for the counting of warheads remotely. While this could not confirm if the displayed RVs are nuclear or decoys, it would set verifiable upper limits.
- Address non-strategic and non-deployed weapons. Novel SAR observation techniques can help detect undisclosed activity and traffic around storage facilities, ensuring weapons are not secretly moved in or out.
Why this matters
Arms control is a crucial tool for managing nuclear risks. The proposed remote-sensing verification regime could help maintain transparency, facilitate communication, and provide predictability between the United States and Russia beyond 2026, reducing the danger of nuclear arms racing without needing to tackle the politically sensitive issue of on-site inspections.
No past or present arms control regime is perfect and completely safe against cheating. An agreement fully relying on observation satellites would not fully eliminate uncertainty, but it would be relatively easier to negotiate than one with on-site inspections, and it would increasingly raise the costs of deception, providing visibility into major nuclear developments and leaving a pathway to more comprehensive arms control once it becomes politically viable in the future.
Avoiding Nuclear Danger in Northeast Asia
For the last two years, experts from the Federation of American Scientists and Nagasaki University have engaged with American, Japanese and South Korean experts as well as partners with valuable insights on nuclear policies in China and Russia to assess the risks of nuclear use and escalation in Northeast Asia. The results of this work are sobering, but not surprising. The growing reliance on nuclear weapons and growing geo-political tensions in the region are a recipe for nuclear disaster. Only purposeful and coordinated actions among countries that seek to avoid war and the use of nuclear weapons can reverse these trends and address these dangers. If current trends and dynamics continue, the risk of nuclear use will continue to increase.
Our consultations included commissioned working papers from U.S., Japanese and South Korean authors, as well as experts on China and Russia to assess the role nuclear weapons play in the security policies of those countries, and how each country views the prospect of war and nuclear risk. Two workshops, one in Seoul and one in Tokyo, were convened by our organizations over the last year and a half. These events included discussions both before and after the U.S. election, and before and after the declaration of martial law in South Korea. The papers and discussions led to a recently published special feature on “The Future of Nuclear Stability in East Asia” of Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament ( J-PAND) .
As the lead researchers for this project, we have developed the following assessments and believe pursuing a set of concrete and deliberate recommendations are essential if Governments seek to reduce the risks of nuclear conflict through accident or miscalculation. The authors do not assume that such steps will change the broader geo-strategic realities in the region. However, these steps, if integrated into government action, offer the prospect of constructive collaboration among states where such efforts are scarce. Furthermore, it remains possible that, once engaged on an issue of mutual self-preservation, the momentum can be created for other cooperative efforts.
Reducing Nuclear Risks and Salience
Unless the policies and activities of all nuclear-armed states and their allies change in East Asia, the probability of a nuclear crisis will continue to grow. This reality should be alarming to all states in the region, as all will suffer should the region (or the world) witness the use of nuclear weapons in combat or even during peacetime as tools for coercion. What is needed is both a recognition of the dynamics driving the potential for crisis by national leaders, coupled with deliberate actions to reduce the risks of accident, escalation, and, where possible, reliance on nuclear weapons for anything other than core nuclear deterrence. Even then, the risks of accidents due to human behavior and complex systems should lead any responsible country to establish in advance a set of mechanisms for communicating to avoid misperception or mistakes when a crisis emerges, which inevitably will.
Of course, not all analysts see these dynamics the same way. The dominant view in the United States is that America’s nuclear capabilities are both essential and highly valuable in both deterring and assuring, and the more reliable and credible these capabilities are, the more stable will be U.S. alliances, and the region as a whole. However, if one considers multiple national perspectives as well as the risks of both accident and miscalculation, there are clear consequences for increasing nuclear salience and enhancing reliance on nuclear weapons that should lead to a deeper examination of alternatives and steps to mitigate those risks. At a minimum, recognizing that the risk of nuclear acquisition, signaling, and use in the region are increasing must lead to closer examination of ways to reduce the risks of accidental or unintended conflict, and to find ways to separate broader U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons from the possible decision by more states in the region to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.
Of course, as long as nuclear weapons exist, there will be an inherent risk that they will be used, and indeed multiple nations continue to rely on nuclear deterrence as a basis for their security. However, there should be no tolerance for accepting unnecessary nuclear risks associated with accidents and miscalculation. Moreover, while all states seek to project their ability to use and manage escalation to their own benefit, there needs to be greater work invested to understanding escalation dynamics among all states in the region and time spent avoiding the risk of uncontrolled or runaway escalation pressures.
In its simplest form, the world and the nations of the region need to recognize that they are part of a multipolar nuclear vortex of potential conflict among four states with nuclear weapons, and two others advanced conventionally-armed states who could trigger (intentionally or otherwise) a conflict with global dimensions. The risks of conflict in the region are as grave as they have ever been, and concerted, reasoned and multi-faceted efforts to manage the nuclear risks inherent in the region are required.
Just as states in the region have different perspectives about what enhances or reduces stability, states also have different interests when it comes to measures perceived to enhance stability and predictability. Eager to maintain the regional security status quo, the United States has sought for many years to promote a set of dialogues and norms to reduce the risks of conflict and accident. However, not content with the status quo, in which the United States maintains broad sway and can project military power in the region, China has resisted crisis management or risk reduction efforts. U.S. officials have proposed repeatedly to establish a set of guard rails on escalation, to which Chinese officials have remarks that such protections may only encourage the U.S. to continue reckless behavior.
Nevertheless, all states regardless of history and intent need to be attentive to the region’s growing nuclear dangers. Russia, China, and the United States have adopted a common position that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. North Korea, which is not recognized formally as a nuclear-weapon state under the NPT, has not issued any similar statements. However, the consequences of any nuclear use in the region would be extreme and must be avoided at all costs.
Steps that could be pursued to that end are discussed below. These include working to reinforce the norm of non-nuclear use, as well as development of tangible mechanisms that can be used in a crisis to communicate and potentially avoid unwanted or accidental escalation.
Political and Diplomatic Steps
Nuclear Leadership
Leaders in the participant countries, and mainly in those with nuclear weapons, need to invest the time and effort to better understand the magnitude of the nuclear risks they manifest, and to communicate with each other at the direct, personal level that they understand those realities. In all of the affected countries, the military services and organizations that support nuclear missions tend to take on a momentum of their own in service of providing their leadership with options for military victory and possible nuclear use. That is their job, yet their actions also can place pressures on leaders whose interests are necessarily broader. Demonstrating at a high political level that those authorized to use and provide options for the use of nuclear weapons understand the risks and consequences involved is an essential step in reducing nuclear dangers. The temptation to bluff, project indifference, or adopt “mad man” postures must be conclusively rejected by all states in the region.
Allied/Conventional Leadership
Japan and South Korea, as the non-nuclear states in the region – as well as Taiwan – should continue to take and expand efforts to encourage constructive engagement and risk reduction measures so that leaders of China, the United States, Russia and North Korea recognize the new nuclear age the world has entered. The lessons that led the leaders of the Soviet Union and United States to end the last global nuclear arms race appear to have been forgotten or lost, a form of collective amnesia about the virtues of cooperative approaches to tempering risks. America’s non-nuclear allies can stimulate broader engagement including through academic, Track II, civil society, economic and other forms of indirect, non-governmental engagement. These channels may not produce immediate results, but should be pursued as they are low risk approaches that can be valuable in expanding consultations, increasing the flow of information, and identifying opportunities for governmental engagement. Through intermediaries, regional groupings, and other bi- and multilateral settings, the non-nuclear weapon states endangered by the nuclear dynamics in East Asia need to increase their efforts to build and support risk reduction dialogues, or avenues for those discussions among the nuclear states.
Intra-alliance Discussions
In today’s environment, it is both important and appropriate for U.S. allies to be vocal in encouraging the United States to remain an active security provider and a conduit for constructive dialogues in the region. However, U.S. allies should also speak out and engage their counterparts in Washington when and if they believe it will be harder for them to continue strong security cooperation with the United States if Washington is not actively seeking to reduce the risks of escalation to the nuclear level in a conflict with other regional powers. There is no region where U.S. allies can expect to reap security benefits of a nuclear alliance with Washington without risk. Yet it remains impossible to predict how increased nuclear risks might influence political dynamics in U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan. This dynamic should be an open part of expanding extended deterrence and security discussions among the U.S. and its security partners.
Within the U.S. extended deterrent relationships with South Korea and Japan, as well as its partnership with Taiwan, there also needs to be a more fulsome and mature discussion about the balance between deterrence and defense, and risks of nuclear escalation. The U.S. relationships with Japan and South Korea especially over the last decades has matured to the point that Tokyo and Seoul take an active role in understanding, assessing, characterizing, and planning detailed responses to specific threat scenarios. This coordination benefits all of the states, but should also include active discussions about conventional-nuclear weapon dynamics, including the risks of accidents and escalation within and beyond the nuclear level, and develop more robust tools for preventing and controlling such escalation, and avoiding miscommunication and accidents. It is unknown, and perhaps unknowable in advance of a conflict, whether the United States will act on its defense commitments in a conflict. However, with increased doubts about U.S. commitments comes the risk both that U.S. allies will seek to expand their own capabilities, drawing a reaction from China and North Korea (while allies’ actions are already reactions to their actions), and furthering the action-reaction cycle that defines arms race instability. Of course, there is also the omnipresent concern that China or North Korea will miscalculate, may assume they can act with impunity, and then find the U.S. ready, willing and able to meet its defense commitments. In short, the region is going to be more unstable and U.S. allies have a direct interest in ensuring not only that they are prepared to face a possible attack, but that they and the United States invest the time and effort now to avoid a conflict should one start by accident or through miscalculation, or escalate beyond the conventional level.
One of the most positive developments for security and deterrence in East Asia over the last few years has been the improved coordination and tempering of political animus between Japan and South Korea, owing in part to the active encouragement of the United States. It is no overstatement that the United States cannot hope to create a stable deterrent relationship with China if it is unable to work with two like-minded partners in Japan and South Korea, not least if those two countries cannot work together toward a common goal of stability and conflict avoidance. To be sure, Seoul and Tokyo have different threat concerns and priorities. But the ability to deter conflict, project strength and coordination, and act quickly and decisively to terminate a conflict and avoid escalation comes through enhanced and durable political and military coordination and collaboration among the United States and its allies in the region. A thickening of US-ROK-Japan as a trilateral security partnership is among the best options those states have to preserve peace and stability in East Asia.
Technical Tools
It remains an open question whether geopolitical tension in the region have led to arms racing or whether arms racing has led to geopolitical tensions. The growth of conflict and tension in the region is a long history and regardless of whether one believes weapons drive conflict or conflict drives weapons, the dynamics in the region are clear for all to see. It is possible that no amount of dialogue, engagement, and risk reduction efforts will disrupt these dynamics. The history of humanity is, in many ways, the history of warfare. However, that history is also loaded with episodes of unwanted and unnecessary conflicts that were detrimental to all involved. As technology improves, countries and other groups will have tools to reduce the risks of accidents and miscommunication, as well as unintended escalation. To be effective, these tools need to be in place before any conflict begins. Examples include:
Crisis communication tools
The public often considers telephone hotlines as the standard tool for communicating with leaders in a crisis. However, it is not widely known that the United States and Soviet Union, and later Russia, put in place a basic but more capable computer-based system that did not rely on voice communications between leaders to pass messages, but established an open computer display in each capital to ensure that no matter the contingency, messages could be sent and read without any action by the receiving side. In fact, the nuclear risk reduction centers remain in place and in use between Washington and Moscow to this day. The ability to send a message without having to wait for the other side to “pick up the phone” has proved to have important political and technical advantages over more simple telecommunications.
No similar system (except for some bilateral mechanisms that require the other side to respond) exists anywhere in East Asia between the United States or any of the countries in the region. The establishment of risk reduction communication centers in all of the capitals, or simply establishing them between bilateral pairs, is one way to create mechanisms before a crisis strikes to help resolve misunderstandings or miscommunications. While it is entirely possible that a message sent will not be reciprocated or well received, there is little to any cost to establishing such a system. Indeed, even the absence of a response can be important information that aids decision making.
The United States and Russia could offer to expand their current system to include other countries, share and demonstrate the technology that they use for consideration by China, South Korea, Japan, and North Korea, or pairs of states could establish similar networks on their own. One way to facilitate this process might also be for a civil society group, such as National Academies of Science or other equivalent academic centers to establish test networks that could be used and demonstrated over a period of months for national military and leaderships in the individual countries to observe the system in use before they commit to them as a political decision.
Incident Agreements
The United States and the Soviet Union worked over the course of the Cold War to establish norms of behavior and then create operational tools for their militaries to communicate at the operational level to manage accidents. These were largely successful both in providing tools to manage crises and signaling that both sides had an interest in avoiding unintended or unwanted conflicts. Despite efforts to create similar systems and tools in East Asia, agreements or tools that have been put in place (such as 1998 US-China Military Maritime Consultative Agreement as well as 2018 Maritime and Aerial Communication Mechanism between the Japan-China Defense Authorities and 2023 Hotline between Japanese and Chinese Defense Authorities) to manage potential incidents among the relevant armed forces (naval and air forces being the main focus with China, and ground forces being a major concern on the Korean Peninsula) are far from enough. They should first make these existing mechanisms effective and useful and then expand them to establish norms of behavior and create operational communication tools.
Not all states in the region support the establishment of such mechanisms, but they are a potentially useful tool that willing states should look to establish and promote. Demonstrating responsible behavior and signaling a concern about the direction of regional security are both valuable opportunities for leaders, and despite some concerns would have no tangible effect on the ability to both deter and prepare for a potential clash of forces. There have been multiple studies done on best practices for such systems including how to establish pre-existing norms of behavior, conduits for communication, and how states should behave if an accident or unplanned clash among forces takes place. These efforts should continue and be enhanced. Where possible U.S., ROK and Japanese approach for intra-alliance/partner behavior and products should be published and promoted as standards that could form the basis for broadening of such efforts to include China and North Korea, as well as Russia.
Build and Use Open-Source Networks
The space revolution has provided governments and independent analysts with a stunning set of tools that previously were inaccessible to all but intelligence agencies in a handful of developed countries. Now, the availability of commercial observation satellites and low-cost drones create potential tools for states in the region to monitor each other’s military behaviors, anticipate potential moves that undermine the security of another, and have detailed information that can be used as part of risk reduction or crisis management processes. Obviously, not all countries in East Asia are pleased with the newfound transparency that can be imposed from outside of their own borders, but this technology will only continue to expand and provide potential tools for others in the region. This will at once reduce the likelihood of military surprises, yet at the same time, the growth of information manipulation technologies, including artificial intelligence, will mean that not everything a country can see is necessarily the truth. This balance between information and mis- or disinformation is a particular challenge in the 21st-century that should concern all states in the region, even though that might seek to use mis- and disinformation to their own advantage.
One concept that should be further developed and promoted is the creation of open-source information fusion cells, involving relevant experts from all of the countries involved in East Asian security dynamics. Having a single location with participants from the various countries who can assess, analyze, and even discuss data being provided by open-source capabilities could be a powerful tool in developing a common framework for discussing a crisis, should one take place. It is unlikely given the current political dynamics that all of the countries in the region will soon agree to establish such a center, thus an interim step might be to establish a trial open-source operation through academic or non-governmental civil society organization that could be accessed by countries in the region by invitation.
Build on what is working
One of the simplest tools for avoiding miscalculation utilized by the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia has been advance notification of ballistic missile test launches. More recently, the United States and China have engaged in apparently reciprocal advance notifications of recent ICBMs tests. This basic step can avoid the risk that a simple test launch might occur at a time of tension and catch any state off guard. Efforts should be made by the United States and China to encourage other states in the region, including North Korea, to follow this standard model to encourage responsible behavior, if not moderation.
Other Steps by the United States, and Allies and Partners
These above steps, whether used in bilateral or multilateral settings, could improve the ability of states to avoid a crisis or manage one should it take place. However, there are other steps
that can be pursued by the United States and its friends and allies in the region that can also improve the outlook for avoiding unwanted or unnecessary nuclear risks.
Broaden routine deterrence and assurance dialogues among the United States and its allies and partners in both bilateral and multilateral formats. Existing dialogues and committees have been useful political tools for improving transparency within bilateral alliances, improving trilateral engagement, and finding ways to enhance military reassurance and deterrence. However, these discussions often overlook other important areas of interdependence among the United States, Japan, and South Korea—and how their cooperation in these areas contributes to the security and prosperity of all three countries. In addition to continuing and deepening these discussions, to include regular engagement on what specific threats they seek to deter and how to do so without taking unnecessary nuclear risks, the countries should also look to engage on economic, technical, cultural, and human exchange dynamics to deepen the anchors for these alliances and partnerships that form the basis for their security in the region.
Expand trilateral communication and coordination mechanisms among the United States, Japan and ROK. Japanese and ROK officials in particular need to put forward a very clear demand signal to the United States that they value the trilateral process consolidated during the Biden administration and would welcome efforts to expand the scope of their engagement. These dialogues should seek to adopt a heavier emphasis on crisis, coordination and scenario planning, to include both escalation and de-escalation scenarios, as well as to conduct exercises around unexpected or surprise events.
Consider tighter regional missile defense architectures. Missile defense is becoming an increasingly important element of deterrence by denial in the region. It is increasingly clear that effective missile defenses can play a significant role in deterring adversaries and reassuring allies. In this regard, developing tighter regional missile defense architectures should be considered. If coordinating and implementing regional missile defense architectures among the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan proves successful, it could have an important politically stabilizing effect by linking them together and reinforcing their relationships in the face of potential political challenges. However, several important issues must be kept in mind when considering regional cooperation on missile defenses, for example, concerns that such cooperation could further stimulate investment in ballistic missile capabilities by North Korea, China, and Russia (although they are already expanding their capabilities regardless), as well as rising costs of missile defense systems. Advancing cooperation between Japan and South Korea still remains politically fragile, posing a challenge to regional cooperation. Furthermore, if Taiwan is to be included in such a regional architecture, China will certainly react harshly both politically and militarily. While the delicate and complex nature of regional relations must be carefully weighed, developing tighter regional missile defense architectures is worth considering.
Promote broader dialogue on the utility and risks of reliance on nuclear deterrence. Nuclear weapons are clearly an important component of strategic deterrence, but they are not a panacea and because of their immense destructive power they should always and only be an option of last resort. This tone needs to be routinely re-injected into alliance discussion to avoid over-reliance on nuclear options and to ensure that nuclear reliance does not become an adversary to prudent and more stabilizing conventional investments for both deterrence and combat. Additional discussions should be pursued to determine when and how it would be possible to reduce or even eliminate the role for nuclear weapons in some contingencies in favor of conventional options that may increase the efficacy of conventional deterrence and escalation management.
Engage adversaries, in close consultation with allies, even if the prospects for progress are limited. Its willingness to break with conventional wisdom and engage adversaries is one area where the current American administration may have a distinct advantage over its predecessors. President Trump has demonstrated that he does not feel constrained in talking with U.S. adversaries, and is willing and even eager to engage with the leadership of foreign countries with historically adversarial or difficult relations with the United States. This high-level engagement provides an opportunity to breakthrough bureaucratic hurdles and achieve terrific strides, if effectively planned and managed. President Trump could choose to reengage North Korea, has even after launching military strikes against Iran offered to pursue diplomacy with Tehran, and is reportedly eager to negotiate and engage directly with China’s president. If any of these dialogues are pursued, then important crisis management and avoidance tools should be brought into these high-level dialogues by the United States. In particular, as it was pointed out in the article of the J-PAND’s special issue on “Nuclear Weapons and China’s National Security: Consistency, Evolvement and Risk Management”, there may be great value in establishing procedures for risk reduction that focus on the timeliness of the tools as well as standardization and maintenance activities to ensure that these tools are operable when needed. At the same time while more complicated, it may be possible for the leaders of these countries or their designated technical teams to work on identifying potential flashpoints and reach task agreements on how the two sides can identify and possibly avoid what are seen as provocative actions. It remains to be seen whether or not China or North Korea are interested in pursuing such high-level high stakes diplomacy, and if they do whether they will be open to areas that have traditionally been excluded from past dialogues. However, if in this new environment, China and North Korea are able to recognize the risks of nuclear escalation and agree that all states in the region would be better off reducing the risk of accidental or unintended nuclear use, then there are tools that all three countries, in close consultations with Japan and South Korea, could pursue to achieve those ends.
Conclusion
None of the steps including above alone or collectively will eliminate the risks of conflict among the multiple nuclear and nuclear dependent states in Northeast Asia. The economic, political and security stakes and dynamics indicate that the region will remain one influenced by tension and increasing military risk until there are fundamental changes in the region, including the nature of leadership in multiple countries, or until there is a collective understanding about the benefits to be gained through political and security engagement and broader integration. While those changes seem unlikely, history is filled with examples where previously insurmountable changes were achieved through unexpected developments.
That being said Northeast Asia looks to occupy in the 21st century the same space Europe occupied the 20th century as a potential flashpoint for military and political tensions among great powers and their partner states. The fact that multiple countries possess nuclear weapons and are dependent on them ultimately for their security, makes the risks of accident, miscalculation, or escalation much more dangerous than the Cold War period. It will take consistent leadership and action to navigate the complex dangers in the region and to avoid what many analysts considered to be an increasingly possible outcome, a nuclear conflict in East Asia.
Understanding the Two Nuclear Peer Debate
Since 2020, China has dramatically expanded its nuclear arsenal. That year, the Pentagon estimated China’s stockpile of warheads in the low 200s and projected that it would “at least double in size.”1 Two years later, the report warned that China would “likely field a stockpile of about 1500 warheads by its 2035 timeline.”2 Both inside and outside government, the finding has transformed discourse on U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
Adm. Charles Richard, while Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, warned that changes in China’s nuclear forces would fundamentally alter how the United States practices strategic deterrence. In 2021, Richard told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “for the first time in history, the nation is facing two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time.”3 In his view, China is pursuing “explosive growth and modernization of its nuclear and conventional forces” that will provide “the capability to execute any plausible nuclear employment strategy.”4 In Richard’s view, the United States is facing a “crisis” of deterrence that will require major shifts in U.S. nuclear strategy.5 “We’re rewriting deterrence theory,” he told an audience.6 For Richard, the danger is not just that the United States would face two separate major power, nuclear-armed adversaries but two nuclear peers that can coordinate their actions or act to exploit opportunities created by the other.
How the United States responds to China’s nuclear buildup will shape the global nuclear balance for the rest of the century. For many observers, the “two nuclear peer problem” presents an existential choice because existing U.S. nuclear force structure and strategy cannot maintain deterrence against two nuclear peers simultaneously. There are only three options: expand the capability of U.S. nuclear force structure; shift nuclear strategy to engage nonmilitary targets;7 or do nothing, which increases the risk of regional aggression and nuclear use.
Despite this growing wave of concern and commentary, there has been no systematic studies that define the nature of the “two nuclear peer problem” and the options available to the United States and its allies for responding to China’s nuclear buildup. An informed decision about how to respond to China’s buildup will depend on answering two additional questions.
First, what exactly is the threat posed by China’s expanding nuclear forces? What is a “two nuclear peer problem” and will the United States face one in the next decade? Specifically, will China’s nuclear buildup render U.S. nuclear forces incapable of attaining critical objectives for deterring nuclear attacks.
Second, what are the best options for responding to China’s expanding nuclear forces? What are the available options to modify U.S. nuclear force structure given existing constraints and will these options effectively correct vulnerabilities created by a “two nuclear peer problem?” Would these options create new risks to the interests of the United States and its allies?
In the following chapters, we each consider a central aspect of the “two nuclear peer problem” and the options available to meet it. Though we have tried to coordinate our chapters so they do not overlap, and build on assumptions and data regarding U.S. and Chinese nuclear forces, each chapter is the work of a single author. We do not present a consensus perspective or set of recommendations and do not necessarily endorse the arguments made in neighboring chapters.
In chapter 2, Adam Mount surveys expert analysis and the statements of government officials to develop a more rigorous definition of the “two nuclear peer problem” than currently exists in the literature. Characterizing and categorizing the risks posed by a tripolar system leads to an unappreciated possibility: there is no “two nuclear peer problem” in the way that the problem is commonly presented. As it stands today, the prominent and influential discourse on the “two nuclear peer problem” does not clearly or accurately characterize the risks posed by China’s expanding nuclear forces, nor the range of options available to U.S. officials to respond. The need to deter two nuclear adversaries does not necessarily create a qualitatively new problem for U.S. strategic deterrence posture.
Subsequent chapters evaluate important pieces of the “two nuclear peer problem” in detail. In chapter 3, Hans Kristensen presents new estimates of U.S. and Chinese force structure to 2035. He provides correctives against excessive estimates of China’s current and future capability and argues it should not properly be considered a nuclear peer of the United States.
The final chapters consider two plausible ways that a tripolar system could present a qualitatively new threat to U.S. deterrence credibility. In chapter 4, Pranay Vaddi considers how China’s buildup will affect U.S. nuclear strategy. He surveys how U.S. planning has historically approached China and evaluates multiple courses of action for how the United States might adapt. In chapter 5, John Warden examines the prospects for Sino-Russian cooperation in peacetime, in crisis, in conventional conflict, and in a nuclear conflict. He argues that it is not only the material facts of China’s buildup that will drive U.S. planning, but the expectations and risk acceptance of U.S. officials with respect to Sino-Russian coordination and U.S. extended deterrence commitments.
The authors are grateful to Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous funding of the project, as well as innumerable colleagues, academics, and government officials for informative discussions. The authors each write in an independent capacity. Their chapters do not reflect the positions of any organization or government.
All the King’s Weapons: Nuclear Launch Authority in the United States
The president of the United States is the only person in the country who can order the use of nuclear weapons, a power commonly known as “sole authority.” This power is granted to the president largely through policy tradition, but the president’s Constitutional role as Commander-in-Chief is often cited as the legal basis. Sole authority was first codified in 1948 when the National Security Council (NSC) adopted the conclusions of NSC-30, which read: “The decision as to the employment of atomic weapons in the event of war is to be made by the Chief Executive when he considers such decision to be required.” The policy has since been reaffirmed in numerous official documents, including, most recently, the Department of Defense’s 2024 Report to Congress on the Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States, which states, “the Guidance reaffirms that the President remains the sole authority to direct U.S. nuclear employment.”
Despite its foundational place in U.S. nuclear policy, sole authority has for years come under heavy scrutiny by experts, journalists, and American citizens. Experts publish pieces warning of the dangers of such a system, people take to social media to remind their networks that “this is the guy with the nuclear codes” whenever the president acts in a concerning manner, and lawmakers even introduce legislation to try to constrain the president’s authority. Recent polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Carnegie Corporation of New York found that 61% of Americans are either somewhat or very uncomfortable with the president having sole authority over nuclear launch decisions.
Sole authority appears like a dangerous toy in the hands of unstable, unreliable, or erratic presidents. President Bill Clinton reportedly lost his nuclear authorization codes for months during his presidency. Jimmy Carter rumoredly sent his codes to the dry cleaners in the pocket of his suit jacket. Following the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan in 1981, Reagan was separated from his military aide, and all of his clothes, including the pants in which the card carrying his nuclear codes sat, were stripped in the hospital and thrown away. His codes were later recovered by the FBI from a hospital trash can. Further, the mental and intellectual reliability of presidents has been questioned, with Reagan’s formal Alzheimer’s diagnosis coming just five years after he left office, John F. Kennedy’s known use of strong pain medications, Richard Nixon’s heavy drinking and erratic behavior leading up to his resignation, and Donald Trump’s history of making flippant remarks and threats of nuclear use, to name a few.
Other concerns with presidential sole authority include the immense time and psychological pressure placed on presidents in crisis scenarios that hinders rational thinking, the challenge to democratic values posed by a system that places ultimate power in one individual’s hands, the ethical and legal burden placed on lower level military officials, and more. But before we can attempt to solve the broad “problem” of sole authority, a more thorough understanding of it is needed.
This report investigates how we arrived at this system of launch authority in the United States today. It traces the origins of sole authority to the earliest days of the nuclear age and follows the history of trial and error — with new procedures and systems added or abandoned as vulnerabilities were detected and new technology emerged — culminating in an assumption that we have arrived today at the optimal system for nuclear launch authority. This report interrogates that assumption first by providing an in-depth understanding of how the policy of sole authority works today and how the nuclear enterprise in the United States is set up to enable it, then by evaluating the risks and vulnerabilities that remain. Finally, the report analyzes the merits and drawbacks of policy proposals that have been put forward by experts and lawmakers to answer a crucial question: is sole authority solvable, or is it truly the best system possible for nuclear launch authority? If the latter, should we accept that reality?
Too Hot not to Handle
Every region in the U.S. is experiencing year after year of record-breaking heat. More households now require home cooling solutions to maintain safe and liveable indoor temperatures. Over the last two decades, U.S. consumers and the private sector have leaned heavily into purchasing and marketing conventional air conditioning (AC) systems, such as central air conditioning, window units and portable ACs, to cool down overheating homes.
While AC can offer immediate relief, the rapid scaling of AC has created dangerous vulnerabilities: rising energy bills are straining people’s wallets and increasing utility debt, while surging electricity demand increases reliance on high-polluting power infrastructure and mounts pressure on an aging power grid increasingly prone to blackouts. There is also an increasing risk of elevated demand for electricity during a heat wave, overloading the grid and triggering prolonged blackouts, causing whole regions to lose their sole cooling strategy. This disruption could escalate into a public health emergency as homes and people overheat, leading to hundreds of deaths.
What Americans need to be prepared for more extreme temperatures is a resilient cooling strategy. Resilient cooling is an approach that works across three interdependent systems — buildings, communities, and the electric grid — to affordably maintain safe indoor temperatures during extreme heat events and reduce power outage risks.
This toolkit introduces a set of Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling and outlines a set of actionable policy options and levers for state and local governments to foster broader access to resilient cooling technologies and strategies.
This toolkit introduces a set of Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling and outlines a set of actionable policy options and levers for state and local governments to foster broader access to resilient cooling technologies and strategies. For example, states are the primary regulators of public utility commissions, architects of energy and building codes, and distributors of federal and state taxpayer dollars. Local governments are responsible for implementing building standards and zoning codes, enforcing housing and health codes, and operating public housing and retrofit programs that directly shape access to cooling.
The Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling for a robust resilient cooling strategy are:
- Expand Cooling Access and Affordability. Ensuring that everyone can affordably access cooling will reduce the population-wide risk of heat-related illness and death in communities and the resulting strain on healthcare systems. Targeted financial support tools — such as subsidies, rebates, and incentives — can reduce both upfront and ongoing costs of cooling technologies, thereby lowering barriers and enabling broader adoption.
- Incorporate Public Health Outcomes as a Driver of Resilience. Indoor heat exposure and heat-driven factors that reduce indoor air quality — such as pollutant accumulation and mold-promoting humidity — are health risks. Policymakers should embed heat-related health risks into building codes, energy standards, and guidelines for energy system planning, including establishing minimum indoor temperature and air quality requirements, integrating health considerations into energy system planning standards, and investing in multi-solving community system interventions like green infrastructure.
- Advance Sustainability Across the Cooling Lifecycle. Rising demand for air conditioning is intensifying the problem it aims to solve by increasing electricity consumption, prolonging reliance on high-polluting power plants, and leaking refrigerants that release powerful greenhouse gases. Policymakers can adopt codes and standards that reduce reliance on high-emission energy sources and promote low-global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants and passive cooling strategies.
- Promote Solutions for Grid Resilience. The U.S. electric grid is struggling to keep up with rising demand for electricity, creating potential risks to communities’ cooling systems. Policymakers can proactively identify potential vulnerabilities in energy systems’ ability to sustain safe indoor temperatures. Demand-side management strategies, distributed energy resources, and grid-enhancing technologies can prepare the electric grid for increased energy demand and ensure its reliability during extreme heat events.
- Build a Skilled Workforce for Resilient Cooling. Resilient cooling provides an opportunity to create pathways to good-paying jobs, reduce critical workforce gaps, and bolster the broader economy. Investing in a workforce that can design, install, and maintain resilient cooling systems can strengthen local economies, ensure preparedness for all kinds of risks to the system, and bolster American innovation.
By adopting a resilient cooling strategy, state and local policymakers can address today’s overlapping energy, health, and affordability crises, advance American-made innovation, and ensure their communities are prepared for the hotter decades ahead.
Poison in our Communities: Impacts of the Nuclear Weapons Industry across America
In 1942, the United States formally began the Manhattan Project, which led to the production, testing, and use of nuclear weapons. In August 1945, the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, killing around 200,000 people by the end of 1945 and leaving survivors with cancer, leukemia and other illnesses caused by radiation exposure. While this was their only use in wartime, states have detonated nuclear weapons many times since for testing purposes, producing radioactive fallout. Many U.S. nuclear weapons production activities, including the mining of uranium and testing of the weapons themselves, have occurred outside of the continental United States. Notably, explosive testing in the Pacific islands and ocean spread radioactive fallout to Marshallese, Japanese, and Gilbertese people, forcibly displacing entire communities and producing intergenerational illnesses.
Much of the scholarship surrounding the effects of nuclear weapons on environmental and human health is framed within a potential detonation scenario. For example, studies have shown that even a regional nuclear war would cause millions of immediate deaths and trigger a “nuclear winter,” a shift in the climate that would disrupt agricultural production, thus killing hundreds of millions more through starvation. Additionally, in 2024, the United Nations General Assembly voted to create an independent scientific panel to study the health, environmental and economic consequences of nuclear war. While such research is crucial for understanding the consequences of nuclear weapons use, nuclear weapons are built, maintained, and deployed everyday, impacting communities at every stage even before detonation. Studying only the predictive futures of the use of a nuclear weapon in war is insufficient in understanding nuclear weapons’ holistic humanitarian impact. According to former Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, “The heart of American deterrence is the people who protect us and our allies. Here at STRATCOM, you proudly stand up—day in and day out and around the clock—to defend us from catastrophe and to build a safer and more peaceful future. So let us always ensure that the most dangerous weapons ever produced by human science are managed with the greatest responsibility ever produced by human government.” Nuclear deterrence theory contends that a retaliatory nuclear strike is so threatening that an adversary will not attack in the first place. Thus, nuclear advocates often suggest that these weapons protect American citizens and the U.S. homeland. This report demonstrates, however, that the creation and sustainment of the nuclear deterrent harms members of the American public. As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
Report Outlines Urgent, Decisive Action on Extreme Heat
‘Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation’ puts heat emergencies on the same footing as other natural disasters, reimagines how governments respond
Washington, D.C. – July 22, 2025 – Shattered heat records, heat domes, and prolonged heat waves cause thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity, damages, and economic disruptions. In 2023 alone, at least 2,300 people died from extreme heat, and true mortality could be greater than 10,000 annually. Workplaces are seeing $100 billion in lost productivity each year. Increased wear and tear on aging roads, bridges, and rail is increasing maintenance costs, with road maintenance costs expected to balloon to $26 billion annually by 2040. Extreme heat also puts roughly two-thirds of the country at risk of a blackout.
Extreme heat events that were uncommon in many places are becoming routine and longer lasting – and communities across the United States remain highly vulnerable.
To help prepare, the Federation of American Scientists has drawn upon experts from Sunbelt states to identify decisive actions to save lives during extreme heat events and prepare for longer heat seasons. The Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation, released today, calls for local, state, territory, Tribal, and federal governments to collaborate with community organizations, private sector partners and research institutions.
“The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods,” the report authors say. “Governments can no longer afford to treat extreme heat as business as usual or a peripheral concern.”
The Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation focuses on five measures to protect people, their livelihoods, and their communities:
- Establish leaders with responsibility and authority to address extreme heat. Leaders must coordinate actions across all relevant agencies and with non-governmental partners.
- Accurately assess extreme heat and its impacts in real time. Use the data to inform thresholds that trigger emergency response protocols, safeguards, and pathways to financial assistance.
- Prepare for extreme heat as an acute emergency as well as a chronic risk. Local governments should consider developing heat-response plans and integrating extreme temperatures into their long-term capital planning and resilience planning.
- When extreme heat thresholds are crossed, local, state, territory, Tribal and federal governments should activate response plans and consider emergency declarations. There should be a transparent and widely understood process for emergency responses to extreme heat that focus on protecting lives and livelihoods and safeguarding critical infrastructure.
- Develop strategies to plan for and finance long-term extreme heat impact reduction. Subnational governments can incentivize or require risk-reduction measures like heat-smart building codes and land-use planning, and state, territory, Tribal and federal governments can dedicate funding to support local investments in long-term preparedness.
Extreme heat in the Sunbelt region of the United States is a harbinger of what’s coming for the rest of the country. But the Sunbelt is also advancing solutions. In April 2025, representatives from states, cities, and regions across the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor from California to Florida, convened in Jacksonville, Florida for the Ten Across Sunbelt Cities Extreme Heat Exercise. Attendees worked to understand the available levers for government heat response, discussed their current efforts on extreme heat, and identified gaps that hinder both immediate response and long-term planning for future extreme heat events.
Through an analysis of efforts to date in the Sunbelt, gaps in capabilities, and identified opportunities, and analysis of previous calls to action around extreme heat, the Federation of American Scientists developed the Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation.
The report was produced with technical support from the Ten Across initiative associated with Arizona State University, and funding from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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About FAS
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) works to advance progress on a broad suite of contemporary issues where science, technology, and innovation policy can deliver transformative impact, and seeks to ensure that scientific and technical expertise have a seat at the policymaking table. Established in 1945 by scientists in response to the atomic bomb, FAS continues to bring scientific rigor and analysis to address national challenges. More information about FAS work at fas.org.
Fueling the Bioeconomy: Clean Energy Policies Driving Biotechnology Innovation
The transition to a clean energy future and diversified sources of energy requires a fundamental shift in how we produce and consume energy across all sectors of the U.S. economy. The transportation sector, a sector that heavily relies on fossil-based energy, stands out not only because it is the sector that releases the most carbon into the atmosphere, but also for its progress in adopting next-generation technologies when it comes to new technologies and fuel alternatives.
Over the past several years, the federal government has made concerted efforts to support clean energy innovation in transportation, both for on-road and off-road. Particularly, in hard-to-electrify transportation sub-sectors, there has been added focus such as through the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge. These efforts have enabled a wave of biotechnology-driven solutions to move from research labs to commercial markets, such as LanzaJets alcohol-to-jet technology in producing SAF. From renewable fuels to bio-based feedstocks, biotechnologies are enabling the replacement of fossil-derived energy sources and contributing to a more sustainable, secure, and diversified energy system.
SAF in particular has gained traction, enabled in part by public investment and interagency coordination, like the SAF Grand Challenge Roadmap. This increased federal attention demonstrated how strategic federal action, paired with demand signals from government, targeted incentives, and industry buy-in, can create the conditions needed to accelerate biotechnology adoption.
To better understand the factors driving this progress, FAS conducted a landscape analysis at the federal and regional level of biotechnology innovation within the clean energy sector, complemented by interviews with key stakeholders. Several policy mechanisms, public-private partnerships, and investment strategies were identified that were enablers of advanced SAF adoption and production and similar technologies. By identifying the enabling conditions that supported biotechnology’s uptake and commercialization, we aim to inform future efforts on how to accelerate other sectors that utilize biotechnologies and overall, strengthen the U.S. bioeconomy.
Key Findings & Recommendations
An analysis of the federal clean energy landscape reveals several critical insights that are vital for advancing the development and deployment of biotechnologies. Federal and regional strategies are central to driving innovation and facilitating the transition of biotechnologies from research to commercialization. The following key findings and actionable recommendations address the challenges and opportunities in accelerating this transition.
Federal Level Key Findings & Recommendations
The federal government plays a pivotal role in guiding market signals and investment toward national priorities. In the clean energy sector, decarbonizing aviation has emerged as a strategic objective, with SAF serving as a critical lever. Federal initiatives such as the SAF Grand Challenge, the SAF Roadmap, and the SAF Metrics Dashboard have helped to elevate SAF within national climate priorities and enabled greater interagency coordination. These mechanisms not only track progress but also communicate federal commitment. Still, despite these efforts, current SAF production remains far below target levels, with capacity largely concentrated in HEFA, a pathway with constrained feedstock availability and limited scalability.
This production gap reflects deeper structural challenges, many of which parallel broader issues across the clean-energy biotech interface. One of the main challenges is the fragmented, short-duration policy incentives currently in use. Tax credits like 40B and 45Z, while important, lack the longevity and clarity required to unlock large-scale, long-term private investment. The absence of binding fuel mandates further undermines market certainty. These policy gaps limit the ability of the clean energy sector to serve as a sustained demand signal for emerging biotechnologies and slow the transition from pilot to commercial scale.
Importantly, these challenges point to a broader opportunity: SAF as a test case for how the clean energy sector can serve as a driver of biotechnology uptake. Promising biotechnologies, such as alcohol-to-jet and power-to-liquid, are currently stalled by high capital costs, uncertain regulatory pathways, and a lack of coordinated federal support. Addressing these bottlenecks through aligned incentives, technology-neutral mandates, and harmonized accounting frameworks could not only accelerate SAF deployment but also establish a broader policy blueprint for scaling biotechnology across other clean energy applications.
To alleviate some of the challenges identified, the federal government should:
Extend & Clarify Incentives
While tax incentives such as the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit offer a promising framework to accelerate low-carbon fuel deployment, current design and implementation challenges limit their impact, particularly for emerging bio-based and synthetic fuels. To fully unlock the climate and market potential of these incentives, Congress and relevant agencies should take the following steps:
- Congress should amend the 45Z tax credit structure to differentiate between fuel types, such as SAF, e-fuels, biofuels, and renewable diesel, based on life cycle CI and production pathways. This would better reflect technology-specific costs and accelerate deployment across multiple clean fuel markets, adding specificity as to how to utilize and earn the credits based on the type of fuel.
- Congress should extend the duration of the 45Z credit and other clean-fuel related incentives to provide long-term policy certainty. Multi-year extensions with a defined minimum value floor would reduce investment risk and enable financing of capital-intensive projects.
- Congress and the Department of Treasury should clarify eligibility to ensure inclusion of co-processing methods and hybrid production systems, which are currently in regulatory gray areas. This would ensure broader participation by innovative fuel producers.
- Federal agencies, including the Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Department of Defense, should be directed to enter into long-term (more than 10 years) procurement agreements for low-carbon fuels, including electrofuels and SAF. These offtake mechanisms would complement tax incentives and send strong market signals to producers and investors.
Scale Biotech Commercialization Support
The clean energy transition depends in part on the successful commercialization of enabling biotechnologies, ranging from advanced biofuels to bio-based carbon capture, SAF and biomanufacturing platforms that reduce industrial emissions. Recent or proposed funding cuts to clean energy programs risk stalling this progress and undermining U.S. competitiveness in the bioeconomy.
To accelerate biotechnology deployment and bridge the gap between lab-scale innovation and commercial-scale production, Congress should take the following actions:
- Authorize and appropriate expanded funding to the DOE, particularly through Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) and to the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support pilot, demonstration, and first-of-a-kind commercial scale projects that enable biotechnology applications across clean energy sectors.
- Direct and fund the DOE Loan Programs Office to establish a dedicated loan guarantee program focused on biotechnology commercialization, targeting platforms that can be integrated into the energy system, such as bio-based fuels, bioproducts, carbon utilization technologies, and electrification-enabling materials.
- Encourage DOE and USDA to enter into long-term offtake agreements or structured purchasing mechanisms with qualified bioenergy and biomanufacturing companies. These agreements would help de-risk early commercial projects, crowd in private investment, and provide market certainty during the critical scale-up phase.
- Strengthen public-private coordination mechanisms, such as cross-sector working groups or interagency task forces, to align commercialization support with industry needs, improve program targeting, and reduce time-to-market for promising technologies.
Design and Promote Next-Gen Biofuel Policies
To accelerate the deployment of low-carbon fuels and enable innovation in next-generation bioenergy technologies, Congress and relevant agencies should take the following actions:
- Congress should direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to modernize the Renewable Fuel Standard by incorporating life cycle carbon intensity as a core metric, moving beyond volume-based mandates. Legislative authority could also support the development of a national Low Carbon Fuel Standard, modeled on successful state-level programs to drive demand for fuels with demonstrable climate benefits.
- EPA should update its emissions accounting framework to reflect the latest science on life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, enabling more accurate assessment of advanced biofuels and synthetic fuels.
- DOE should expand R&D and demonstration funding for biofuel pathways that meet stringent carbon performance thresholds, with an emphasis on scalability and compatibility.
Regional Level Key Findings & Recommendations
Regional strengths continue to serve as foundational drivers of clean energy innovation, with localized assets shaping the pace and direction of technology development. Federal designations, such as the Economic Development Administration (EDA) Tech Hub program (Tech Hub), have proven catalytic. These initiatives enable regions to unlock state-level co-investment, attract private capital, and align workforce training programs with local industry needs. Early signs suggest that the Tech Hub framework is helping to seed innovation ecosystems where they are most needed, but long-term impact will depend on sustained funding support and continued regional coordination.
Workforce readiness and enabling infrastructure remain critical differentiators. Regions with deep and committed involvement from major research universities, national labs, or advanced manufacturing clusters are better positioned to scale innovation from prototype to deployment. Real-world testbeds provide environments for stress-testing technologies and accelerating regulatory and market readiness, reinforcing the importance of place-based strategies in federal innovation planning.
At the same time, private investment in clean energy and enabling biotechnologies remains crucial to developing and scaling innovative technologies. High capital costs, regulatory uncertainty, and limited early-stage demand signals continue to inhibit market entry, especially in geographies with less mature innovation ecosystems. Addressing these barriers through coordinated federal procurement, long-term incentives, and regional capacity-building will be essential to supporting growth in regions with strong assets to develop industry clusters that could yield clean energy benefits.
To accomplish this, the federal government and regional governments should:
Strengthen Regional Workforce Pipelines
A skilled and regionally distributed workforce is essential to realizing the full economic and technological potential of clean energy investments, particularly as they intersect with the bioeconomy. While federal funding is accelerating deployment through initiatives such as the IRA and DOE programs, workforce gaps, especially outside major innovation hubs, pose barriers to implementation. Addressing these gaps through targeted education, training, and talent retention efforts will be critical to ensuring that clean energy projects deliver durable, regionally inclusive economic growth. To this end:
- Federal agencies like the Department of Education and National Science Foundation should explore expanding support for STEM programs at community colleges and Minority Serving Institutions, with a focus on biosciences, engineering, and agricultural technologies relevant to the clean energy transition.
- Federally supported training and reskilling programs tailored to regional clean energy and biomanufacturing workforce needs could benefit new and existing cross-sector partnerships between state workforce agencies and regional employers.
- State and local governments should consider implementing talent retention strategies, including local hiring incentives, relocation support, and career placement services, to ensure that skilled workers remain in and contribute to regional clean energy ecosystems.
Strengthen Regional Infrastructure and Foster Cross-Sector Collaboration
Robust regional infrastructure and cross-sector collaboration are essential to accelerating the deployment of clean energy technologies that leverage advancements in biotechnology and manufacturing. Strategic investments in shared facilities, modernized logistics, and coordinated innovation ecosystems will strengthen supply chain resilience and improve technology transfer across sectors. Facilitating access to R&D infrastructure, particularly for small and mid-sized enterprises, will ensure that innovation is not limited to large firms or major metropolitan areas. To support these outcomes:
- Federal support for regional testbeds, prototyping sites, and grid modernization labs, coordinated by agencies such as DOE and EDA, would support the demonstration and scaling of biologically enabled clean energy technologies.
- State and local governments, in coordination with federal agencies including DOT and DOC, explore investment in logistics infrastructure to enhance supply chain reliability and support distributed manufacturing.
- States should consider creating or expanding the use of innovation voucher programs that allow small and mid-sized enterprises to access national lab facilities, pilot-scale infrastructure, and technical expertise, fostering cross-sector collaboration between clean energy, biotech, and advanced manufacturing firms.
Attract and De-Risk Private Capital
Attracting and de-risking private capital is critical for scaling clean energy and biotechnology innovations. By offering targeted financial mechanisms and leveraging federal visibility, governments can reduce the financial uncertainties that often deter private investment. Effective strategies, such as state-backed loan guarantees and co-investment models, can help bridge funding gaps while strategic partnerships with philanthropic and venture capital entities can unlock additional resources for emerging technologies. To this end:
- State governments, in collaboration with the federal agencies such as DOE and Treasury, should consider implementing state-backed loan guarantees and co-investment models to attract private capital into high-risk clean energy and biotech projects.
- Federal agencies like EDA, DOE, and the SBA should explore additional programs and partnerships to attract philanthropic and venture capital to emerging clean energy technologies, particularly in underserved regions.
- Federal agencies should increase efforts to facilitate connecting early-stage companies with potential investors, using federal initiatives to build investor confidence and reduce perceived risks in the clean energy sector.
Cross-Cutting Key Findings
The successful deployment of federal clean energy and biotechnology initiatives, such as the SAF Grand Challenge, relies heavily on the capacity of regional ecosystems and the private sector to absorb and implement national goals. Many regions, particularly those outside established innovation hubs, lack the infrastructure, resources, and technical expertise to effectively utilize federal funding. As a result, the impact of national policies is often limited, and the full potential of federal investments goes unrealized in certain areas.
Federal programs often take a one-size-fits-all approach, overlooking regional variability in feedstocks, industrial bases and cost structures. Programs like tax credits and life cycle analysis models can unintentionally disadvantage regions with different economic contexts, creating disparities in access to federal incentives. This lack of regional customization prevents certain areas from fully benefiting from national clean energy and biotech initiatives.
The diffusion of innovation in clean energy and biotechnology remains concentrated in a few key regions, leaving others underutilized. Despite robust federal R&D investments, commercialization and scaling of innovations are primarily concentrated in regions with established infrastructure, hindering the broader geographic spread of these technologies. In addition, workforce development efforts across federal and regional programs are fragmented, creating misalignments in talent pipelines and further limiting the ability of local industries to leverage available resources effectively. The absence of a unified system for tracking key metrics, such as SAF production and emissions reductions, makes it difficult to coordinate efforts or assess progress consistently across regions. To address this, the federal and regional governments should:
Create a Federal–Regional Clean Energy Deployment Compact
A Federal-Regional Clean Energy Deployment Compact is critical for aligning federal clean energy initiatives with the unique capabilities and needs of regional ecosystems. By establishing formal mechanisms, such as intergovernmental councils and regional liaisons, federal programs can be more effectively tailored to local conditions. These mechanisms will ensure two-way communication between federal agencies and regional stakeholders, fostering a collaborative approach that adapts to evolving technological, economic, and environmental conditions. In addition, treating regional tech hubs and initiatives as testbeds for new policy tools, such as performance-based incentives or carbon standards, will allow for innovative solutions to be tested locally before scaling them nationally, ensuring that policies are effective and contextually relevant across diverse regions. To this end:
- The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with the DOE and EPA, should establish formal intergovernmental councils or regional liaisons to facilitate ongoing dialogue between federal agencies and regional stakeholders. These councils would focus on aligning federal clean energy initiatives with regional needs, ensuring that local priorities, such as feedstock availability or infrastructure readiness, are considered in policy design.
- The DOE and EPA should treat tech hubs and regional clean energy initiatives as testbeds for policy innovation. These regions can pilot performance-based incentives, carbon standards, and other policy tools to assess their effectiveness before scaling them nationally. Successful models developed in these testbeds should be expanded to other regions, with lessons learned shared across state and local governments.
- Regional universities and innovation hubs should collaborate with federal and state agencies to develop pilot programs that test new policy tools and technologies. These institutions can serve as incubators for innovative clean energy solutions, providing valuable data on what policies work best in specific regional contexts.
Build a National Innovation-to-Deployment Pipeline
Creating a seamless innovation-to-deployment pipeline is essential for scaling clean energy technologies and ensuring that regional ecosystems can fully participate in national clean energy transitions. By linking DOE national labs, Tech Hubs, and regional consortia into a coordinated network, the U.S. can support the full life cycle of innovation, from early-stage R&D to commercialization and deployment, across diverse geographies. Additionally, co-developing curricula and training programs between federal agencies, regional tech hubs, and industry partners will ensure that talent pipelines are closely aligned with the evolving needs of the clean energy sector, providing the skilled workforce necessary to implement and scale innovations effectively. To accomplish this the:
- DOE should facilitate the creation of a national network that connects federal labs, regional tech hubs and innovation consortia. This network would provide a clear pathway for the transition of technologies from research to commercialization, ensuring that innovations can be deployed across different regions based on local needs and capacities.
- Regional Tech Hubs, in partnership with local universities and research institutions, should be integrated into the pipeline to provide localized innovation support and commercialization expertise. These hubs can act as nodes in the broader network, offering the infrastructure and expertise necessary for scaling up clean energy technologies.
Develop a Shared Metrics and Monitoring Platform
A centralized dashboard for tracking key metrics related to clean energy and biotechnology initiatives is crucial for guiding investment and policy decisions. By integrating federal and regional data can provide a comprehensive, real-time view of progress across the country. This shared platform would enable better coordination among federal, state, and local agencies, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently and that policy decisions are informed by accurate, up-to-date data. Moreover, a unified system would allow for more effective tracking of regional performance, enabling tailored solutions and based on localized needs and challenges. To this end:
- The DOE, in partnership with the EPA, should lead the development of a centralized dashboard that integrates existing federal and regional data on SAF production, emissions reductions, workforce needs, and infrastructure gaps. This platform should be publicly accessible, allowing stakeholders at all levels to monitor progress and identify opportunities for improvement.
- State and local governments should contribute relevant data from regional initiatives, including workforce training programs, infrastructure development projects, and emissions reductions efforts. These contributions would help ensure that the platform reflects the full range of activities across different regions, providing a more accurate picture of national progress.
The Department of Labor and the DOC should integrate workforce development and industrial capacity data into the platform. This would include information on training programs, regional workforce readiness, and skills gaps, helping policymakers align talent development efforts with regional needs.
The DOT should ensure that transportation infrastructure data, particularly related to SAF production and distribution networks, is included in the platform. This would provide a comprehensive view of the supply chain and infrastructure readiness necessary to scale clean energy technologies across regions.
The clean energy sector, and specifically SAF, highlights both the promise and the persistent challenges of scaling biotechnologies, reflecting broader issues, such as fragmented regulation, limited commercialization support, and misaligned incentives that hinder the deployment of advanced biotechnologies. Overcoming these systemic barriers requires coordinated, long-term policies including performance-based incentives, and procurement mechanisms that reduce investment risk and free up capital. SAF should be seen not as a standalone initiative but as a model for integrating biotechnology into industrial and energy strategy, supported by a robust innovation pipeline, expanded infrastructure, and shared metrics to guide progress. With sustained federal leadership and strategic alignment, the bioeconomy can become a key pillar of a low-carbon, resilient energy future.