Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the US government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology.

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But… there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women, and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.

ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.

Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies—flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections—wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.

The Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the bipartisan independent regulator that approves commercial nuclear power plants and monitors their safety. The agency is not a household name. But it’s considered the international gold standard, often influencing safety rules around the world.

The NRC has critics, especially in Silicon Valley, where the often-cautious commission is portrayed as an impediment to innovation. In an early salvo, President Donald Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke out about the importance of agency independence. It was the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired.

During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era.

“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” he said, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.

The aggressive moves have sent shock waves through the nuclear energy world. Many longtime promoters of the industry say they worry recklessness from the Trump administration could discredit responsible nuclear energy initiatives.

“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator—we do not know whose interests it is serving,” warned Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair during the Obama administration. “The safety culture is under threat.”

A ProPublica analysis of staffing data from the NRC and the Office of Personnel Management shows a rush to the exits: Over 400 people have left the agency since Trump took office. The losses are particularly pronounced in the teams that handle reactor and nuclear materials safety and among veteran staffers with 10 or more years of experience. Meanwhile, hiring of new staff has proceeded at a snail’s pace, with nearly 60 new arrivals in the first year of the Trump administration compared with nearly 350 in the last year of the Biden administration.

Some nuclear power supporters say the administration is providing a needed level of urgency given the energy demands of AI. They also contend the sweeping changes underway aren’t as dangerous or dire as some experts suggest.

“I think the NRC has been frozen in time,” said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the investment and strategy consultancy Veriten. “It’s a great time to get unfrozen and aim to work quickly.”

The White House referred most of ProPublica’s questions to the Department of Energy, where spokesperson Olivia Tinari said the agency is committed to helping build more safe, high-quality nuclear energy facilities.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, America’s nuclear industry is entering a new era that will provide reliable, abundant power for generations to come,” she wrote. The DOE is “committed to the highest standards of safety for American workers and communities.”

Cohen did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The NRC declined to comment.

Blindsided by DOGE

The US has not had a serious nuclear incident since the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, a track record many experts attribute to a rigorous regulatory environment and an intense safety culture.

Major nuclear incidents around the world have only strengthened the resolve of past regulators to stay independent from industry and from political winds. A chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima accident, investigators found, was the cozy relationship between the country’s industry and oversight body, which opened the door for thin safety assessments and inaccurate projections overlooking the possible impact of a major tsunami.

“We knew regulatory capture led directly to Fukushima and to Chernobyl,” said Kathryn Huff, who was assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Biden administration.

The US has barely built any nuclear power plants in recent decades. Only three new reactors have been completed in the last 25 years, and since 1990 the US has barely added any net new nuclear electricity to its grid. Though about 20 percent of US energy is supplied by nuclear power plants, the fleet is aging. Some experts blame the slow build-out on the challenging economics of financing a multibillion-dollar project and the uncertainty of accessing and disposing of nuclear fuels.

But an increasingly vocal group of industry voices and deregulation advocates have blamed the slow build-out on overly cautious and inefficient regulators. Among the most powerful exponents of this view are billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; both venture capitalists have their own investments in the nuclear energy sector and are influential Trump supporters.

Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, after Trump won the 2024 election, helping pick staff for the new administration. In late 2024, Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”

Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE—which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs—was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.

The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.

As DOGE gutted agencies, departures mounted in the nuclear sector. Career experts in nuclear regulations and safety departed or were forced out. When Trump fired Hanson, a Democratic NRC commissioner, the president’s team explained the move by saying, “All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction.”

In an unsigned email to ProPublica, the White House press office wrote: “All commissioners are presidential appointees and can be fired just like any other appointee.”

In August, the NRC’s top attorney resigned and was replaced by oil and gas lawyer David Taggart, who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. In all, the nuclear office at the DOE had lost about a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit focused on science and technology policy.

That summer, Cohen and a team of DOGE operatives touched down at the NRC offices, a series of nondescript towers across from a Dunkin’ in suburban Maryland. He was joined by Adam Blake, an investor who had recently founded an AI medical startup and has a background in real estate and solar energy, and Ankur Bansal, president of a company that created software for real estate agents. Neither would comment for this story.

Many career officials who spoke with ProPublica were blindsided: The new Trump officials at the NRC seemed to have no experience with the intricacies of nuclear energy policy or law, they said. One NRC lawyer who briefed some of the new arrivals decided to resign. “They were talking about quickly approving all these new reactors, and they didn’t seem to care that much about the rules—they wanted to carry out the wishes of the White House,” the official said.

At one point, Cohen began passing out hats from nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, one of the companies vying to build a new reactor, according to sources familiar with the matter and records seen by ProPublica. NRC staffers balked; they were supposed to monitor companies like Valar for safety violations, not wear its swag.

NRC ethics officials warned Cohen that the hat handout was a likely violation of conflict rules. It betrayed a misunderstanding of the safety regulator’s role, said a former official familiar with the exchange. “Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator—the watchdog—is going around wearing the power plant’s branded hats,” the official said. “Would that make you feel safe?” The NRC and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment about the hat incident.

Valar counts Trump’s Silicon Valley allies as angel investors. They include Palmer Luckey, a technology executive and founder of the defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, the software company helping power Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation raids.

It was among three nuclear reactor companies that sued the NRC last year in an attempt to strip it of its authority to regulate its reactors and replace it with a state-level regulator. Before the Trump administration came into office, lawyers watching the case were confident the courts would quickly dismiss the suit, as the NRC’s authority to regulate reactors is widely acknowledged. But new Trump appointees pushed for a compromise settlement—which is still being negotiated. The career NRC lawyer working on the case quietly left the agency.

Valar and its executives did not reply to requests for comment.

“Going So Fast”

The deregulatory push is the culmination of mounting pressure—both political and economic—to make it easier to build nuclear power in the US. Over the years, a bipartisan coalition supporting nuclear expansion brought together environmentalists who favor zero-carbon power and defense hawks focused on abundant domestic energy production.

Anti-nuclear activists still argue that renewable energy like wind and solar are safer and more economical. But streamlining the NRC has been a bipartisan priority as well. The latest major reform came in 2024, when President Joe Biden signed into law the ADVANCE Act, which went as far as changing the mission statement of the NRC to ensure it “does not unnecessarily limit” nuclear energy development.

Some nuclear power supporters say the Trump administration is merely accelerating these changes. They cite instances in which the current regulations appear out of sync with the times. The NRC’s byzantine rules are designed for so-called large light-water reactors—massive facilities that can power entire cities—and not the increasingly in vogue smaller advanced reactor designs popular among Silicon Valley-backed firms.

Rules that require fences of certain heights might make little sense for new reactors buried in the earth; and rules that require a certain number of operators per reactor could be a bad fit for a cluster of smaller reactors with modern controls. Advances in sensors, modeling, and safety technologies, they say, should be taken into account across the board.

The NRC has said it expects over two dozen new license requests from small modular and advanced reactor companies in coming years. Many of those requests are likely to come from new, Silicon Valley-based nuclear firms.

“There was a missing link in the innovation cycle, and it was very difficult to build something and test it in the US because of mostly licensing and site availability constraints in the past,” said Adam Stein of the pro-nuclear nonprofit Breakthrough Institute.

The regulatory changes are in flux: This spring, the NRC is starting to release thousands of pages of new rules governing everything from the safety and emergency preparedness plans reactor companies are required to submit to the procedures for objecting to a reactor license.

“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” said one official working on reactor licensing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast—everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”

Lawyers from the executive office of the president have been sent to the NRC to keep an eye on the new rules, a move that further raised alarms about the agency’s independence.

Nicholas Gallagher—a relatively recent New York University law school graduate and conservative writer whom ProPublica previously identified as a DOGE operative at the General Services Administration—has been involved in conversations about overhauling environmental rules.

He’s working alongside Sydney Volanski, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who rose to national attention while she was in high school for her campaign against the Girl Scouts of America, which she accused of promoting “Marxists, socialists and advocates of same-sex lifestyle.”

NRC lawyers working on the rules were told last October that Gallagher and Volanski would be joining them, and they both appear on the regular NRC rulemaking calendar invite.

The White House maintains, however, that “zero lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been dispatched to work on rulemaking.” Neither Gallagher nor Volanski replied to requests for comment.

The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump’s cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.

Political operatives have been “inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the No. 2 career operations official. “I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”

Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration’s interference at the NRC. He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.

At a recent hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board—an independent body that helps adjudicate nuclear licensing—NRC lawyers withdrew from the proceedings, citing “limited resources.” The judge remarked that it was the first time in over 20 years the NRC had done so.

Meanwhile, some staff members, other career officials say, are afraid to voice dissenting views for fear of being fired. “It feels like being a lobster in a slowly boiling pot,” one NRC official who has been working on the rule changes told ProPublica, describing the erosion of independence.

The official was one of three who compared their recent experience at NRC to being in a pot of slowly boiling water. “If somebody is raising something that they think that the industry or the White House would have a problem with, they think twice,” the official said.

Inside the NRC, the steering committee overseeing the changes includes Cohen, Taggart, and Mike King, a career NRC official who is the newly installed executive director for operations. The former director, Mirela Gavrilas, a 21-year veteran of the agency, retired after getting boxed out of decision-making, according to a person familiar with her departure. Gavrilas did not respond to a request for comment.

Any final changes will be approved by the NRC’s five commissioners, three of whom are Republicans. In September, the two Democratic commissioners told a Senate committee they might be fired at any time if they get crosswise with Trump—including over revisions to safety rules.

Draft rules being circulated inside the NRC propose drastic rollbacks of security and safety inspections at nuclear facilities. Those include a proposed 56 percent cut in emergency preparedness inspection time, CNN reported in March.

Even some pro-nuclear groups are troubled by the emerging order. Some have tried to backchannel to their contacts in the Trump administration to explain the importance of an independent regulator to help maintain public support for nuclear power. Without it, they risk losing credibility.

“You have to make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear energy and supports many of the regulatory changes being proposed by the Trump administration.

Greenwald’s group favors faster timelines for approving nuclear reactors, but she worries that the agency’s fundamental independence has been undermined. “We would prefer that they yield back more of NRC independence,” she said.

“Nuke Bros” in Silicon Valley

One Trump administration priority has been making it easier for so-called advanced reactor companies to navigate the regulatory process. These firms, mostly backed by Silicon Valley tech and venture money, are often working on designs for much smaller reactors that they hope to mass produce in factories.

“There are two nuclear industries,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. “There are the actual people who use nuclear reactors to produce power and put it on the grid… and then there are the ‘nuke bros’” in Silicon Valley.

Trump’s Silicon Valley allies have loomed large over his nuclear policy. One prospective political appointee for a top DOE nuclear job got a Christmas Eve call from Thiel, the rare Silicon Valley leader to back Trump in 2016. Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a nuclear fuel startup and an advanced reactor company, quizzed the would-be official about deregulation and how to rapidly build more nuclear energy capacity, said sources familiar with the conversation.

Nuclear energy startups jockeyed to spend time at Mar-a-Lago in the months before the start of Trump’s second term. Balerion Space Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in multiple companies, convened an investor summit there in January 2025, according to an invitation viewed by ProPublica. Balerion did not reply to a request for comment.

A few months later, when Trump was drawing up the executive orders, leaders at many of those nuclear companies were given advanced access to drafts of the text—and the opportunity to provide suggested edits, documents viewed by ProPublica show.

Those orders created a new program to test out experimental reactor designs, addressing a common complaint that companies are not given opportunities to experiment. There are currently about a dozen advanced reactor companies planning to participate. Each has a concierge team within the DOE to help navigate bureaucracy. As NPR reported in January, the DOE quietly overhauled a series of safety rules that would apply to these new reactors and shared the new regulations with these companies before making them public.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright—who served on the board of one of those companies, Oklo—has said fast nuclear build-out is a priority: “We are moving as quickly as we can to permit, build, and enable the rapid construction of as much nuke capacity as possible,” he told CNBC last fall. Oklo noted that Wright stepped down from the board when he was confirmed.

The Trump administration hopes some of the companies would have their reactors “go critical”—a key first step on the way to building a functioning power plant—by July 2026. Then the NRC, which signs off on the safety designs of commercial nuclear power plants, could be expected to quickly OK these new reactors to get to market.

According to people familiar with the conversations, at least one nuclear energy startup CEO personally recruited potential members of the DOGE nuclear team, though it’s not clear if Cohen was brought aboard this way. Cohen has told colleagues and industry contacts that he reports to Emily Underwood, one of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s top aides for economic policy. He is perceived inside government as a key avatar of the White House’s nuclear agenda.

In its email to ProPublica, the White House said, “Seth Cohen is a Department of Energy employee and does not report to Emily Underwood or Stephen Miller in any capacity.”

The DOE spokesperson added, “Seth’s role at the Department of Energy is to support the Trump administration’s mission to unleash American Energy Dominance.”

Cohen has been pushing to raise the legal limit of radiation that nuclear energy companies are allowed to emit from their facilities. One nuclear industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said many firms are fixating on changing these radiation rules: Their business model requires moving nuclear reactors around the country, often near workers or the general public.

Building thick, expensive shielding walls can be prohibitively expensive, they said.

Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor has called limits on exposure to radiation a top barrier to industry growth. A recent DOE memo seen by ProPublica cites cost savings on shielding for Valar’s reactor to justify changing those limits. “Shielding-related cost reductions,” the memo said, “could range from $1-2 million per reactor.” The debate over the precise rule change is ongoing.

The DOE has been considering a fivefold increase to the limit for public exposure to radiation, which will allow some nuclear reactor companies to cut costs on these expensive safety shields, internal DOE documents seen by ProPublica show.

A presentation prepared by DOE staffers in their Idaho offices that has circulated inside the department makes the “business case” for changing the radiation dose rules: It could cut the cost of some new reactors by as much as 5 percent. These more relaxed standards are likely to be adopted by the NRC and apply to reactors nationwide, documents show.

In February, Wright accompanied Valar’s executive team on a first-of-its-kind flight, as a US military plane was conscripted to fly the company’s reactor from Los Angeles to Utah. Valar does not yet have a working nuclear reactor, and a number of industry sources told ProPublica they viewed the airlift as a PR exercise. Internal government memos justified the airlift by designating it as “critical” to the US “national security interests.”

Cohen posted smiling pictures of himself from the cargo bay of the military plane.

Cohen told an audience at the American Nuclear Society that the rapid build-out was essential to powering Silicon Valley’s AI data centers. He framed the policy in existential terms: “I can’t emphasize this strongly enough that losing the AI war is an outcome akin to the Nazis developing the bomb before the United States.”

As it deliberated rule changes, the DOE has cut out its internal team of health experts who work on radiation safety at the Office of Environment, Health, Safety, and Security, said sources familiar with the decision. The advice of outside experts on radiation protection has been largely cast aside.

The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science… with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”

The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA”—the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard—which directs anyone dealing with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.

It often pushes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to entirely throw it out was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.

Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, said sources familiar with the deliberations.

Internal DOE documents arguing for changing dose rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of the AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group studying radiation safety. “They fundamentally mistake the science.”

John Wagner, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory and the report’s lead author, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science over changing radiation exposure rules is hotly contested. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not meant to be the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform debate.”

The impact of radiation levels at very low doses is hard to measure, so the US has historically struck a cautious note. Raising dose limits could put the US out of step with international standards.

For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.

In June, he shot down the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their VCs and their board and say, listen, guys, we actually need a few hundred million dollars more to put into a trust fund?”

He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events—disasters that have roughly a 1 percent chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.

“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Read the original story here. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Pratheek Rebala and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

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Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has long dismissed reams of data on lifesaving vaccines as being insufficient to prove safety—is pushing the Food and Drug Administration to lift restrictions on over a dozen injectable peptide treatments. The treatments have little to no efficacy data behind them and were previously banned by the FDA for posing significant safety risks.

Kennedy is a self-proclaimed "big fan" of the risky treatments. Peptides, generally, are chains of amino acids linked together with peptide bonds, a link between the carboxyl group of one amino acid and the amino group of another. Bioactive peptides can have a range of cellular functions and influence various biochemical processes. Well-established, FDA-approved types of peptide drugs include GLP-1s for obesity and insulin for diabetes. But online, peptide drugs are now seemingly synonymous with unproven, non-FDA-approved treatment. They've grown extremely popular among wellness influencers, celebrities, and "biohackers," who claim without evidence that peptides can treat various diseases, reverse aging, and improve appearance.

On February 27, Kennedy touted such unproven peptides as a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast, saying he had used them to treat injuries with "really good effect." He also vowed to end the FDA's "war on peptides" and revealed his plan to reverse the FDA's restrictions on many of them.

Kennedy was likely referring to the FDA's 2023 decision to reclassify over a dozen unproven peptide drugs for potentially posing "significant safety risks" amid a rise in unproven claims about their benefits. The reclassification took the peptides off a list of drugs that can be made by compounding pharmacies—a type of pharmacy that makes customized drugs for individual patients. As a result, such pharmacies can no longer make them for human use. But, the black and gray markets are still awash with the questionable peptide products, some outright illicit and others sold to individuals for "research use." Some of Kennedy's supporters and allies are among those selling unproven peptide treatments.

Safety concerns

On March 22, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy was "poised" to follow through on his plan to lift FDA restrictions on peptides. Two days later, The Washington Post's editorial board blasted Kennedy's plans as "hypocritical quackery." Today, The New York Times reported that the FDA is moving to allow compounding pharmacies to make 14 currently restricted peptides. The Times noted that top FDA leaders have "reservations" about the changes and the potential criticism that the agency is making decisions based on politics rather than evidence.

It remains unclear which 14 peptides are being considered for eased access. But it's expected that certain popular peptides will be on the list, including BPC-157 (Body Protection Compound-157), which was first isolated from gastric juices and is claimed to promote tissue repair. There are also growth-hormone-releasing peptides CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin.

Experts note that there are no randomized controlled trial data to prove that any of these peptides work. Moreover, experts worry about various safety concerns, including impurities from gray- or black-market products, random dose sizes, as well as combinations of unproven peptides, sometimes called "stacks." Peptides that stimulate growth have the potential to spur cancers, for instance, and others may cause hormonal imbalances. Last year, two women became critically ill after receiving peptide injections at an anti-aging conference in Las Vegas.

The data on these peptides is "just woefully minuscule," Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told the Times. "It’s a mess, because we don’t have any data that these work," he said. "Maybe one of them actually does something good. But right now, we just know that they’re a liability."

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Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military's most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit.

The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military's constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites. It consists of software to handle new signals and jam-resistant capabilities of the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018. The ground segment also includes two master control stations and upgrades to ground monitoring stations around the world, among other hardware elements.

RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, won a Pentagon contract in 2010 to develop and deliver the control system. The program was supposed to be complete in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion. Today, the official cost for the ground system for the GPS III satellites stands at $7.6 billion. RTX is developing an OCX augmentation projected to cost more than $400 million to support a new series of GPS IIIF satellites set to begin launching next year, bringing the total effort to $8 billion.

Although RTX delivered OCX to the Space Force last July, the ground segment remains nonoperational. Nine months later, the Pentagon may soon call it quits on the program. Thomas Ainsworth, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told Congress last week that OCX is still struggling.

Hopes dashed

The Space Force's formal acceptance of the ground system from RTX last year marked a turning point for OCX after years of blunders. The handover allowed military teams to validate the new control software and upgraded ground facilities before declaring the system ready for operational service. But this testing uncovered more problems.

"As a result, extensive and more operationally relevant testing with actual GPS satellites, ground antennas, and user equipment led to an increase in finding extensive system issues across all subsystems, many of which have not been resolved," Ainsworth told the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces in prepared testimony.

"For over 15 years, the program has experienced significant technical challenges, schedule slips, and associated cost growth, putting at risk the launch and capability of future GPS satellites," Ainsworth continued.

Delays in the OCX program forced the military to retool the GPS network's decades-old legacy control system to manage the GPS III satellites. Upgrades in 2020 allowed the Space Force to begin using a subset of the new capabilities enabled by "M-code" GPS signals designed for warfare.

The military-grade signals are especially important now to combat GPS jamming and spoofing around war zones in Ukraine and the Middle East. M-code is more resistant to jamming, and its encryption makes it more difficult to spoof, a kind of attack that makes receivers trust fake navigation signals over real ones. The upgrade also allows the military to deny an adversary access to GPS during conflict, while maintaining the ability for US and allied forces to use M-code for an advantage.

Military officials previously thought they needed OCX up and running to fully exploit M-code signals on approximately 700 types of weapons systems such as airplanes, ships, ground vehicles, and missiles.

Because of its civilian and military importance, the GPS network is an "attractive target for adversaries," said Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess, the Space Force's deputy chief of operations. "Jamming (denial of signal) and spoofing (false signals) are a current and growing threat to GPS. We are modernizing GPS to mitigate these threats."

But a key part of the modernization is still plagued by problems. Ainsworth told lawmakers that continuing to update the existing GPS ground control system "is now a viable option as systemic issues with OCX continue."

This could spell the end for the OCX program. The service is weighing options for how to proceed, including possibly canceling the program entirely, a Space Force spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

In a written statement released to Ars, RTX said: "The GPS OCX program is a large-scale, highly complex ground system modernization effort. US Space Force accepted delivery of a mission-capable system in 2025 and assumed operational control at that time. RTX is working alongside the government to address any post-delivery concerns."

How did it come to this?

The Government Accountability Office found the OCX program was marred by "poor acquisition decisions and a slow recognition of development problems" before it exceeded cost and schedule targets in 2016, triggering an automatic Pentagon review for potential cancellation. The problems included difficulties with the software's cybersecurity features and a "persistently high software development defect rate."

At the time, defense officials blamed the troubles on the government's lack of software expertise and Raytheon's "poor systems engineering" practices. The military restructured the program and continued development, only to encounter further delays and cost overruns.

"There have been problems in program management, problems with contractor performance, problems in systems engineering, both on government and on the contractor side, over a number of years. It's a very stressing program," Ainsworth told lawmakers last week. "We are still considering how to ensure we move forward."

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The Trump administration is turning to the nuclear option on endangered-species protections in the name of national security.

A rarely tapped panel nicknamed the “God Squad” will meet Tuesday to discuss whether overriding Endangered Species Act regulations for all federally regulated fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico is more important than preventing the extinction of several imperiled species. That includes sea turtles and a whale species down to its last 51 individuals.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the upcoming Endangered Species Committee meeting last week, with no details on specific projects in the Gulf or the basis for what would constitute an extraordinary action. Only twice in the panel’s nearly half-century has it ever lifted restrictions.

But after the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the meeting, the Trump administration told the court that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf exempted “for reasons of national security.”

A federal judge declined Friday to block the meeting.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum speaks during a news conference at the White House on Aug. 11, 2025. Credit: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images

“It’s disappointing that the court didn’t immediately stop Hegseth’s reckless power grab, but this is just the first battle in a longer fight to protect the Gulf’s endangered whales and turtles,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

The situation puts the country in uncharted waters. No administration has ever before requested a national security exemption from endangered-species protections.

It’s a challenging case to make. US oil production is hovering around record highs. Companies working offshore in the Gulf’s federal waters produced 1.9 million barrels of oil per day last year, and that’s with endangered-species protections in place, which require companies to minimize their impact on animals rather than limiting or prohibiting oil and gas operations altogether.

Experts also say it’s doubtful that increasing oil production there would have any immediate benefits to national security.

But it does align with President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” platform. His administration has called for much more production—especially after gas prices soared since he authorized strikes on Iran in February. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a $5 billion deepwater oil drilling project in the Gulf this month.

Though the committee meeting is moving forward, the Trump administration skipped several usual steps in the process, experts say.

“It was written to be a rare but necessary emergency escape clause when there was no alternative and human welfare was desperately at issue,” said Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law School. “This is not carefully done. This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

How the “God Squad” works

Plater was lead counsel in a high-profile 1970s lawsuit that gave rise to the creation of the Endangered Species Committee. A dam under construction in Tennessee, his legal team and environmentalists in the area argued, would threaten a tiny endangered fish called the snail darter.

Many saw this “Tellico Dam vs. the Snail Darter” case as the first real test of the Endangered Species Act’s powers. It eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in favor of the snail darter. Based on the law’s wording, they said, the government must protect an endangered species “whatever the cost.”

This powerful language prompted Congress to pass an amendment in 1978 creating the committee as an extreme measure to override endangered species protections in specific cases with major implications for the US economy and welfare.

The committee is composed of several top officials, including the heads of the Interior Department, the US Department of Agriculture, the Army, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ironically, even this new entity sided with the fish—or, at the very least, against the dam.

“They had just figured out… that the cost of the dam was actually greater than the benefits, even putting aside the fish,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (Construction was eventually completed anyway after Congress tucked an exemption for it in a budget bill.)

Since then, the God Squad has only been convened a handful of times. Just two exemptions have ever been granted, once for a dam in endangered whooping cranes’ habitat in the Great Plains region and another for proposed federal timber sales in Oregon, which would have affected threatened northern spotted owls. The God Squad voted to permit some of the timber sales, but the agency involved later withdrew its exemption request.

It’s been decades since the committee was last brought together.

The only parties that can request an exemption are federal agencies proposing an action, the governor of the state in which the action is proposed, or the entity seeking a permit related to an agency action.

Before that point, as part of the normal endangered-species process for a federal action, government researchers perform rigorous analyses to forecast project impacts, creating what’s called a “biological opinion.” In it, they typically outline mandatory measures that could mitigate threats to endangered species.

In very rare cases, agencies conclude a federal action cannot be conducted without jeopardizing an endangered animal or plant. That’s when the God Squad comes into play.

Similar to a trial, the officials call in a range of experts—from economists to biologists—to testify on the project impacts. By the end, the committee must be able to answer two major questions: Is there a “reasonable and prudent” alternative? If not, do the pros outweigh the cons for the public?

That’s why it’s called the God Squad. There is a very real possibility a species could go extinct if the project moves forward, even if the committee still requires some level of mitigation measures.

The Trump administration said in a court filing this week that it would bypass the evidentiary hearing meant to inform the committee’s decision.

“It’s almost impossible to believe that there would be a project that couldn’t be altered in a way that would allow for the promotion of an endangered or threatened species,” said Rob Verchick, an environmental law expert at Loyola University New Orleans. “One thing I think we do know is that when Congress created this committee, it was seen as being an alternative of very last resort.”

Recent actions suggest the Trump administration doesn’t see it that way.

Energy vs. extinction?

On Trump’s first day back in office last year, he declared a “National Energy Emergency” and directed the Interior secretary to convene the committee “not less than quarterly” to review applications or “identify obstacles to domestic energy infrastructure specifically deriving from implementation of the [Endangered Species Act] or the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

While that hasn’t occurred—publicly, at least—the administration is now moving forward with its first God Squad meeting on March 31, which will be livestreamed at 9:30 am Eastern.

The initial announcement of the meeting “seemed a little ridiculous, frankly, because there hadn’t been the proper procedural requirements to allow for a convening,” said Verchick, who served in the EPA during the Obama administration. In an interview before the administration’s court filing raised the specter of national security, he added: “It’s so unusual that they’re not even talking about what the individual project is that they’re concerned about. And then they’re not even talking about the individual animals that are, in theory, posing a barrier to whatever the project is.”

Christopher Danley, senior counselor to the Secretary of the Interior, argued in that court filing Wednesday that no exemption application or applicant is necessary due to the national security determination.

Verchick said over email the next day that the section of the law cited in the legal filing “does not relieve Secretary Hegseth from having to issue a valid exemption application.” Instead, it “directs how the Committee must respond upon receiving a valid exemption application that asserts an exemption is necessary for national security.”

He added that the Department of Defense “does not appear to have submitted a valid exemption application or report. There’s no evidence of an application or report at all. If the application exists, it was submitted too late.”

Asked about that, the Defense Department did not respond. The Interior Department also did not answer questions from Inside Climate News.

The sprawling nature of the exemption the agency seems to be seeking for all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf could make it more difficult to secure, said Farber, the UC Berkeley professor.

“That’s sort of characteristic of the administration, you know, go big,” he said. “But on the other hand, it may make it more vulnerable than a more targeted exemption request.”

Even amid the conflict in Iran, it might also be challenging for the federal government to justify why overruling endangered species regulations in the Gulf will support national security, according to Charles McConnell, the executive director for the Center for Carbon Management in Energy at the University of Houston.

“If this is simply being looked at as a visceral reaction to the prices at the pump, and people want to see this announcement as something that’s going to make gasoline prices less next week, that’s absurd,” he said. “Last time I looked, we weren’t actually running short [on oil] at all.”

Instead, McConnell thinks this move could be the Trump administration’s way of showing it is “100 percent behind the oil and gas community.”

“It’s about power and control,” he said. “It’s more political than it is energy security.”

The Gulf of Mexico hosts one of the highest concentrations of offshore fossil fuel infrastructure in the world, with about 3,500 oil and gas structures and tens of thousands of inactive wells. Trump is looking to open up oil and gas operations by around 1.27 billion acres of federal waters in the Gulf, off California, and along Alaska’s coast.

However, NOAA issued a biological opinion 10 months ago, finding that collisions with oil industry boats in the Gulf of Mexico could jeopardize the continued survival of the endangered Rice’s whale. At night, the whales spend most of their time within 50 feet of the water’s surface.

Some 51 remain, so even the loss of a single whale could have outsized effects on the population.

The analysis also found that noises from oil and gas construction or other activities are “likely to result in chronic stress” for the Rice’s whales and many other species in the area, including endangered sperm whales and five imperiled species of sea turtles.

Another profound—and potentially extinction-level—risk? Oil spills, as evidenced by the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The largest marine oil spill in US history, the offshore drilling rig explosion killed 11 people directly and dumped more than 210 million gallons into the Gulf.

A Kemp’s ridley turtle is released into the wild at Stewart Beach in May 2015 in Galveston, Texas. Credit: Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Sea turtles suffocated under sludge. Poisoned seabirds washed up by the hundreds on Louisiana shores. The spill killed an estimated 20 percent of the Rice’s whale population. Researchers, nonprofits, and local volunteers are still cleaning up the aftermath of the spill in Gulf coastal ecosystems 16 years later.

Now, oil rigs in the region face stricter regulations to ensure their systems are up to date. They are also required to comply with Endangered Species Act requirements to minimize their impacts on vulnerable animals. The latest jeopardy finding for the Rice’s whale says boats should immediately begin using technology to avoid vessel strikes and monitor for the presence of the animal.

But Trump has rolled back many environmental protections he thinks stand in the way of oil. He scrapped drilling prohibitions in ecologically sensitive areas. His offshore fossil fuel expansion plan, the Center for Biological Diversity estimated, could trigger thousands of oil spills across the country, based on average spill rates in recent decades. And his administration rescinded guidance in February for oil and gas vessels to slow down in the western Gulf to avoid hitting whales.

The God Squad could remove other regulations on industry activities. Given that this national security exemption is unprecedented, only time will tell how it plays out, Farber said. But he expects further litigation.

The Trump administration has “a real advantage going in, because it’s [claiming] national security, but they’re really pressing that to kind of its far limits,” he said.

Plater said the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws that allows citizens to increase enforcement through substantive actions. He’s seen this firsthand: The snail darter case that threw the law into the public spotlight decades ago was spurred by an idea from one of his law students for a paper.

In his view, the committee that grew out of that case is for the most part “a very fair, careful bypass” for extreme scenarios.

Now, however, Plater fears it will be “weaponized to roll back citizen enforceable protections for all the endangered and threatened species in the Gulf.”

“This is not just talking about a whale and the need for fossil fuels. It is just one more act in a political quashing of citizen involvement in statutory enforcement and protection of public values,” he said. “Scratch away at almost any environmental controversy, and pretty soon you’re looking at big questions of democratic governance.”

Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems, and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.

She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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A federal judge ruled that President Trump's executive order defunding NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment and issued a permanent injunction stating that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it.

The Trump order's "instruction that all federal agencies stop funding NPR and PBS constitutes a penalty for engaging in speech disfavored by the President and cannot be lawfully implemented by any executive department or agency," Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee in US District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled yesterday.

The ruling against Trump in the case filed by NPR, PBS, and several stations may not have much practical impact. Trump's May 2025 executive order was followed by Congress rescinding the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) budget of $1.1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.

The CPB voted to dissolve itself in January 2026 after distributing all remaining funds provided by Congress. NPR, PBS, and member stations continue to operate with other funding sources but had to make budget cuts. Federal agencies could cite yesterday's court ruling in future actions to fund public media, but that's unlikely to happen under the Trump administration.

Moss said the executive order sent a clear message that "NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the President disapproves of their 'left wing' coverage of the news." Noting that the Trump order purported to apply "regardless of the nature of the program or the merits of their applications or requests for funding," Moss said that "viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type" violates the First Amendment.

A PBS article yesterday pointed out that public media suffered budget cuts from Trump's executive order right away, months before Congress decided to end its annual funding for the CPB. "Trump's executive order immediately cut millions of dollars in funding from the Education Department to PBS for its children's programming, forcing the system to lay off one-third of the PBS Kids staff," the PBS article said.

White House angry about "ridiculous ruling"

Moss wrote that Trump's "extreme" executive order did not simply withdraw funding for NPR and PBS journalism or impose conditions on participation in specific federal programs. Instead, it directed all federal agencies to eliminate all funding to NPR and PBS.

"The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech," Moss wrote. "Perhaps that is because neither Congress nor any prior Administration has ever attempted something so extreme, or perhaps it is because any prior effort to do so has failed. But the most obvious reason is that any such individual ban, based on past speech, would almost certainly constitute the type of retaliation that the First Amendment prohibits."

The ruling can be appealed. "This is a ridiculous ruling by an activist judge attempting to undermine the law," a White House spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars. "NPR and PBS have no right to receive taxpayer funds, and Congress already voted to defund them. The Trump administration looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”

NPR CEO Katherine Maher called the ruling "a decisive affirmation of the rights of a free and independent press... The court made clear that the government cannot use funding as a lever to influence or penalize the press, whether as a national news service or a local newsroom." She said that NPR and member stations "will continue delivering independent, fact-based, high-quality reporting to communities across the United States, regardless of the administration of the day."

PBS said yesterday that it is "thrilled with today’s decision declaring the executive order unconstitutional. As we argued, and Judge Moss ruled, the executive order is textbook unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and retaliation, in violation of longstanding First Amendment principles."

Judge: Trump illegally targeted "disfavored viewpoint"

The judge's ruling strikes down Section 1 of the executive order, which instructed the CPB and all federal agencies to cease federal funding for NPR and PBS. Moss also struck down Section 3(a), in which Trump directed all agency heads to "identify and terminate, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS."

"Any agency action implementing Sections 1 and 3(a) would injure Plaintiffs anew by retaliating against them for their exercise of First Amendment rights," Moss wrote. He declared the sections "unlawful and unenforceable because they are viewpoint discriminatory and retaliatory in violation of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause."

Moss criticized the Trump executive order and a White House fact sheet that attempted to justify the executive order, saying that the documents make it clear the government action "targets a disfavored viewpoint" in violation of the Constitution. Moss wrote:

The Order instructs federal agencies to deny Plaintiffs funding because “neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” The Fact Sheet, in turn, denounces Plaintiffs for “fuel[ing] partisanship and left-wing propaganda,” and it includes bullet points identifying specific instances of purportedly biased speech. These include NPR’s failure “to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story,” NPR’s insistence that “COVID-19 did not originate in a lab,” NPR’s “Valentine’s Day feature around ‘queer animals,’” PBS’s “negative coverage” of “congressional Republicans” and comparatively “positive coverage of congressional Democrats,” PBS’s more frequent use of the phrase “far-right” than its use of the phrase “far-left,” and PBS’s negative “coverage of the 2024 Republican National Convention” and more positive “coverage of the 2024 Democratic National Convention.”

A White House press release similarly characterized NPR and PBS news coverage as "trash" and provided examples of articles allegedly showing that “NPR and PBS have zero tolerance for non-leftist viewpoints," Moss noted.

"It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch," Moss wrote. "The Executive Order seeks to exclude NPR and PBS from receiving federal grants or other funding because they have provided more positive coverage of his political opponents than of his party and allies, because their news coverage, in his view, tips left, and because they were critical of him."

Revival of CPB still "highly unlikely"

Trump is entitled to criticize any reporting, but he may not "use his governmental power to direct federal agencies to exclude Plaintiffs from receiving federal grants or other funding in retaliation for saying things that he does not like," Moss wrote. The executive order, Moss wrote, did not "define or regulate the content of government speech or ensure compliance with a federal program" or "set neutral and germane criteria that apply to all applicants for a federal grant program. Instead, it singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs."

Trump's action cut off funding "without regard to whether the federal funds are used to pay for the nationwide interconnection systems, which serve as the technological backbones of public radio and television; to provide safety and security for journalists working in war zones; to support the emergency broadcast system; or to produce or distribute music, children’s or other educational programming, or documentaries," Moss wrote. "And it applies to grants from the (now defunct) Corporation for Public Broadcasting ('CPB'), the Federal Emergency Management Agency ('FEMA'), the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts ('NEA'), and all other federal agencies."

Although Congress has since gotten on board with Trump's defunding of NPR and PBS, the Trump order violated congressional directives in place at the time it was issued, Moss wrote. When "Congress decides to fund a category of First Amendment activity, the executive branch 'violates the First Amendment when it denies access to a speaker solely to suppress the point of view [it] espouses on an otherwise includible subject,'" Moss wrote, quoting a 1985 Supreme Court ruling.

Trump's order also directed the CPB to stop all funding for NPR and PBS, but Moss decided that the plaintiffs' request for injunctive or declaratory relief against the CPB itself is now moot. The CPB told the court that it decided to dissolve because Congress rescinded its funding, not because of the executive order, he wrote.

Moss said there's little reason to think the CPB will be reconstituted. A new CPB's board members would have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate and "would have no reason to seek to re-incorporate the CPB absent congressional funding—a prospect that also seems highly unlikely in the foreseeable future," Moss wrote.

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My colleagues over in enterprise product support often get corporate customers who report that “Your latest update broke our system.” After studying the problem (which is usually quite laborious because they have to go back and forth with the customer to capture logs and dumps and traces), they eventually conclude that, actually, the system was broken even before the upgrade! Their prediction is that if the customer takes an affected system and rolls back the update, it will still be broken. And if they take a system that hasn’t yet taken the update, and reboot it, it will also be broken in the same way.

And the prediction is true.

What is going on is that three weeks ago, the company’s IT department updated some software or installed a new driver or deployed some new group policy that they saw in a TikTok video or something, and the new policy does some really sketchy things like changing security on registry keys or reconfiguring services or changing some undocumented configuration settings. The software updates or the new driver or the new group policy renders the machine unbootable, but they don’t notice it because they don’t reboot until Patch Tuesday.

And then Patch Tuesday comes around, the update installs, and the system reboots, and now the new software or the new driver or the sketchy configuration settings kick in to make their lives miserable.

It wasn’t the update that broke their system. It was the fact that the system rebooted.

The post Before you check if an update caused your problem, check that it wasn’t a problem before the update appeared first on The Old New Thing.