Happy Juneteenth!

Nuclear is, allegedly, one of the big planks of this Administration's ambitious energy goals. However there has been less meat than meets the eye, if you excuse the pun. The problem is that while many energy sources, especially hydrocarbon and solar, mostly just require the government to proverbially get out of the way, not so with nuclear, which requires massive upfront investments which typically will not be made by the private sector without state aid in one form or another.

Still, they're going to give it the old college try. President Trump has signed four executive orders trying to boost nuclear, primarily through deregulation.

The order overhauls the structure of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, directing it to consult with DOGE to “reorganize the NRC to promote the expeditious processing of license applications and the adoption of innovative technology.”

The orders also grant the US Energy Secretary authority to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects, taking it away from the NRC. President Trump is also using the Defense Production Act to speed up purchases of uranium and protect the domestic supply chain. Until 2023, the United States got much of its enriched uranium from Russia. He is also ordering DEO and DOD to explore federal lands that may be suitable for siting nuclear plants.

These are all good policies but it's hard to see how it would enable the US to meet President Trump's goal of quadrupling domestic production of nuclear power within 25 years.

We have written about this before. The most successful nuclear nation in the world is France, and they did it by adopting a top-down, government-driven, albeit pragmatic and responsive, approach, which we described here: "The nuclear rollout was a titanic undertaking: the Plan Messmer was approved in 1974 and the last reactor was connected to the grid in 1999." In our briefing, we add: "In short, wilful, pragmatic, intelligent, and determined execution is what accomplished it."

Check out the briefing here.

Check out our interview with Mark Nelson of Radiant Energy Group on this topic on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Fertility — Terrible news: according to a new Pew survey, "The total number of children that women and men ages 20 to 39 planned to have, on average, dropped from 2.3 in 2012 to 1.8 in 2023." (Via Brad Wilcox) For the longest time, people had desired fertility above replacement rate, and so the policy question was: how to help them realize a goal they already have. If people's desired fertility drops, that makes the already-mountaineous task even harder, and less politically sustainable. If people don't even want kids, let alone have them, why would they vote for natalist policies?

#Fertility — More fertility stuff, sorry, but this is interesting. A new NBER paper by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears looks at how much of fertility decline is explained by childlessness versus smaller family sizes and concludes "Childlessness explains only 38% of the decline in fertility in the advanced economies." This suggests that to increase the birthrate of a country, it may be much more fruitful to encourage existing parents to have more children than to get the childless to become parents.

#BigBeautifulBill — The Tax Foundation has put out its analysis of the tax side of Senate Finance GOP's version of the Big Beautiful Bill. "The major tax provisions would reduce federal tax revenue by $4.8 trillion between 2025 and 2034, on a conventional basis. On a dynamic basis, incorporating the projected increase in long-run GDP of 1.1 percent, the dynamic score of the tax provisions falls to $3.9 trillion, meaning economic growth pays for 19 percent of the major tax cuts."

#Immigration — Based on new numbers from the Current Population Survey, the number of foreign-born individuals in the labor force declined by 601,000 from January to May 2025. The decline was entirely among non-citizens. More analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies.

#Trade — Michael Strain of AEI has been one of the most forceful critics of protectionism and of the Admin's trade policies. He has a new paper out (PDF) arguing that tariffs do not boost, indeed may depress, manufacturing employment. "A look at the import statistics should give protectionists immediate pause. In each quarter of the years 2023 and 2024, between 54% and 56% of US imports consisted of intermediate goods and materials, capital goods, and automotive engines and parts. Or consider the case of steel. The administration's steel tariffs might help US steel producers. But for every one job in steel production, there are 80 jobs in US industries that use steel. Among others, US manufacturers of household appliances, farm machinery, mining machinery, batteries, and hardware are steel intensive, and will face higher production costs due to steel tariffs (Russ and Cox 2018)." These are all fair observations.

#Housing #TheEconomy — Builders broke ground on home construction in May at the slowest pace in five years. The housing sector is obviously key to the US economy. The issuance of building permits, an indicator of the appetite to build homes, also hit a five-year low, and sentiment among homebuilders dropped to the lowest level since 2022 in June, reports Axios. "Now the sector faces new Trump-era factors, including tariffs and deportations, that are holding back construction and limiting supply."

#Antitrust #Healthcare — FTC Commissioner Mark Meador highlights this paper by FTC economists on the impact of mergers in the healthcare sector, specifically mergers between physician firms. "A significant fraction of the physician mergers we identified, especially those involving health systems, exhibited characteristics that could indicate the potential for competitive harm."

#HigherEd — Interesting: Palantir just announced what they call the "American Tech Fellowship" where they will "find, train, and unleash the American talent that others have overlooked and undervalued." Very importantly, there is no college degree requirement to apply. This kind of elite traineeship is the future of higher education.

#HigherEd #DEI — Want to see the past of higher education? "New documents obtained by the Free Beacon show the Harvard Law Review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about 'author diversity.' And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that 'we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.'" More.

#WaterIsWet — Who would have thunk it: grouping pupils by ability produces better results.