Three weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump’s “flood the zone” approach to remaking the United States government in an America First image is upending the prevailing Western notions of the Ukraine peace process, freeing multinational firms to engage in corrupt business practices, and leaving a vacuum for adversaries to expand their global influence after USAID, the world’s top provider of foreign aid, is shut down.
Trump’s foreign policy team — a mix of national security hawks like Marco Rubio (Secretary of State) alongside America First proponents like Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense) and Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence) — represents competing policy approaches, positioning the president as the ultimate decision-maker willing to bypass traditional checks and balances to implement his vision of America’s global role.
Many of Trump’s executive actions lack power to change policy without additional action from Congress. The Republican majority in both houses largely supports his efforts to streamline the federal bureaucracy — carried out by Elon Musk’s team at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) — and shows limited resistance to his moves to freeze or redirect congressionally approved funding. The Democratic minority has struggled to formulate a coherent counterstrategy but appears reluctant to use the March 14 government funding deadline as leverage.
Instead, the courts have stepped in to check and balance Trump’s attempts to test the limits of executive power, blocking some of his early priorities, such as freezing foreign aid funding and firing the USAID workforce, which are now headed to the right-leaning Supreme Court. It is unclear how many of Trump’s initiatives will ultimately be reinstated by the courts, and how America’s global standing may change as a result.
Trump supporters argue that by injecting chaos and uncertainty into policymaking, the president is achieving results, whether cutting government waste or reducing China’s willingness to escalate tensions over Taiwan. His strategy is resonating with voters, 70% of whom say he is fulfilling his campaign promises and 53% approve of his job performance. Now they would like Trump to focus more on reducing consumer prices (66%) and less on imposing tariffs (49%) or cutting foreign aid (39%). Time will tell if declining expectations of financial wellbeing and affordable groceries under Trump (both measures are down from January, by 7 and 11 percentage points) are a sign of Americans’ growing weariness with all that chaos — and of their desire for Trump to start paying closer attention to the pocketbook issues he promised to fix.
The U.S. Department of Transportation suspended a $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program to build fast EV chargers along designated routes, approved as part of the 2021 infrastructure law. Of the original amount, $3.3 billion has been allocated to states that administer the program, but just $616 million has been awarded to companies to actually build charging stations. All approved but unspent funds are under review, with proposed changes expected in the spring. It is unclear whether the Trump administration can cancel pre-approved projects or halt spending of funds appropriated by Congress, so legal challenges are likely. But since last week, most states that had NEVI projects underway have paused them, with a possible exception of Maryland still reportedly moving ahead with “obligated” projects.
Billed as a way to realign federal spending with the new administration’s priorities, the move risks damaging public confidence in EVs by amplifying range concerns, a leading deterrent to EV ownership. If NEVI is suspended indefinitely, the funding freeze would impact mostly smaller players in the charging space, while Tesla, one of the largest recipients of NEVI funding, is unlikely to be seriously affected. Charger construction in low-income and rural areas could draw to a standstill, while more profitable locations would be covered by private efforts like Ionna, a joint venture of eight automakers (including Ford, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz) with plans to deploy 1,000 fast-charging points nationwide by 2026. If NEVI is eventually revived with reduced funding, a new study from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that making the Tesla charging network universally accessible could achieve a similar EV charging footprint with 500 fewer stations and as much as $332 million in savings.
Chris Wright, a fossil-fuels executive turned President Trump’s Energy Secretary, has called terms like clean energy “deceptive” and argued that net-zero policies raise consumer energy costs and undermine U.S. national security. Now Wright and John Sneed, the new head of the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office who held the same position during the first Trump term, are spearheading an overhaul of the $412 billion program authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act to support a variety of clean energy technologies, including EVs, components, and advanced batteries. The program has awarded approximately $35 billion in loans and loan guarantees to bolster EV manufacturing, with some awards finalized just days before President Joe Biden left office, including a $6.6 billion loan to Rivian to build a new EV plant in Georgia.
Since Trump’s return to the White House the loan office’s work has largely stopped while its operations are being retooled to focus on the technologies favored by the new administration, such as nuclear power and liquefied natural gas. Trump officials are exploring ways to cancel existing financing deals, including conditional loans worth a total of $47 billion across all programs that have not been finalized, and use the freed-up funds, plus more than $200 billion in uncommitted funding, to advance the president’s priorities. There is general consensus that loan agreements finalized under Biden are relatively safe, although recipients should brace for delayed disbursements and lengthy court proceedings if the administration does try to claw back the funds. Conditional awards face bigger risks because they may require further approvals from the Treasury Department or the Office of Management and Budget, where they may be blocked or stalled beyond their two-year loan guarantee expiration deadline. We are watching further developments in this space — including any pushback from Republicans in Congress, whose districts account for 80% of manufacturing investments spurred by Biden’s climate law, or automakers like Ford, whose CEO Jim Farley recently warned of widespread layoffs if the Trump administration ended financial support for EV manufacturing.
