President aims to ‘unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy’
US president Donald Trump has released a discretionary budget request that cuts “non-essential research on nuclear energy” and urges the Office of Nuclear Energy to “focus on what is truly needed to achieve national dominance in nuclear technology.
This includes developing innovative concepts for nuclear reactors, researching advanced nuclear fuels, and maintaining the capabilities of the Idaho National Laboratory.
According to the discretionary budget request – essentially a bird's eye view of Trump’s spending priorities – the Office of Nuclear Energy would get $408m (€359m) less than 2025 levels, as reported by the Exchange Monitor.
So far there are few details about increases or decreases to specific programmes, such as the Generation III+ Small Modular Reactor Program or the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP).
According to the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the US Department of Energy received $49.8bn in fiscal year 2025, while only $45.1bn has been requested for FY 2026.
The ANS said: “This initial ‘skinny’ budget proposal is likely to change quite a bit as agencies will now submit their own budget justifications before the White House puts out its full FY 2026 proposal by the end of May, after which the ‘sausage is made’ in Congress before final funding is appropriated.”
In total, the budget aims to cut more than $163bn from non-defence federal spending for FY 2026, a 22.6% reduction on the current year.
“The budget supports the president’s commitment to unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources and reorients Department of Energy funding toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power,” the Office of Management and Budget said.
