By Kennedy Maize
In a largely unnoticed move last month (April 20) President Trump issued five separate but intimately connected “presidential determinations” under the terms of the 1950 Defense Production Act (DPA) essentially claiming broad control over the entire U.S. energy economy. In the announcements, Trump also cited his January 20, 2025 Executive Order 14156 (“Declaring a National Energy Emergency”). 
The five presidential memoranda are effectively a declaration of a national industrial policy with regards to energy, a unique and largely unprecedented move except in times of major wars. Conventional conservative thought eschews national governmental industrial policy in favor of letting private sector markets work. Trump has clearly abandoned conservative doctrine in favor of his desire for a “unitary executive,” and not for the first time.
In a memo to clients, the Washington law firm Squire Patton Boggs commented, “The determinations cover grid infrastructure; natural gas transmission, processing and storage; liquefied natural gas capacity; coal supply chains and baseload power generation capacity; domestic petroleum production, refining and logistics capacity; and a broader category addressing large-scale energy and energy-related infrastructure.”
Here’s a summary:
- The electricity grid. This order covers “grid infrastructure and its associated upstream supply chains, including transformers, transmission lines and conductors, substations, high-voltage circuit breakers, power control electronics, protective relay systems, capacitor banks, electrical core steel, and related raw materials and manufacturing tools.”
- Oil production. The determination finds that “domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity, including exploration and production, gathering and transmission pipelines, storage, and marine terminals, are industrial resources, materials, or critical technology items essential to the national defense.” It implicitly includes natural gas production.
- Natural gas. This determination covers “natural gas and LNG capacity, including gathering and transmission pipelines, compression, processing plants, underground storage, LNG liquefaction, storage and marine load, export facilities, and critical distribution infrastructure, are industrial resources, materials, or critical technology items essential to the national defense.”
- Coal. The memorandum concludes that “coal supply chains and baseload power generation capacity, including coal mining, rail and barge logistics, export and domestic terminals, generating unit availability and life-extension work, on-site stockpiles, and associated reliability updates, are industrial resources, materials, or critical technology items essential to the national defense.”
- Large-Scale Energy and Energy‑Related Infrastructure. This apparent mop up finding applies to “engineering, site acquisition and preparation, permitting, early-stage risk mitigation financing instruments, domestic manufacturing capacity, and enabling infrastructure, are industrial resources, materials, and critical technology items essential to the national defense.”
The Trumpian view of the importance of energy infrastructure and production clearly does not encompass renewable energy, including hydropower, geothermal, solar, wind, or battery storage, which are not directly addressed in his orders. The memoranda also don’t address nuclear. The administration already controls nuclear power development.
All five orders delegate implementation and enforcement to the U.S. Department of Energy, which likely had a lot to do with initiating and formulating the five memoranda. Each is addressed to “The Secretary of Energy.”
The Patton Boggs memo says a “key uncertainty” of the Trump orders is whether the DPA “can materially alter the economics and timing of large infrastructure projects that remain constrained not only by capital access, but also by siting, permitting, supply-chain and construction bottlenecks.”
A 2023 Congressional Research Service history of the Defense Production Act notes. “Though initially passed in response to the Korean War, the DPA is historically based on the War Powers Acts of World War II. Gradually, Congress has expanded the term national defense, as defined in the DPA. Based on this definition, the scope of DPA authorities now extends beyond shaping U.S. military preparedness and capabilities, as the authorities may also be used to enhance and support domestic preparedness, response, and recovery from natural hazards, terrorist attacks, and other national emergencies.”
The key provision, Title III, “allows the President to incentivize the domestic industrial base to expand the production and supply of critical materials and goods. Authorized incentives include loans, loan guarantees, direct purchases and purchase commitments, and the authority to procure and install equipment in private industrial facilities.”
Congress has routinely reauthorized the DPA over the years, most recently last December. It has also been routinely used. A Council on Foreign Relations article a year ago wrote, “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump used the law to address shortages of medical supplies, while Biden used it to accelerate vaccine production and strengthen supply chains for essential products.”
In his second term, Trump has used the DPA to push domestic production of rare earth minerals to counter China’s control of that market. He also used the act this March to restart an oil pipeline from an offshore California site that closed after a major 2015 oil spill.
What comes next? The Patton Boggs memo says that the significance of the Trump orders will “depend less on the issuance of the presidential memoranda themselves than on how DOE structures and deploys support, how much funding is actually available, and whether the administration can pair Title III financing with broader regulatory and project-execution measures.”