Report Published September 14, 2026 · 2 minute read
Fragmented by Design: A Reform Agenda for Federal Energy Financing Programs
The United States is on the cusp of an enormous wave of energy investment. The US power sector alone may need up to $1.4 trillion in new capital by 2030.1
But the innovative energy sources essential to meeting growing US energy demand—including nuclear power, geothermal, carbon capture, and long-duration storage—are hard to finance on their own. They are expensive to build and often higher risk, so private investors are frequently reluctant to fund them without help.
That’s where the federal government comes in. Through grants, loans, loan guarantees, and other tools, government support can make these projects more attractive to private capital. But there’s a problem: those tools were never designed to work as a system. They were built one at a time, over decades, by different agencies across the federal government.
Third Way’s new report, based on a comprehensive review of federal programs and dozens of expert interviews, finds that:
- Federal financing tools are scattered across dozens of agencies and program offices, with no one in charge of coordination or maintaining a government-wide view of the projects they support.
- Projects can routinely qualify for multiple programs at once, but applicants must navigate each program independently. Each has its own paperwork, rules, risk tolerance, and review processes. And, when new presidential administrations come in, guidelines frequently change, creating more uncertainty.
- These problems raise costs, slow projects down, and diminish confidence from investors that federal support will actually be there when they need it.
To fix these problems, our report recommends three changes:
- Create a National Energy Financing Council to coordinate reporting and set common ground rules across agencies.
- Publish an annual investment plan that tells applicants where the government wants to invest and gives agencies shared standards for weighing risk.
- Build inter-agency teams for reviewing applications, structuring deals, and tracking loan performance so that individual agencies are not duplicating work.
None of this requires shutting down existing programs or creating new federal bureaucracy. It just means connecting the tools that already exist.
