President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act, handing the Department of Energy new authority to block bulk-power system equipment tied to countries it flags as national security threats.
“Since my first term, the threat to the United States regarding foreign supply of bulk-power system electric equipment has become even more acute,” the order reads.
“The rapid growth of advanced manufacturing, data centers, artificial intelligence, and defense production has increased the Nation’s dependence on abundant, reliable electricity and magnified the consequences of a successful attack or supply disruption on the bulk-power system.”
The order doesn’t ban all foreign equipment. It targets gear tied to “Covered Foreign Entities” — countries under a U.S. arms embargo, sanctions regime, or ones the Secretary of Energy names as threats. Transformers. Batteries. Inverters. The software that runs them. All of it falls inside the order’s reach.
The executive order builds on a narrower 2020 predecessor, Executive Order 13920, that targeted Chinese-made transformers alone.
Bridget Bartol, head of industry and regulatory affairs at the National Electric Manufacturers Association, calls the new order “kind of an update and expansion” of that earlier action. She says manufacturers still need clarity on what counts as software “designed and developed by a covered foreign entity,” since the order names no countries outright.
Edison Electric Institute, representing investor-owned utilities, says its members will work with DOE to protect reliability and affordability, spokesperson Dani Marx says. (Bartol’s and Marx’s comments were first reported by Utility Dive.)
The numbers explain the urgency. China produces 80% or more of the world’s lithium-ion battery cells and a major share of its solar components, per the International Energy Agency. That’s leverage this order hopes to blunt.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright leads the effort, working alongside the Secretary of War, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence.
The stated goal is to stop hostile states from burying surveillance tools or backdoors inside the hardware that keeps the lights on.
The order argues that today’s light-touch rules on foreign-made equipment give adversaries room to build in and exploit vulnerabilities. That includes “digital backdoors built into their systems” that let a foreign government reach remotely, reads the order. It also frames the dependence itself as a risk as leaning on foreign suppliers leaves the U.S. exposed to a supply-chain break “as a result of disruptions in international trade or other causes.”
This isn’t a new worry. One foreign backdoor lets an attacker skip the hardest part of a grid attack. Next comes the jump from a compromised IT network into the operational technology that runs the equipment. Build the backdoor into the hardware, and that jump disappears.
Both sides of that risk are already playing out.
Volt Typhoon, the Chinese state-linked group, has burrowed into U.S. energy systems for years by hijacking residential routers to mask its access. Grid-monitoring gear has been found sitting exposed on the open internet, running an insecure legacy protocol. And the EU made a parallel move in May, urging member states to drop Huawei and ZTE gear from telecom networks over the same espionage fears.
Water utilities are already living this fight. More than 30 Minnesota water systems got hit in a coordinated attack in late July — attackers shut down Braham’s well and treatment plant outright, and Plymouth had to disconnect cellular-linked equipment at two water towers and several lift stations while crews took over manually. The campaign didn’t stop there.
In August, New Jersey and Alabama confirmed their own utilities were targeted in what CISA now calls a “significant increase” in attacks on the programmable logic controllers that run pump and valve systems across at least a dozen states.
Federal officials point to Iran without confirming it outright. No community has lost safe drinking water, but the pattern is now familiar. Cheap, internet-facing industrial hardware that nobody locked down is the common denominator.
Senate Democrats introduced a $300 million fix in response. The water sector’s version of this fight is already being legislated while the grid order tries to get ahead of it.
The FCC has been squeezing foreign-made networking gear out of U.S. infrastructure on a parallel track. Netgear recently won a carve-out after the agency moved to target foreign routers on national-security grounds.
Add to that in December’s a ban on new foreign-made drones such as Chinese manufacturer DJI, and January’s forced divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American-led ownership group, and a pattern emerges. Sector by sector, Washington is trying to strip out foreign hardware and software it can’t fully vet.
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