Fusion Is Ready. Is Trump’s Washington?

DEVENS, Massachusetts — On a rainy July day at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a former U.S. Army base-turned-research park forty miles northwest of Boston, dozens of material science experts and engineers are intently focused on the task at hand: assembling huge, 10-foot long magnets out of stacks of superconducting copper-colored tape on a massive factory floor.

Specialized welders will soon attach the magnets to a partially-built nuclear reactor, which looks vaguely like something out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Iron Man comes to mind.)  To be clear: This isn’t the atom-splitting “fission” reactor most people are familiar with, the likes of which once sparked public fear in the United States and is now experiencing a renaissance. It’s a fusion reactor, nicknamed SPARC, designed to trigger the same atom-fusing reaction that powers the sun.

Creating the pancake-like layers of each magnet “used to take months. Now it takes a shift,” points out Benjamin Byboth, a former Navy nuclear submarine engineer who now runs business development for the company, as he walks me through a tour of the factory.

Commonwealth — an 8-year-old firm that was born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now the most well-funded of a wave of fusion startups, backed by $3 billion from Bill Gates, Google and other investors — aims to switch on the reactor next year and generate more energy than it took to drive the reaction. It would be the first time a company, as opposed to a government-funded laboratory, has done that. What’s more, executives say, it would prove that fusion is capable of fueling actual power plants and homes — and, yes, data centers — with carbon emissions-free energy by the early 2030s.

That’s a hugely complex goal for a technology that has seen 75 years of fits, starts and elusive progress, a goal that’s “difficult enough to be humbling for everybody,” Byboth says as we walk through the bustling cafeteria, full of PhDs, engineers, tech entrepreneurs and even auto and biotech experts. It’s an orderly, energetic scene of progress that Commonwealth likes to show off to visitors.

That’s because even as that scientific and engineering work continues here at the Commonwealth campus, its executives, as well as officials at other fusion startups, are engaged in a sales job playing out in communities, board rooms and Donald Trump’s Washington. Its success may determine whether fusion ceases being science fiction and starts becoming a real way of tackling the world’s energy and climate woes. And the engineers at Commonwealth want to ensure that when this finally happens, it happens in the United States.

Safety is only part of the conversation. Fusion isn’t the nuclear power that haunted Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers raised against the Cold War backdrop of meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, officials assure concerned local residents here and in Virginia, where Commonwealth is planning a fusion-fueled plant. Fusion facilities involve only the radiation risk of, say, a modern hospital where cancer patients get radiation treatment, says Byboth.

The bigger challenge: Persuading not only the public and the market, but administration officials and congressional leaders, that a breakthrough is right around the corner — justifying an even bigger infusion of taxpayer money. And that if the United States doesn't do that, China will get there first.

That’s a hard sell for a technology that’s been 20 years away since, well, the 1970s. It’s even more difficult in a divided, disrupted Washington where the Trump administration is cutting non-defense programs as low as they can go. Complicating matters even further: They’re trying to make their case at a moment when the promise of fusion is competing with proven technology like advanced nuclear fission reactors, not to mention ever-cheaper solar power and batteries.

Commonwealth officials insist they will be able to field a commercial power plant by the early 2030s. They’re so confident that the company has forged a partnership with Dominion Energy in Virginia to build a pilot reactor, and already applied to join the Mid-Atlantic electrical grid, PJM. And the Trump administration has been rhetorically bullish, they say, as was Joe Biden’s team.

Yet as they race toward what they call their 2027 “Kitty Hawk” moment, Commonwealth officials in Devens tell POLITICO Magazine that without a more robust cost-sharing investment from the federal government to help fusion companies build actual pilot power plants and establish a supply chain, the industry won’t be able to scale.

“We're at the limits of what private capital can support,” says Trent Bauserman, a former policy advisor to House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer and Biden staffer who now runs federal relations for Commonwealth.

More specifically, the industry wants policymakers to commit money to a full-fledged, well-funded commercialization initiative akin to the NASA program that helped produce Elon Musk’s SpaceX — and to stop funding some fusion research projects launched in the 2000s and 2010s that are now seen as outdated, thanks to the advances of the last decade. They’re pushing for $10 billion over ten years — half to help companies get onto the grid, half to fund test facilities — to make that happen.

That’s a big number, acknowledges Bob Mumgaard, Commonwealth’s co-founder and CEO. But, he says, with the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and China all spending billions to get fusion to market, “for the U.S. to lead, that’s the type of number that’s needed.” Building fusion technology is expensive. “A $100 million federal program,” he says, “is not meaningful to this industry at this stage.”

But that sales pitch has fallen flat thus far. That was evident in early June, when the Department of Energy’s top science official, Dario Gil, met with officials from the eight companies receiving aid under the current federal program and made clear that their demand for $10 billion in new money is unrealistic in this environment, multiple industry officials say.

Mumgaard, who was not at the Gil meeting, says that in the realm of science, artificial intelligence and the buzzy, mysterious topic of quantum computing are taking up mindshare and dollars.

“The administration has priorities, you know – quantum, AI. And fusion is like the third. And one and two are eating everything and not leaving very much,” Mumgaard says.

That has fusion officials now scrambling to tell their story to Washington policymakers in hopes of better navigating the federal spending game.

The frustration comes at a moment of great excitement and activity, alongside lingering skepticism and considerable uncertainty, in the nascent fusion industry, which sprung out of universities and national laboratories less than a decade ago.

Thus far, few companies have managed to maneuver around these dynamics as well as Commonwealth. Mumgaard won early applause from the Biden administration and is now on President Trump's science and technology council. But there have been challenges. His company, in fact, was formed in reaction to a decision by President Barack Obama to defund U.S. fusion work at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center in favor of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, a global effort launched in southern France. Supporters successfully lobbied to get the funding back, temporarily. But the fickle nature of federal funding led Mumgaard and others to start a company in 2018 as they began developing a plan to to use high-temperature superconductor magnets for fusion in a new way, an innovation that became the company’s technological signature.

As that was happening, a massive breakthrough occurred in 2022 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, when scientists using a different, laser-based fusion technology succeeded, for the first time ever, in generating more energy from a fusion reaction than it took to spark the reaction itself.

It was a landmark moment that made 60 Minutes and brought more investors and policymakers off the sidelines, excited by the prospect of energy that would produce no emissions and be essentially limitless, thanks to the fact that its main ingredients are found in seawater. According to the Fusion Industry Association, nearly $4.5 billion poured into the industry in 2025, bringing total private investment to nearly $14 billion, compared to less than $2 billion back in 2020. And just last week, Jeff Bezos’ General Fusion became the first fusion company to go public.

Commonwealth officials argue their magnetic confinement model — different from the laser technology used in the Lawrence Livermore demonstration — has the best chance of powering the grid in a sustainable way. And they say that they’re trying to be as transparent as possible to help build momentum; they released peer-reviewed studies of the science behind their SPARC reactor earlier this spring.

Since progress on an experiment that takes place in a fraction of a second at temperatures topping 100 million degrees isn’t easy to demonstrate, Commonwealth executives eagerly bring top government officials and investors to their facility. That includes a stopover to “Tokamak Hall” — a tokamak being the doughnut-shaped reactor designed by the Soviets and then built in the United States in the 1970s, when Washington began one of many short-lived bursts of support for nuclear fusion as a cure to the country’s energy woes.

To fusion leaders like Mumgaard, the case for fusion as an answer to energy and climate troubles is easy at a moment where energy demand has spiked across the world, driven in part by the AI and data center boom. Solar, wind and battery technology have all gotten far cheaper, but the power they produce, and the land they require, can’t meet the huge demands of companies and states now, in his view. “If you want to power, say, Virginia, you are not going to do it with wind and solar and batteries,” says Mumgaard, who did his applied plasma physics and nuclear engineering work at MIT.

“If you just wanted to power Massachusetts and batteries were free and solar was free, you would have to pave over Berkshire County. People like Berkshire County.”

As Mumgaard and other fusion advocates see it, the U.S. bureaucracy’s approach to advancing fusion has become outdated even as the industry — and technology — have evolved rapidly. Fusion remains based in the Office of Science, and while the Trump administration has proposed the creation of an Office of Fusion, it remains unfunded for the moment.

But critics argue the case being made by fusion companies — that fusion science is essentially solved, and getting on the grid is now an engineering and financing question — goes too far, and comes with real risks.

One of those critics is John Holdren, who ran Barack Obama’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for eight years, and has been outspoken in warning that for all the advances of the last decade, hurdles remain considerably higher than companies are willing to admit. Talk of a final push toward commercial fusion is “wildly premature,” he argues, and could lead to a bust.

For one thing, the fusion reactions done thus far have not produced more energy than the full electrical power needed to run the tokamak or the lasers involved. And if they actually can produce that kind of energy yield, companies will still need to build technology that can sustain these reactions for years, not seconds.

(That’s why Commonwealth says its test, scheduled for next year, is designed to create a “commercial relevant reaction,” meaning a reaction that produces more energy than all of the power involved in producing it.)

In an email, Holdren, now affiliated with Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, argues that overenthusiastic investment from industry or the government “at best will waste a lot of money and at worst could lock in hopeless approaches in ways that actually slow down the realization of a significant fusion contribution to commercial electricity generation.”

Mumgaard’s answer to that: Holdren and others leveling those criticisms are a decade behind, and should come to Devens to see the technological progress being made.

Notably, no one in the Trump administration is raising such concerns — publicly, at least. The Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, which provides fusion companies funding if they meet certain technical and engineering goals, was signed into law by Trump in 2020. And Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has been an enthusiastic supporter of the fusion industry — he often notes that he studied it himself at MIT.

Moreover, the industry won a significant victory last year when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to regulate future fusion reactors less stringently than fission reactors, based on the lower safety and radiation risks they pose. While a fission reaction involves splitting atoms and creating a volatile chain reaction, fusion involves forcing atomic nuclei together at high temperatures —and can be stopped immediately.

But close listeners in the fusion industry took note when Wright went on Katie Miller’s podcast earlier this year and referred to a fusion timeline that’s notably more pessimistic than the “mid-2030s” goal that’s been the official line.

“Fusion energy on the grid, yeah, it's 10 years if everything goes awesomely well — 10 to 20 years — but it's coming,” Wright said at the time. “I went to work on it 40 years ago, and we thought it was 10 or 20 years away then, so could be wrong.”

For some fusion advocates, Wright’s remarks cast a bit of a pall; one industry source, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, says he was caught off guard.

Meanwhile, Trump’s budget office’s fiscal 2027 spending request sends mixed signals on fusion; it would fund the creation of a new Office of Fusion with $10 million, but would effectively cut overall fusion funding by about $50 million from fiscal 2026 levels. Congressional appropriators have so far ignored a request from House fusion supporters to add $4 billion in supplemental funding to help fuel the industry. Within the Office of Science — where fusion work has traditionally been housed — funding for AI and for quantum computing, another part of the Trump administration’s “Genesis project” fared better, with a requested $1.2 billion in new funding.

There are signs that Congress is warming to fusion technology.

Five years ago, when Alex Valys, the founder and president of Xcimer, a laser fusion firm based in Denver, and his co-founder and former MIT roommate Connor Galloway, visited Capitol Hill, “People would basically be like, ‘Oh, this is cute. There's two nerds in my office. Like, why are you talking to me?,’" says Valys, whose company today is the second biggest recipient of federal fusion funding.

Today, more than 100 members of Congress are members of the House and Senate fusion caucuses. And support from the milestone program, created under the first Trump administration and launched under Biden, gave Xcimer the credibility to attract private financing, and to partner quickly with national laboratories. Last month, it was able to start operating its laser technology, which it aims to turn into the world’s largest laser and a commercial fusion plant.

But Valys says Congress and the administration are not expanding the program — modeled on NASA’s commercial space program — fast enough to get companies to the next stage in an industry that involves big, capital-intensive power plant systems. The Energy Department studied the NASA model closely, he says. But the first commercial contract for space, which went in part to SpaceX, was for several hundred million dollars.

“By comparison, the [fusion program] started with $46 million for eight companies, Valys says.

Government funding, he says, makes private investors more willing to commit. Otherwise, it’s a tougher sell. “When we're looking for investment in future funding rounds, they say, ‘Jesus, is the U.S. government going to step up here?’” Valys says, sounding rueful.

Industry officials are realizing that their progress isn’t resonating as loudly as it needs to in Trump’s Energy Department and on Capitol Hill, particularly following the June industry meeting with Gil, the Under Secretary of Energy for science and innovation, at a Boston event where he unveiled a Department roadmap for helping the fusion industry grow.

Gil, a former IBM executive, told the assembled company officials that their ask for a big $10 billion infusion was “an uphill battle” and told them to pursue other funding approaches, and talk more to Congress, according to Matt Miles, senior vice president of external affairs at Knoxville, Tenn.-based Type One Energy, who attended the meeting. While the meeting was initially a bit tense, Miles says it ended up being productive with an “honest and open and candid” exchange.

Ask Xcimer’s Valys about that meeting, which he also attended, and he deflects somewhat. He says he didn’t note “any particular tension,” but calls it clarifying.

“One of the major takeaways for me from the meeting was… fusion is still fairly early as an industry,” he says. “I think people still don't actually understand, like, what state the industry is in.”

The Department of Energy declined to comment on the Boston meeting or Gil and Wright’s broader view of the fusion industry’s funding requests.

Fusion industry officials are now thinking about other funding mechanisms and looking for vehicles on the Hill, including a potential third budget reconciliation bill. And they’re pushing the administration and lawmakers to reprogram unspent funding from cancelled renewable energy projects to support fusion efforts. House appropriators, meanwhile, are focused on winnowing down the number of companies receiving federal aim to better focus on the most promising programs.

Demand for energy has risen dramatically over the past decade of fusion growth, Valys says — in ways that ultimately may aid the fusion industry’s messaging efforts.

“The biggest thing that's changed since we started Xcimer is, when we used to tell that story, we would basically say, ‘And who knows what we're going to do with that energy?’” he says. “Now there's a clear answer, right? It's AI.” (Last year, Helion Energy, based in Everett, Washington, began working on a fusion plant to power Microsoft’s data centers.)

Unsurprisingly, it’s the China threat that factors most heavily in the industry’ messaging with Washington. China’s investments in fusion technology – in some cases using designs clearly based on U.S. companies’ models – are increasingly evident.

But Commonwealth is working with policymakers and regulators in Japan, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom — the country furthest down the road on fusion policymaking — to try to shape regulatory frameworks for fusion. It’s also working at the state level to do the same.

“We think there's a big tipping point where some of this technology demonstration is just going to propel things to go even faster,” says Jennifer Ganten, Commonwealth’s chief global affairs officer. “And those who were prepared and had the policies and had the regulations and all that are going to be ready for scaling commercial fusion.”

The fusion industry’s argument in Washington is that for the United States to win this race, it needs more federal help. The flip side: If no federal help is forthcoming, companies could go overseas.

Mumgaard, when asked whether private financing alone could get his company on-the-grid fusion by the 2030s, says the answer is yes — but not necessarily in the United States.

“The question, he says, “would be where.”

Whether that argument is enough to carry the day with White House and lawmakers remains to be seen. To date, fusion has been a niche interest of scientists, universities and home-state supporters. Hyperscalers, manufacturers and customers that stand to benefit from a fusion industry will need to get in the game, Mumgaard acknowledges. It’s that kind of coalition of the willing that would ultimately prompt the White House to move.

“It's not yet fully translated into political action,” he says.