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For Immediate Release
April, 22 2014, 11:49am EDT
Contact:
Ben Schreiber, Climate and energy program director, (202) 222-0752, bschreiber@foe.org
Kate Colwell, Communications specialist, (202) 222-0744, kcolwell@foe.org
Friends of the Earth Statement on Nuclear Loan Guarantee
Yesterday, E&E News reported that the Department of Energy's loan guarantees for the first new nuclear reactors in more than 30 years were awarded without making the recipient companies pay a project subsidy cost.
WASHINGTON
Yesterday, E&E News reported that the Department of Energy's loan guarantees for the first new nuclear reactors in more than 30 years were awarded without making the recipient companies pay a project subsidy cost. Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which established the loan guarantee program, requires that the government receive "from the borrower a payment in full for the cost of the obligation," yet DOE awarded $6.5 billion in guarantees for two reactors at Plant Vogtle in February without charging the fee. The credit subsidy fees had not been revealed until now.
Ben Schreiber, Climate and energy program director at Friends of the Earth, issued the following statement in response:
I'm shocked that President Obama gave away the entire farm to the nuclear industry. Not charging a fee was irresponsible and illegal. He has treated nuclear reactors as risk-free, when 32 percent of all nuclear construction is cancelled before one watt of electricity is produced; and the Vogtle reactors are already 21 months behind schedule and more than a billion dollars over budget. This giveaway is even more egregious because safe technologies like wind and solar are available and cheaper.
When a homeowner receives federal mortgage insurance, they are expected to pay monthly premiums, without fail, for that insurance. Yesterday it came out that President Obama has provided a preemptive bailout to two risky and expensive nuclear reactors, free of charge.
This decision highlights the weak economics of nuclear reactors and President Obama's desperation to build them anyway. New reactors simply are not being built without government support. Subsidized government financing for Plant Vogtle -- atop other government subsidies such as Price-Anderson support, the nuclear production tax credit and accelerated depreciation -- has U.S. taxpayers bearing the financial burden for these risky and dangerous projects. Nuclear reactors will never be clean and they have no place as part of a strategy for dealing with climate change.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400LATEST NEWS
'We're Literally Starving Them': GOP Senator Gloats That Iranians 'Can't Feed Themselves' Because of Trump Blockade
One foreign policy analyst said the senator was effectively admitting that “we’re literally committing crimes against humanity.”
Apr 23, 2026
A Republican US senator proudly declared that President Donald Trump's blockade of Iranian ports is "starving" Iranians on Wednesday, in yet another piece of counterevidence to the idea that the president's war there is meant to "liberate" the people.
"We have this embargo working, this blockade, and we're literally starving them," said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) during an interview on Newsmax. "Both financially, and they can't feed themselves either, very long."
During the same interview, Marshall said Trump must “take everything into consideration” to finish the war against Iran and compared the decision Trump must make to "President [Harry] Truman’s decision on dropping the bomb, and D-Day for President [then-Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower.”
The comments came after Trump announced that he would extend a two-week ceasefire while continuing his naval blockade of Iranian ports, enacted as a counter to Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused chaos and inflation across the global economy.
It was yet another 180-degree spin from Trump, who just days before had issued another genocidal threat to "blow up" the "whole country" of Iran, including civilian infrastructure, if it did not capitulate to his demands in a ceasefire agreement, which was roundly condemned by international organizations as a pledge to commit war crimes.
The Iranian population suffered tremendously under Trump's "maximum pressure sanctions" before the war, which fueled 58% food inflation year over year in September 2025.
The war launched by the US and Israel in February has only heightened the pain: Last month, Iran's inflation rate hit a record 72%, and the cost of its staple food basket soared to 134% compared with the previous year.
More than 750,000 jobs had been lost as of last week, and the United Nations Development Program predicted that Iran's economy could contract by as much as 10% as a result of the war. In just 40 days of war, the UNDP found that 3.5-4.1 million Iranians have fallen below the poverty line.
Trump's blockade of Iranian ports has tightened the noose even more, cutting off about 90% of the nation's maritime trade.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the blockade immediately affected nearly a million tons of grain and oilseeds. Prices for commodities like rice, which have already increased sevenfold in recent months, are expected to soar even further.
While Iran is much larger and more self-sufficient than Cuba, the blockade mirrors the economic warfare Trump has waged against the island in what he has said is an effort to force its leadership from power or outright "take" it for the US.
The blockade of fuel shipments to the island enacted through tariff threats has paralyzed its economy and resulted in rolling blackouts that have disrupted hospital care, agriculture, and every other facet of daily life for the Cuban people, drawing condemnation from United Nations human rights experts, who have called it a "serious violation of international law" and an act of "extreme unilateral economic coercion."
The Trump administration and its cheerleaders in Congress have not been shy about their goal for sanctions in Iran—to inflict suffering upon the people of Iran in hopes that they will rise up and overthrow their governmen. But Marshall's declaration that Trump was trying to "starve" Iran was seen by critics as an even more explicit endorsement of collective punishment than most.
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said it confirmed that Trump was pitching "genocide as a tactic in Iran."
In less than two months, at least 1,700 civilians have been killed, including more than 250 children, according to the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. More than 26,000 people have been injured, according to the Iranian Health Ministry.
The international affairs researcher Derek Davison wrote that by cheering a policy he said was "literally starving" Iran, Marshall was basically saying: "We're literally committing crimes against humanity. It's awesome."
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Senate Republicans Block Sanders Amendment to Cut US Drug Prices by More Than 50%
Sen. Bernie Sanders said the amendment blocked by the GOP "would prevent pharmaceutical companies from charging more for prescription drugs in the United States than they do in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Japan."
Apr 23, 2026
Senate Republicans voted in the early hours of Thursday morning to reject an amendment offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders that aimed to cut US prescription drug prices in half by mandating that Americans pay no more for medications than people in Canada and other wealthy nations.
Just two Republicans, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, voted with every present Democrat in support of Sanders' (I-Vt.) proposed amendment to the GOP's emerging budget reconciliation package. Republicans plan to use the legislative vehicle to fund the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, principally Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The amendment vote put nearly every Senate Republican on the record against a policy supported by President Donald Trump. Last year, Trump signed an executive order directing federal health officials to "communicate most-favored-nation price targets to pharmaceutical manufacturers to bring prices for American patients in line with comparably developed nations."
But experts have noted that, without congressional action giving the federal government more power over drug pricing, pharmaceutical companies would not be required to comply with the proposed targets—rendering Trump's order effectively meaningless. Drug prices have continued to rise in the US despite Trump's order and his outlandish, mathematically impossible claims.
"If Trump is serious about making real change rather than just issuing a press release," Sanders said last year in response to Trump's executive order, "he will support legislation I will soon be introducing to make sure we pay no more for prescription drugs than people in other major countries. If Republicans and Democrats come together on this legislation, we can get it passed in a few weeks."
The Sanders-led amendment that Republicans blocked on Thursday called for reducing "the price of prescription drugs in the United States by more than 50% by adopting most-favored-nation drug pricing so that the American people pay no more for prescription drugs than Europeans or Canadians."
Research has shown that Americans pay at least twice as much on average for prescription drugs as people in other wealthy nations.
"This amendment is very simple," Sanders said during Senate debate on Thursday. "It would prevent pharmaceutical companies from charging more for prescription drugs in the United States than they do in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Japan.”
Last May, Sanders and several of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate introduced the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act, which would require federal health officials to "review brand-name drugs annually for excessive pricing and, if a drug is found to be priced excessively, to void any exclusivity granted to its sponsor."
"Under the bill, a price is considered excessive if the domestic average manufacturing price exceeds the median price for the drug in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan," according to a summary of the legislation. "If a price does not meet this criteria, or if pricing information is unavailable in at least three of these countries, the price is still considered excessive if it is higher than reasonable in light of specified factors, including development cost, revenue, and the size of the affected patient population."
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‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal
"The US government is now one of, if not the most, corrupt governments on earth," said one critic.
Apr 23, 2026
Critics reacted with disgust after Eric Trump went on Fox Business on Thursday morning to boast about Foundation Future Industries, a company where he serves as chief strategy adviser, scoring a multimillion-dollar deal from the US Department of Defense.
For the segment, Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo invited on both Eric Trump and Sankaet Pathak, co-founder and CEO of Foundation Future, a robotics firm that earlier this year won a $24 million Pentagon contract that will see its robots deployed in Ukraine, where they will be used to inspect and transport weapons.
Bartiromo asked the second-eldest son of President Donald Trump how he got involved with Foundation Future, and "what attracted" him to the enterprise.
Trump responded that he decided to get involved with robotics to help America "win" the race with China to build battle-ready robots, in the same way he purportedly helped the US "win" by being an early investor in cryptocurrency.
"We better be winning this race in the United States of America," he declared. "We're the greatest economy in the world... When you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist bump you and they high five you, they follow your commands. You bring in AI economy, it's going to change industry, it's going to change military application, it's going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited."
Eric Trump on his $24 million Pentagon contract for robots: "It's gonna change industry, military application, hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it's a very beautiful thing, but we must win that race." pic.twitter.com/JsfiB6Usbi
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 23, 2026
Eric Trump and his brother, Donald Trump Jr., for months have been investing in companies with the goal of scoring lucrative Pentagon deals.
The Wall Street Journal reported in March that the Trump brothers invested in a Florida-based drone company called Powerus that “is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon” for drones that started when the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones and drone components from the US in December.
And in 2025, at least two companies backed by Trump Jr. received contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the DOD.
Given this history, critics were quick to hurl accusations of corruption at the Trumps for using their father's presidency to personally enrich themselves.
"The president's son, who was never involved in this industry before his father became president, should not be getting contracts from the Pentagon," declared Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch. "This is absurd corruption that Republicans in Congress will say nothing about and do no oversight."
Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, said the fact that the president's son is openly boasting about getting multimillion-dollar deals from his father's DOD shows "the US government is now one of, if not the most, corrupt governments on earth."
University of Michigan political scientist Donald Moynihan compared the Trump brothers to Uday and Qusay Hussein, the late sons of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and argued that much of Trump's second administration appears to be running the US government like it's a family business.
"An underestimated rationale for Trump's massive ramp-ups in immigration/military spending," he wrote, "is to create a public slush fund for friends, families, donors."
National security attorney Bradley Moss, in a nod to possible future congressional investigations of the Trump family's corruption, advised Eric Trump to "preserve your records."
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