"NRC Commissioner Annie Caputo “apparently resigned rather than be compromised by politics.”"
"A top official at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is resigning from her post amid the Trump administration’s attempts to overhaul atomic energy rules and chip away at the agency’s independence.
Commissioner Annie Caputo, a Republican whom President Donald Trump initially nominated to the five-member NRC in May 2017, announced her plans in an email to staff on Tuesday, as this newsletter first reported. She had another year left on her five-year term after being reappointed by former President Joe Biden in 2022. The NRC confirmed to me that Caputo will leave once the newly confirmed agency chair, David Wright, is sworn in, noting that Wright’s paperwork is still being processed. The NRC also provided a copy of Caputo’s email (see below), in which she said she planned to “more fully focus on my family.”
“Caputo was very industry friendly Republican. If her resignation signals more radical changes, then the nuclear industry could find itself with a yet more unstable investment climate paired with a diminishing social license to operate,” Emmet Penney, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, told me. “A regulatory whipsaw effect would strangle the nuclear renaissance in its crib—a brutal and humiliating own-goal for energy dominance.”"
Alexander C. Kaufman reports for Mother Jones July 30, 2025. This story originally appeared on the author’s substack newsletter, Field Notes From Alexander C. Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.
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