FERC is the kind of agency most people couldn’t name if you paid them, which is sort of the point. It sets wholesale power rates, approves the transmission lines that keep three separate power grids from turning into three separate countries, and it’s supposed to do that job the same way no matter who’s in the White House. That’s the whole design. So it’s a little startling to read former commissioners, Republican and Democratic appointees alike, saying out loud that a president can now fire them at will, and that the agency could lose quorum entirely depending on who resigns or gets removed this cycle.

The timing is almost too on the nose. The same week, DOE put out a draft transmission study arguing the single biggest lever for cutting grid congestion (up to $12 billion in costs last year) is more interregional transmission: links between ERCOT and its neighbors, between the Eastern and Western interconnections, the kind of project that takes a decade or more to site, permit, and build, longer than any presidential term and longer than most people’s patience for infrastructure news. That’s exactly the kind of project a stable, boring, apolitical approval body is supposed to protect from having its permissions yanked halfway through construction because the administration changed.

Meanwhile New York quietly hit 8 gigawatts of distributed solar, ahead of its 2030 target, on the strength of a program nobody’s fighting about: predictable incentives, a standardized interconnection process, nothing more exciting than paperwork that works the same way every year. Turns out that’s the trick.

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