From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Curtis Schube

One of the first executive orders President Trump issued was “Unleashing American Energy.”

It begins an effort to undo the harm caused by the Biden administration’s unprecedented assault on the American energy sector. It overturns President Biden’s own destructive executive orders, including those canceling oil leases and prioritizing environmental regulations over the good of the economy and producing reliable energy.

It also orders that unduly burdensome energy regulations be rescinded. Trump’s EO forthrightly states that its goal is to encourage energy production “to meet the needs of our citizens and solidify the United States as a global energy leader.”

This executive order takes the nation in a whole new direction. It orders the agencies to audit their policies to weed out burdensome regulations that impact energy development. It terminates the infamous Green New Deal. It prioritizes employment and economic impacts in energy policy. It also revokes a Jimmy Carter Executive Order to reduce the burden on environmental studies that notoriously hold up energy projects.

One reform that met less pomp and circumstance, but is not lacking in impact, is permitting reform. President Trump’s Order instructs agencies to “eliminate all delays within their respective permitting processes including … the use of general permitting and permit by rule.”

This type of permitting reform should impact all American lives for the better. We all know how difficult permits can be to obtain, even if on a smaller scale than energy. When making an addition to a house, for example, one must submit it to government and pray that everything is correct.

Then, the waiting game begins as the government reviews the application, requires possible alterations at the its whim, then, eventually at some point, the project can move forward. It can be expensive and time consuming, and sometimes may deter people from even trying.

The same applies on a larger scale. Permits for major projects, like an oil well, can take years, even a decade or longer, to jump through all of the hoops. And, as the federal government is the gatekeeper to many different varieties of activities that require a permit, whoever is in charge of the executive branch can cripple a project.

Permits by rule and  general permits simplify the process drastically and ease the burden on both the applicant and the government. They are simple and predictable. For both types of permits, the government will first pre-determine the required criteria for someone to meet before the permitted conduct can commence. The government will promulgate the standards for all to see and know.

The applicant, knowing exactly what is required to perform the permitted conduct, can get a project moving quickly. For a general permit, no contact with the government is even needed. A permittee can begin a project so long as it satisfies the pre-set standards.

For a permit by rule, the applicant simply has to certify to the government, in writing, that all the criteria have been met. In response, the government can only check to see if the correct certifications are made and then either approve it or return the certifications with an explanation of which ones are not met. This is done in a short period of time, such as 30 days.

In both cases, the government has no discretion on a case-by-case basis. Instead of focusing its efforts as a gatekeeper for permits, the government will only focus on permittees who have not met the criteria, but after the permittee has begun its project. The government’s role is focused on enforcement actions.

Both sides benefit from this system. For those who behave correctly, the permitting process does not hold up projects. For the government, the resource drain for overseeing permitting is drastically reduced. The government only has to focus its attention on the minority of parties.

This system also has a built-in deterrent. If a permittee were to begin a project, only to have the government shut the project down at a later time through an enforcement action, the permittee would lose a significant investment.

The true benefit is to the American people. If energy companies can have a quick and expedited form of permitting, then the supply of energy can expand quicker. This makes the cost of energy, and all products, cheaper. In the wake of natural disasters, rebuilding can happen quicker. Infrastructure can be put in place faster. The benefits go on and on.

Permitting reform, such as that referenced in President Trump’s Executive Order, is a fantastic first step toward a more efficient government. His agencies should take full advantage and convert as many permits as possible to a permit by rule or general permit as soon as possible.

Curtis Schube is the Executive Director for Council to Modernize Governance, a think tank committed to making the administration of government more efficient, representative, and restrained. He is formerly a constitutional and administrative law attorney.

From The Deep View

$600 billion collapse

Volatility is kind of a given when it comes to Wall Street’s tech sector. It doesn’t take much to send things soaring; it likewise doesn’t take much to set off a downward spiral.

After months of soaring, Monday marked the possible beginning of a spiral, and a Chinese company seems to be at the center of it.

Alright, what’s going on: A week ago, Chinese tech firm DeepSeek launched R1, a so-called reasoning model, that, according to DeepSeek, has reached technical parity with OpenAI’s o1 across a few benchmarks. But, unlike its American competition, DeepSeek open-sourced R1 under an MIT license, making it significantly cheaper and more accessible than any of the closed models coming from U.S. tech giants.

But the real punchline here doesn’t have to do with R1 at all, but with a previous language model — called V3 — that DeepSeek released in December. DeepSeek was reportedly able to train V3 using a small collection of older Nvidia chips (about 2,000 H800s) at a cost of about $5.6 million. Still, training is only one cost of many tied to AI development/deployment; while the costs associated with researching, developing, training and operating both R1 and V3 remain either unknown or unconfirmed, DeepSeek’s apparent ability to reach technical parity at a far reduced cost, without state-of-the-art GPU chips or massive GPU clusters, has a lot of implications for America’s now tenuous position in AI leadership. (Though DeepSeek says it is open-sourced, the company did not release its training data).

Since the release of R1, DeepSeek has become the top free app in Apple’s App Store, bumping ChatGPT to the number two slot. In the midst of its spiking popularity, DeepSeek restricted new sign-ups due to large-scale cyberattacks against its servers. And, as Salesforce Chief Marc Benioff noted, “no Nvidia supercomputers or $100M needed,” a point that the market heard loud and clear.

What happened: Led by Nvidia, a series of tech and chip stocks, in addition to the three major stock indices, fell hard in pre-market trading early Monday morning. All told, $1.1 trillion of U.S. market cap was erased within a half hour of the opening bell.

Performance didn’t get better throughout the day. Nvidia closed Monday down 17%, erasing some $600 billion in market capitalization, a Wall Street record. TSMC was down 14%, Arm was down 11%, Broadcom was down 17%, Google was down 4% and Microsoft was down 2%. The S&P fell 1.4% and the Nasdaq fell 3.3%. An Nvidia spokesperson called R1 an “excellent AI advancement.” This is all going into a week of Big Tech earnings, where Microsoft and Meta will be held to account for the billions of dollars ($80 billion and $65 billion, respectively) they plan to spend on AI infrastructure in 2025, a cost that Wall Street no longer seems to feel quite so good about.

It’s hard to miss the political tensions underlying all of this. The tail end of former President Joe Biden’s time in office was marked in part by an increasingly tense trade war with China, wherein both countries issued bans on the export of materials needed to build advanced AI chips. And with President Trump hell-bent on maintaining American leadership in AI, and despite the chip restrictions that are in place, Chinese companies seem to be turning hardware challenges into a motivation for innovation that challenges the American lead, something they seem keen to drive home.

R1, for instance, was announced at around the same time as OpenAI’s $500 billion Project Stargate, two impactfully divergent approaches.

What’s happening here is that the market has finally come around to the idea that maybe the cost of AI development (hundreds of billions of dollars annually) is too high, a recognition “that the winners in AI will be the most innovative companies, not just those with the most GPUs,” according to Writer CTA Waseem Alshikh. “Brute-forcing AI with GPUs is no longer a viable strategy.”

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, however, thinks this is just a good time to buy into Nvidia — Nvidia and the rest are building infrastructure that, he argues, China will not be able to compete with in the long run. “Launching a competitive LLM model for consumer use cases is one thing,” Ives wrote. “Launching broader AI infrastructure is a whole other ballgame.”

“I view cost reduction as a good thing. I’m of the belief that if you’re freeing up compute capacity, it likely gets absorbed — we’re going to need innovations like this,” Bernstein semiconductor analyst Stacy Rasgon told Yahoo Finance. “I understand why all the panic is going on. I don’t think DeepSeek is doomsday for AI infrastructure.”

Somewhat relatedly, Perplexity has already added DeepSeek’s R1 model to its AI search engine. And DeepSeek on Monday launched another model, one capable of competitive image generation.

Last week, I said that R1 should be enough to make OpenAI a little nervous. This anxiety spread way quicker than I anticipated; DeepSeek spent Monday dominating headlines at every publication I came across, setting off a debate and panic that has spread far beyond the tech and AI community.

Some are concerned about the national security implications of China’s AI capabilities. Some are concerned about the AI trade. Granted, there are more unknowns here than knowns; we do not know the details of DeepSeek’s costs or technical setup (and the costs are likely way higher than they seem). But this does read like a turning point in the AI race.

In January, we talked about reversion to the mean. Right now, it’s too early to tell how long-term the market impacts of DeepSeek will be. But, if Nvidia and the rest fall hard and stay down — or drop lower — through earnings season, one might argue that the bubble has begun to burst. As a part of this, watch model pricing closely; OpenAI may well be forced to bring down the costs of its models to remain competitive.

At the very least, DeepSeek appears to be evidence that scaling is one, not a law, and two, not the only (or best) way to develop more advanced AI models, something that rains heavily on OpenAI and co.’s parade since it runs contrary to everything OpenAI’s been saying for months. Funnily, it actually seems like good news for the science of AI, possibly lighting a path toward systems that are less resource-intensive (which is much needed!)

It’s yet another example of the science and the business of AI not being on the same page.