For years we’ve been told the grid is fine, and saying otherwise was just a conspiracy theory.
Resilient. Redundant. Hardened. Nothing to see here folks!
On August 26, 2026, the President of the United States signed an executive order declaring that the equipment which runs that grid is an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security.
Not a risk. Not a concern. A national emergency, invoked under the same statute normally reserved for hostile foreign regimes.
Executive Order 14420. Go read it yourself — we’ll link it at the bottom. But here’s what it says, what it doesn’t say, and why the part everybody is going to skip is the part that actually matters to your family.
What the Executive Order Does To Secure Our Power Grid
The order runs on two authorities: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act. IEEPA is what gets used to freeze the assets of cartels and adversary states. It is now pointed at the supply chain feeding America’s high-voltage electrical system.
The core prohibition: no acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation of foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment when the Secretary of Energy determines two things — that the gear traces back to a “Covered Foreign Entity,” and that the deal poses an undue risk of sabotage, unauthorized access, malicious remote action, or supply disruption.
The equipment list is not vague. It names transformers. Reactors. Capacitors. Grid-connected inverters. Battery energy storage systems. Backup generators. High-voltage circuit breakers. Protective relaying. Generation turbines. And the guts of the whole thing — industrial control systems, remote terminal units, programmable logic controllers, intelligent electronic devices, distributed control systems, safety instrumented systems.
Then it goes further and covers the software, the firmware, the remote-access capability, and the maintenance and update mechanisms attached to any of it.
The Sentence The Media Seem to Skip
The Secretary of Energy is authorized to impose conditions on the continued use, operation, maintenance, servicing, or updating of foreign-manufactured or foreign-operated equipment that was acquired or installed before the date of this order — including requirements to identify, isolate, monitor, secure, disconnect, replace, or remove it.
Read that again.
This isn’t a rule about what we buy next year. It’s a rule about what is bolted down in substations from Georgia to Oregon right now. The federal government just gave itself the authority to walk into the existing American grid and order hardware pulled out of it.
You do not write that sentence unless you believe there is something in there worth pulling out.
The order does include a few guardrails — before ordering anything disconnected or removed, the Secretary has to weigh effects on reliability and safety, whether secure replacements are actually available, and continuity of essential service. Phased compliance is allowed.
We’ve Been Here Before, and It Got Undone
If this feels familiar, your memory is working.
On May 1, 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13920 — same subject, nearly the same title, same national emergency over the bulk-power system. The Department of Energy issued a prohibition order that December.
Then the administration changed. In January 2021 the new EO 13990 suspended 13920 for 90 days. On April 20, 2021, DOE revoked the December prohibition order outright. The underlying emergency declaration expired May 1, 2021, and the whole effort was replaced with a request for information and a supply chain review.
Five years of paperwork. The transformers stayed where they were.
So understand what you’re looking at with EO 14420: this is round two of a fight that was already started once and then dropped. The vulnerability didn’t go away during those five years. Nobody fixed it. It just stopped being anybody’s problem in Washington.
Why They’re Nervous
The order doesn’t name China. Not once. “Covered Foreign Entity” is left as a blank to be filled in later by rulemaking.
Everybody knows what goes in the blank.
The transformer at the Port of Houston. In the summer of 2019, a 226-ton high-voltage transformer built by Chinese manufacturer JiangSu HuaPeng and destined for a Western Area Power Administration substation in Colorado was intercepted at the port and trucked under federal escort to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. The Wall Street Journal broke it in May 2020. What Sandia found has never been made public. The head of the Electric Power Research Institute called the diversion of a transformer that size unprecedented in his experience.
Nobody in government has explained it to this day. Six years later.
Worth noting for our Nevada readers: in filings submitted to FERC in 2021, grid researcher Michael Mabee documented JSHP’s own marketing claims that its transformers carried roughly 20 percent of the load in Las Vegas and 10 percent in New York City. That’s a vendor’s sales pitch, not a federal audit. But it’s the vendor telling you where its iron ended up.
The rogue radios. In May 2025, Reuters reported that U.S. energy officials had found undocumented communication hardware — including cellular radios — inside Chinese-made solar inverters and batteries. Undocumented meaning not on the bill of materials. Not supposed to be there. Officials described the concern as an extra channel that could route around the firewalls utilities install specifically to block traffic back to China. One source used the phrase “built-in way to physically destroy the grid.”
Now look back at the equipment list in EO 14420. Grid-connected inverters. Battery energy storage systems. Remote access capabilities. Lifecycle update mechanisms.
That list wasn’t assembled by lawyers guessing.
The tenants already inside. We covered this in detail in The DHS Power Grid Warning Washington Wants You to Forget — CISA, NSA and FBI advisory AA24-038A confirming the Chinese state-sponsored group Volt Typhoon pre-positioned in U.S. critical infrastructure networks, with access held inside some environments for at least five years. And the ODNI’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, in plain unclassified English, describing adversaries building options for future disruption.
Hardware backdoors are the physical version of the same play. You don’t need to break in if you shipped them the lock.
The Problem With “Just Rip It Out”
Here’s where the emergency runs into some issues.
Large power transformers are custom-built, house-sized, and mostly imported. As of Wood Mackenzie’s Q2 2025 survey, standard power transformers averaged around 128 weeks from order to delivery. Generator step-up units ran about 144 weeks. The chief executive of Hitachi Energy — the biggest transformer manufacturer on the planet — told S&P Global in January 2026 that waits on large units still stretch as long as 40 months. Prices are up roughly 77 percent since 2019, and domestic manufacturing covers only about a fifth of American power transformer demand.
Now add a federal mandate to replace installed foreign units on top of that queue.
You cannot order your way out of a four-year lead time. Every unit yanked for security reasons is a unit that has to be replaced from a supply chain that is already the tightest it has been in modern history — while NERC’s 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment projects summer peak demand growing 224 GW over ten years and flags 13 of 23 North American assessment areas at elevated or high resource adequacy risk within five years. We broke that down in Two Government Reports, One Answer: The Grid Runs Short by 2029.
That’s why Section 2(b) has all those brakes built into it. The people who wrote this order know that aggressive removal could cause the exact outage it’s meant to prevent.
They are trying to defuse the bomb without setting it off. That is the honest description of the situation.
Now the Other Side, Because You Deserve It Straight
We’re not going to run the panic play. Here’s what this order does not do.
Nothing is banned yet. Not one item. The prohibition only bites after the Secretary of Energy makes specific determinations, and DOE has 120 days to publish implementing rules — and even then the text says rules get issued “as needed.” The order is a loaded authority, not an executed action.
No country has been designated. Covered Foreign Entity is defined by category — governments under U.S. arms embargo or ITAR sanctions, plus whoever the Secretary designates in consultation with War, DNI, and the national security advisor. Until that list exists on paper, the scope is theoretical.
It doesn’t touch your street. The order defines bulk-power system as transmission rated 69,000 volts and above and explicitly excludes local distribution. The pole transformer outside your house is not covered. Neither is your rooftop solar. The utility-scale inverter farm feeding your county is a different story.
Executive orders are reversible. EO 13920 is the proof. One signature created it, another signature retired it, and nothing about the underlying hardware changed in between. A national emergency declared by pen can be ended by pen in January of any inauguration year.
And it creates no rights. Section 7 says so directly — no enforceable claim by any party, implementation subject to available appropriations.
So: real authority, real timeline, real threat behind it. Zero guarantee any of it gets executed before the next thing breaks.
Which brings us to the only part you actually control.
What This Means For You
Strip away the legal machinery and the message from the White House is simple and it is not comforting: the federal government believes foreign-built hardware sitting inside the American grid is dangerous enough to justify emergency powers, and the fix takes years it may not have.
That is not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to stop outsourcing your family’s continuity of power to a supply chain that Washington just labeled a national emergency.
Water first, always. Municipal water is electricity. Pumps, treatment, pressure — all of it. You have about three days without water and the tap goes quiet long before the grid comes back. Start at Emergency Water Storage: Storing Water for Long-Term Preparedness.
Food that actually survives. Grocery stores run roughly three days of inventory and restock by truck, and trucks need functioning fuel pumps. Read Long-Term Food Storage: What Actually Lasts 25 Years and 60+ Long-Term Survival Foods You Can Buy at the Grocery Store.
Power you own outright. Not a generator you’ve never started. Hardware you’ve tested, with fuel or panels to match. Cheap Off-Grid Power: Real Solar Setups Under $1,000 is the budget entry point. The Best Emergency Solar Generators & Power Packs covers the field, and How Many Solar Panels and Batteries Do You Actually Need does the sizing math. Buy it before a rulemaking process starts squeezing the inverter and battery market — the components in your power station and the ones named in this order come off some of the same production lines.
Communications, because the phone dies in hour one. Communication Infrastructure: Preparing for Chaos.
Understand the failure modes. Power Grid Threats: EMPs, Terror Attacks and Grid Failures and EMP Preparedness.
Knowledge that doesn’t need a signal. Offline Knowledge Hubs: Building Your Own Digital Survival Library.
Starting from nothing? What Preparedness Items Should You Stockpile?
The government’s own advisory council told this country in 2018 to plan for an outage of two months to six months or more. The government’s public guidance still says two weeks. Nobody has ever reconciled those numbers, and this executive order doesn’t reconcile them either.
Six years ago they seized a transformer at the Port of Houston and never told you why. Today they declared an emergency over the whole category.
You don’t get a vote on the odds. You only get to decide what your house looks like on the day they land wrong.