An electric power substation and high-voltage transmission lines in Beaverton, Oregon, circa January 2026. Foreign-made equipment in the US power grid has raised growing national security and cybersecurity concerns. (Shutterstock/Hrach Hovhannisyan)

America Has a Second Chance to Secure Its Power Grid from China

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Washington recognized the risks of foreign-made grid equipment years ago. Now it has another opportunity to address the vulnerabilities it left unresolved.

We’ve long known that America’s enemies seek to hold our critical infrastructure systems at risk. Doing so gives our adversaries a potentially huge benefit in a future conflict. But what many Americans don’t realize is how serious this threat actually is, particularly when it comes to our power grid. Late last month, the Trump administration gave us a peek into this when the president declared a national emergency on foreign-made bulk-power systems that could “have digital backdoors built into their systems that allow a foreign country to access that equipment remotely.”

While it is fairly obvious why a foreign adversary having backdoor access to our bulk power systems—the core of the high-voltage grid that carries electricity long distance across America—might be a national emergency, you might wonder why now, particularly given that in his first term, President Donald Trump issued a similar executive order. What’s changed in the last five years requiring new action?

Well, according to the executive order, it turns out that “certain foreign actors are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system.” That’s obviously not good, particularly given that our economy today—even more than just five years ago—is driven by advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, and defense tech, all of which, the president notes, have increased our reliance on “abundant, reliable electricity and magnified the consequences of a successful attack or supply disruption on the bulk-power system.”

So maybe it’s no surprise that Russia, China, and Iran want to go after the American power grid and that the power grid really, really matters to our economy. After all, it was way back in the late 1990s that we first identified the Russian Moonlight Maze campaign digging into our unclassified government networks, including at the Department of Energy’s national labs, and it was the early 2000s when we found the Chinese Titan Rain actors doing something similar. In 2007, engineers........

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