The Trump administration’s ambivalence—some might say hostility—toward science and research took a turn for the worse when the president signed a controversial new tax bill into law at the end of last year. Donald Trump’s first year in office was marked by questionable appointments to federal departments and agencies—including Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency and Rick Perry at the Department of Energy (DoE)—that handle important policy decisions best informed by science. Large tax cuts added a blow to any hope Congress might be able to ease some of the steepest proposed budget cuts for fiscal year 2018, which would affect the EPA as well as the Agriculture and the Health and Human Services departments.

One of the administration’s stated goals in reducing corporate tax rates is to lure manufacturing and business investment back to the U.S. Apple, most notably, announced plans this month to open a new campus as part of a five-year, $30-billion U.S. investment plan, and will make about $38 billion in one-time tax payments on its overseas cash. Additional incentives to repatriate manufacturing operationscame last week, when the White House imposed a four-year increase in tariffs on imported solar panels.

Those tariffs, not to mention the budget and tax cuts, raise particularly interesting questions about the future of the energy sector—which for the past several years has marched toward radical change, as technological advances steadily beat down the cost of harvesting solar and wind energy. Scientific American spoke with Joshua Rhodes, a postdoctoral research fellow in The Webber Energy Group and at The University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, about the potential impact of the Trump administration’s financial policies on energy research—and how the U.S. might better prepare itself to meet its future energy needs.