Would you rather spend money bailing out unprofitable power plants or solving real threats to national security? I bet most Americans would choose the latter, but unfortunately that is not the direction that the Trump administration is taking when it comes to a system that directly impacts every one of us – the electricity grid.

President Trump has been trying to find ways to save the struggling coal industry since taking office. On Thursday night, Bloomberg reported that the Department of Energy plans to invoke two rarely-used emergency statutes to require grid operators to purchase electricity from unprofitable coal and nuclear plants. The intervention is intended as a “stop-gap measure” while the DOE takes two years to study threats to the energy system.