White House Bans Foreign Bulk-Power Equipment Over Cyber Backdoor Risks

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday prohibiting the acquisition and installation of foreign-made bulk-power system electric equipment in the United States, citing mounting evidence that adversaries are embedding digital backdoors into critical energy infrastructure. The order targets technology managing transmission lines rated at 69,000 volts or higher, along with substations, control rooms, power generating stations, reactors, and associated software and firmware that could be remotely accessed or updated by foreign governments. The Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, and Department of Energy are now required to vet transactions involving bulk-power equipment, and a pre-qualified vendor list is expected within 120 days. Federal agencies may also impose conditions on previously purchased equipment where replacements are unavailable.

The move follows a string of cyber intrusions targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. Water utilities in at least 12 states were compromised last month, and on the same day the executive order was signed, CISA reported malicious activity against more than 100 internet-exposed systems in the water and wastewater sector. The NSA and FBI recently published a joint advisory warning of an AI-powered "active threat" targeting a specific brand of operational technology used across the energy, water, and agricultural industries. In the United Kingdom, attackers knocked a small power plant offline for four days. While no nation has been formally blamed for the most recent incidents, multiple analysts have pointed to Iranian threat actors, and U.S. officials have previously attributed critical infrastructure intrusions to Russian and Chinese hackers. Separately, the FBI disrupted a Chinese botnet on Wednesday that had breached the Federal Reserve, NASA, and other federal agencies.

Officials frame the order as a response to an "unusual and extraordinary threat" from foreign supply-chain compromises that could enable remote sabotage or cascading blackouts. "During my first term, I found that the bulk-power system could be a target of those seeking to commit malicious acts against the United States," Trump said, citing risks to the economy, public health, and national defense. For security teams assessing their own exposure to foreign-supplied components, running a SSL/TLS checker can help confirm whether connected systems use properly validated certificates, while a port scanner can reveal externally exposed management interfaces on operational technology networks. Organizations managing sensitive infrastructure should also conduct a privacy checkup to evaluate how much operational metadata could leak to foreign adversaries probing their perimeter.