The Lending Brief Podcast

Lender of Last Opportunity: Federal Credit, Nuclear Energy, and the Infrastructure Gap

In this episode of The Center for USA Lending’s The Lending Brief, sponsored by Allocore, we’re joined by Owen Barwell, five-time CFO of multiple federal agencies including the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for a wide-ranging conversation on the role of federal lending in financing what private capital won’t touch.

Drawing on his experience deploying $30 billion in renewable energy loans during the Recovery Act, Owen makes the case for why government lending is essential to de-risking emerging technologies like small modular reactors until private markets are ready to step in.

He also pulls no punches on the state of federal lending infrastructure, drawing a direct parallel to where federal financial management was before the CFO Act of 1990, and arguing that data standardization, systems consolidation, and a common language across agencies are prerequisites before any real modernization can take hold.

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