The secretary has moved aggressively, reorganizing the department and bolstering fossil fuels while trying to tackle artificial intelligence’s energy

The Department of Energy is moving at a fast clip and making major changes under Secretary Chris Wright as the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term wraps up.

Thousands of staffing positions have been cut. Over $11 billion in grants has been canceled. Decades-old energy efficiency regulations have been dismantled. DOE has issued emergency orders to keep coal plants from retiring, part of its focus on fossil fuels. And it’s pushing to expand the data center boom.

“It’s been a massive swing,” said Tom Pyle, president of the fossil-fuel-supporting, free-market group American Energy Alliance.

In a heavily divided nation, the Trump agenda at DOE is triggering applause from conservatives and fossil fuel supporters and consternation among environmentalists. Climate activists and public health advocates say the DOE under Wright is advancing policies that raise energy prices and expose Americans to harmful pollution tied to fossil fuel emissions.

“Chris Wright has fully embraced Donald Trump’s war on renewables, and that’s extremely significant,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “Almost on a weekly basis, Secretary Wright posts social media content from his official government accounts spreading complete misinformation and lies about renewable energy and particularly about solar.”

Wright himself is a major change-maker in the federal government and energy world. As a former CEO of fracking services company Liberty Energy, Wright is steeped in data on energy systems and a frequent guest on media outlets like Fox News. At an event last week, Trump called Wright the “greatest oil man anywhere in the world.”

A reorganization last month at DOE moved the decades-old Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to a new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. It also cut the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which was created by Congress in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, and renamed the Loan Programs Office the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.

Gordon said the cut to OCED and grant cancellations, most of which stem from the infrastructure law, flout U.S. laws.

On the homefront, Wright has used emergency authorities to force utilities to operate fossil fuel plants in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington. And new policies to boost fossil fuels keep rolling in. In early December, for instance, Wright teased new rules to use fossil-fuel-based backup generators to meet demand growth.

Meanwhile, nuclear energy is a major priority for the administration. The White House has pledged to quadruple nuclear energy in the United States by 2050 and is pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to expedite license approvals.

DOE is poised to fund new uranium enrichment projects in the U.S., with a deadline approaching on a cutoff for Russian imports that are vital to the U.S. nuclear sector. But so far, utilities are moving sluggishly — if at all — to contract to build new nuclear plants.

With other emerging technologies, like fusion, funding is also a critical issue. Wright has been pushing for fusion — which envisions power plants using the same reaction powering the sun — and the recent DOE reorganization created a new office for the industry. The move will help gear the department more toward commercialization of projects, but details are being sorted out, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association.

The new office shows the “administration takes seriously the goal and challenges of getting fusion energy commercialized,” said Holland, who met with Dario Gil, DOE’s undersecretary for science, this month.

But “there’s a reality that we’re in a budget-constrained environment,” he said in an interview. The fusion office currently is funded at around $800 million, and the industry is pushing for funding closer to $1 billion annually.

“We’re confident if the administration asked for it, Congress would support them,” Holland said.

  • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOP
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    Furchtgott-Roth and other conservatives say the efficiency rules deprive Americans of market choice. “We’ve moved from an energy scarcity era in the Biden administration to an energy abundance era in the Trump administration,” she said. “There’s no need for the government to set rules for efficiency.” A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the efficiency rules are “raising prices, limiting product choice, and undermining performance, reliability, and longevity.”

    On a completely unrelated note, the head of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, who was working to advance clean energy technology was murdered in his home Monday night.

    On Tuesday, an article was published regarding a recent Congressional hearing, reorganization at the Department of Energy under Chris Wright.

    Following the publication of this article, House Science Committee Democratic staff told FYI that DOE has not yet determined which Fusion Energy Sciences programs will be moved from the Office of Science to the Office of Fusion, aside from the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program and the INFUSE program. They also said it is unclear if the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations will continue to exist. The headline of this story has since been updated accordingly.

    Lofgren criticized Wright for not testifying before the committee, saying “there must be accountability” for actions at DOE this year, including “the mass firings and coerced departures of dedicated experts throughout DOE, the illegal elimination of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, insanely inaccurate statements regarding the role that renewables play in ensuring the reliability of our electric grid, [and] the widely debunked climate ‘science’ report that the secretary commissioned.”