Chris Wright is allowing the Department of Energy to be dismantled before his eyes
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright calls himself “a science geek, turned tech nerd, turned lifelong energy entrepreneur.” Why is he standing by as DOGE and the White House destroy his department?
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Chris Wright wasn’t the worst choice Donald Trump could have made to lead the U.S. Department of Energy.
National environmental groups opposed Wright’s nomination, to be sure. But energy industry players were cautiously optimistic that Wright – who studied at UC Berkeley and MIT and led a company involved in shale oil and gas development but also enhanced geothermal energy exploration – was open to supporting all forms of energy.
Climate hawk and clean energy champion Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was willing to give Wright the benefit of the doubt.
“While I do not agree with Mr. Wright on a number of issues, he has committed to working with us in good faith to continue investing in our national labs in New Mexico and across the country, accelerating transmission infrastructure to meet our nation’s skyrocketing demand for clean power, and, most importantly, upholding the law and implementing Congress' vision,” said Heinrich in a January 23 statement explaining his vote to confirm Wright.
For his part, Wright tried to reassure skeptical senators he was committed to expanding U.S. energy production and to reducing costs.
“The security of our nation begins with energy. Previous administrations have viewed energy as a liability instead of the immense national asset that it is. To compete globally, we must expand energy production, including commercial nuclear and liquified natural gas, and cut the cost of energy,” he said in an opening statement at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy Committee on January 15.
The DOGE onslaught
But that was before representatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) entered the Department of Energy’s (DOE) headquarters and proceeded to slash and burn their way through the department’s workforce.
Thousands of DOE employees have either been fired or made to feel so unwelcome that they have accepted deferred resignation or early retirement offers – White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has succeeded in his quest “to put them in trauma.” The department’s ranks are now so depleted that political leaders at the agency have resorted to asking departing staffers to stay lest no one be left to run offices and programs.
And despite any assurances Wright may have given Sen. Heinrich, DOE’s national laboratory network was not spared from DOGE layoffs.
“We must protect and accelerate the work of the Department’s national laboratory network to secure America’s competitive edge and its security. I commit to working with Congress on the important missions of the national laboratories,” Wright had pledged at his confirmation hearing.
Nevertheless, 114 researchers and scientists were fired at the network’s crown jewel, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, on May 5.
Meanwhile, this week Wright announced an unprecedently aggressive plan to roll back 47 regulations that had established energy and water efficiency standards for dozens of consumer appliances.
“While it would normally take years for the Department of Energy to remove just a handful of regulations, the Trump Administration assembled a team working around the clock to reduce costs and deliver results for the American people in just over 110 days,” Wright boasted in a May 12 press release.
Wright is not calling the shots
So, what’s going on?
According to sources inside the department who have spoken with Latitude Media reporter Maeve Allsup, Wright is not the one calling the shots. Allsup’s reporting on the chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty at DOE since DOGE’s “hostile takeover” is essential reading.
“I don’t think people believe that Chris Wright is steering the ship here. Regardless of what he might want to do with the agency and its funding and its projects, there is no sense that he has the final say on pretty much anything,” Allsup said on the May 9 episode of Latitude Media’s “Open Circuit” podcast.
She added: “People want to be hopeful. People that I’ve spoken with who are still at DOE and those who have left, really, really believe in the projects that they were working on and the impact that they could have. They believe in the mission of their offices, but I think there is some really heavy skepticism that any of that can happen in the next four years.”
What – or who – else might explain the turmoil at DOE? Allsup and “Open Circuit” co-host Katherine Hamilton see the fingerprints of Russell Vought and Project 2025 – despite Trump’s many attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign to disavow the Heritage Foundation’s government-slashing blueprint.
“So just for fun, I went back and reread the DOE section of Project 2025, and essentially everything that Chris Wright says, and he testified to the appropriations committee today, is directly from that,” said Hamilton, a former NREL employee, policy expert, and chair of the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm 38 North Solutions.
“When we started to see drafts come out of DOE, the first phase of how they planned to downsize, and they were categorizing certain offices as essential, nothing in those leaked drafts was a surprise to anyone who has read that DOE chapter of Project 2025, because that document explicitly calls for cutting offices like ARPA-E [Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy], OCED [Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations], GDO [Grid Deployment Office], EERE [Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy]. And at least in the early drafts that I saw, not a single one of the offices that Project 2025 recommends eliminating were named as essential offices under the new regime at DOE,” added Allsup.
Who’s in charge?
While it is normal for the White House to have the final say on policy priorities at federal agencies, Cabinet secretaries typically aren’t micromanaged.
But in Trump 2.0, Cabinet secretaries appear to be play-acting being in charge, while the decisions that matter are made elsewhere – be it energy czar and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum delegating the responsibility for his budget and workforce to a member of the DOGE team, or Pam Bondi playing attorney general on TV, while the real power at the Department of Justice rests with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
As for the Department of Energy, so many employees have left or been pushed out that few will be left to implement Wright’s nine-point plan for DOE policy, which itself echoes Project 2025, as Energy Wire’s Christa Marshall reported in February.
Perhaps Wright would have been better off staying on to guide his former company, Liberty Energy. The company’s market value has nearly halved since Trump was inaugurated. Considering the chaos caused by Wright's current boss’ tariff policies, Liberty might want its former CEO back at the helm.
