The Department of Energy unveiled a long-awaited internal reorganization of the agency on Thursday, implementing sweeping changes that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright pitched as “aligning its operations to restore commonsense to energy policy, lower costs for American families and businesses.”
The two-paragraph press release, which linked to a PDF of the new organizational chart, offered little insight into what the changes mean. Indeed, two sources familiar with the rollout told me the agency hadn’t even held a town hall to explain the overhaul to staffers until sometime Friday. (Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.)
After conversations with multiple former agency staffers, including a senior political appointee who helped lead the Biden-era reorganization in 2022, here’s what stood out to me:
1. ‘This seems sloppy.’
The spring 2022 overhaul Jennifer Granholm, former President Joe Biden’s secretary of energy, oversaw came with a detailed legal memo and extensive explanations about what the changes would mean.
“Overall, this seems sloppy,” the former senior staffer who led that process told me this morning. “If you’re trying to carry out a very coherent energy dominance strategy, you’d at least explain which boxes are moving where and what’s sitting under those boxes.”
Announcing the changes with so little detail, the former official said, “seems like a fundamental lack of leadership.”
“This, to me, just seems reckless,” the appointee continued. “People who are sitting within these offices don’t know where they’re going to work virtually on Monday.”
That, of course, may change by the end of today once the Energy Department holds its town hall meeting.
2. A lot of power is going to a new office led by a deputy close to Wright.
It’s unusual for an office at the agency to report directly to the secretary. Those that do typically straddle multiple types of responsibilities within the agency. For example, the Office of Technology Transitions reported directly to Granholm under the Biden administration because its purview fell under both research and deployment. The Office of Policy functions similarly. But the newly-created Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation absorbed not only various mining-related sections of the agency, but also the now-defunct Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. That puts a lot of money and grant-making powers under the new office.
Leading the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation will be Audrey Robertson, who was confirmed last month as the assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. A former investment banker and oil executive, Robertson served on the board of directors of Wright’s former company, the fracking giant Liberty Energy, until earlier this year. Another agency source familiar with the organization said “it makes no sense for this office not to answer to an undersecretary of energy.”
“Audrey is Wright’s person,” the source told me.
That, the other former agency official told me, creates some political liabilities for Wright.
“For departmental oversight reasons, that’s a lot of grant-making money and authorities that typically you’d want to layer under additional oversight before it goes to the secretary,” the ex-official said. “This is the thing that sticks out like a sore thumb.”
3. Some of the moves follow a clear, if arguably partisan, logic.
All that said about the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, no one can blame Wright for wanting to consolidate some of the bureaucracy. One way to read the decision to eliminate certain offices, such as the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains or the Office of State and Community Energy Programs, is that the new administration wanted to undo the changes made under its predecessor in 2022. While manufacturing work included a lot of what the U.S. is doing with batteries, funding for that work fell under the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“A lot of the moves that they’re doing to re-consolidate offices aligns with what was technically under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which directed battery work to go through EERE,” one of the sources told me. “So some of this is realignment back to the original congressional direction.”
4. No one’s getting fired — yet.
The stop-gap funding bill that reopened the government after the longest shutdown in history included a measure to prevent any dismissals until January 30.
But it’s unclear whether the agency plans to terminate workers as part of the reorganization starting in February.
5. Fusion is getting its own office.
In a sign that the Trump administration is taking efforts to commercialize fusion energy technology more seriously, the reorganization gives fusion its own office, moving the work out of the Office of Science.
“Overall this is a win for the private-fusion sector, and further cements a move from a discovery-based research model to milestone-driven, commercialization-focused policy,” Stuart Allen, the chief executive of the investment company FusionX Group, wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “All signs point to a federal strategy increasingly aligned and enmeshed with the rapid advancement of fusion energy.”
6. Geothermal is linking up with fossil fuels.
Under the new structure, geothermal and fossil fuels will live together under the new Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office.
There are some obvious synergies. The new generation of geothermal startups racing toward commercialization rely on drilling techniques such as fracking to tap into hot rocks in places that conventional companies couldn’t. Oil and gas companies are excited about the industry; Sage Geosystems, one of the big players, is led by the former head of Shell’s fracking division. And notably, most of the big companies, including Sage, Fervo Energy, and XGS Energy (whom I have written about twice recently in these pages) are all headquartered in Big Oil’s capital of Houston, Texas.
7. Hydropower ended up in a weird spot.
Nuclear power has long had its own office at the Energy Department, and that won’t change. But you’d think that the other source of clean baseload power that the Trump administration has anointed as one of its preferred generating sources might get slotted in with geothermal. Instead, however, hydropower is in Robertson’s mega-office.
8. Nuclear weapons are being left alone.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the Energy Department’s work that deals with the nation’s nuclear arsenal was largely left untouched by the changes. Perhaps the agency had enough drama from the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismissals of critical workers in the early days of the administration, which led to an embarrassing effort to reverse the firings.
9. There’s still open questions about things like the hydrogen hubs.
As was widely expected, the reorg killed the Biden-era Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which the new administration had already gutted. What becomes of key programs that office managed is still a mystery. Chief among them: the hydrogen hubs.
The Energy Department yanked funding for the two regional hubs on the West Coast last month, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorovo reported at the time. A leaked list that the administration has yet to confirm as real proposed defunding all seven of the hubs. It’s unclear whether that may happen. If it doesn’t, it’s unclear where those billions of dollars may go. The most obvious place is under Robertson’s portfolio, ballooning the budget under her control by billions.
10. The Loan Programs Office is now the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
When Wright announced the first totally new loan issued under the agency’s in-house lender earlier this week, he trumpeted his new approach the Loan Programs Office. He wanted to refashion the entity with its lending authority of nearly $400 billion as a source of funding primarily for the nuclear industry. The first big loan issued Tuesday afternoon went to utility giant Constellation to finance the restart of the functional reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear station. But at a press conference last month, Wright hinted at the new branding, as Emily called in this piece. It’s now the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
The new office isn’t just the LPO, however. The $2.5 billion Transmission Facility Financing Program will also fall under the new so-called EDF — an acronym it will aptly share with France’s biggest utility, which came under state control recently as part of Paris’ efforts to refurbish and expand the country’s vast nuclear fleet.
11. With all that in mind, some coverage of these changes was a little overblown.
I’ll leave it to my source to level a critique at my colleagues in this industry:
“Even in The New York Times today there’s an article that says all these offices are eliminated,” one of the sources told me. “Their names were eliminated, but a lot of the projects for whatever remains that they haven’t terminated are just being reassigned.” The Wall Street Journal had a similar angle.
The actual thing to watch for, the source said, was how job descriptions change.
“What’s going to be more telling is when they have a new, updated mission of the Office of Electricity or a new, updated mission of the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.”
California beamin'.EIA
