Trump Still Doesn’t Know What the Department of Energy Does

Back in 2016, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Energy famously didn’t know what the job actually entailed. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry believed “he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry,” per a New York Times report at the time. Trump undoubtedly agreed; I mean it’s right there in the title, “Energy,” what else could we be dealing with here.

After four years in the White House and another four yelling about taking it back, Trump has shown again that he has no idea what the department actually does. He nominated Chris Wright for energy secretary, the founder and CEO of an oilfield services company called Liberty Energy — that word again, “energy,” this is all coming together beautifully.

It’s barely worth going into all the reasons he is a bad choice, his general climate change denial chief among them, but it is worth sitting with once more how little nominations like this reckon with the actual job at hand. The Department of Energy has a budget in the ballpark of $50 billion per year; in its 2025 budget request, a full 48 percent of that money is earmarked for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains and oversees that country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Another 16 percent is for “environmental management” — nuclear waste cleanup in places like Hanford, Washington, a site that alone would get a full $3.1 billion of the entire department’s budget. The Office of Science gets 17 percent, and then we get down into the weeds with smaller numbers. Hanging out at a solid two percent, or $900 million, is “fossil energy and carbon management” — the thing that, if we’re being generous, an oilfield services CEO might know something about.

Obviously, running a big piece of federal bureaucracy doesn’t require someone with expertise into every last thing the department does. Still, bringing in people who might be familiar with the DOE’s main functions seems reasonable — like Obama’s two picks, physicists Ernest Moniz and Steven Chu. But this is just what Trump does — every pick is either what one of his behind-the-scenes ghouls wrote on a piece of paper and slid in front of him to sign, or the combination of “I saw him on the TV” and “well clearly Jim Farmer should run Agriculture.” Why is Dr. Oz the pick to run the massively complicated Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies? Because those involve healthcare, and his name has “Dr.” in it.

The Energy Department under Biden, led by former Michigan governor and public policy expert and professor Jennifer Granholm, has in fact made reducing emissions and improving the country’s energy picture priorities. Under Trump, it’s not so much that it will just stop doing that, it’s that no one in charge much cares what it’s there for at all.