The Department of Energy is removing offices devoted to clean energy in an apparent escalation of the Trump administration’s push to unravel Joe Biden’s climate legacy.
The agency released a new organizational chart Thursday that no longer includes the offices devoted to clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and energy assistance for states and communities. The office of manufacturing and supply chains has also been removed from the chart, as has the office devoted to expanding the nation’s electric grid infrastructure.
Those offices were beefed up and significantly restructured during the Biden administration to bring about the clean energy policies passed in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
It’s not clear whether by removing these offices, the administration is ceasing all work around clean energy.
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The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — the beating heart of the Biden administration’s climate efforts — will be folded into a new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, a current DOE employee told NOTUS.
The people who worked in the manufacturing office will be added to the new minerals office, which will report directly to Energy Secretary Chris Wright instead of an undersecretary. It will be managed by Audrey Robertson, who was confirmed by the Senate in October and previously sat on the board of the oil and gas company founded by Wright, according to a person familiar with the matter.
It’s possible that many of the other offices could be restructured similarly. That said, the Trump administration has made clear it is changing course from the previous administration when it comes to energy policy.
In October, the Department of Energy rescinded at least $7.5 billion worth of grants distributed mainly to clean energy projects. In September, the Environmental Protection Agency completely restructured, entirely removing its large independent research arm. In April, the Agriculture Department took climate-focused funding programs for farmers and restructured them to fund Trump administration priorities instead.
Many of the people who worked on environmental justice issues across the administration have been laid off through the administration’s reductionsin-force, and both the DOE and the EPA have lost a significant portion of their staff through voluntary retirement programs.
The administration’s new organizational chart includes some new offices — among them an office dedicated to artificial intelligence, another to fusion, and a third to critical minerals.
The administration did elevate one renewable technology into its own office: What was once called the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management is becoming the Office of Hydrocarbons and Geothermal.
Geothermal technology is much more popular with Republicans than other renewable resources because the most advanced versions rely on similar technologies, skills and people as those used for the natural gas industry.
The office of the ombudsman — an internal, confidential employee resource for workplace problems — was removed from the organizational chart.
“The Energy Department is aligning its operations to restore commonsense to energy policy, lower costs for American families and businesses, and ensure the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” Wright said in a press release.
Most of the offices no longer on DOE’s organizational chart were those that received a large influx of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — Biden’s largest legislative legacies. Almost all of the funding channeled through those laws has already been spent, and what was left was almost entirely rescinded earlier this year, through Trump’s July reconciliation bill.
And over the course of the last year, almost every agency has proposed repeals and rollbacks of nearly every Biden-era environmental regulation.
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