Project 2025: The White House Downgrades the Department of Energy

Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term has started, Part 2 of the series has commenced.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has played a crucial role in the nation’s energy security and infrastructure modernization under eight previous presidents. But under President Donald Trump, the DOE is slotted for a downgrade in its mission, funding, and operational capacity.

The DOE, which was created in 1975 in response to the 1970s oil crisis, oversees national policy regarding energy production, development of the nation’s renewable energy resources, energy conservation, oversight of nuclear power, and the military's nuclear weapons program. Its mission includes making sure America’s energy-related research remains on the cutting edge of innovation. It is a Cabinet-level agency with an enormous portfolio and a $51 billion annual budget as of 2024, directly answerable to the president. Its 17,000 federal employees, plus another 90,000 contract employees, have their hands full trying to move the U.S. deeper into the 21st century and making sure that the nation remains energy competitive with China, the European Union, Russia, and other major powers.

Given the significance of the DOE’s historical mission, many leaders from the business, scientific, military, and energy specialties are growing concerned over the plans of the Trump administration to cut the budget, staff, and capacity of the DOE. Trump’s philosophy seems to be guided by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, which downplays the seriousness of climate change and America’s responsibility to enact effective policies that will greatly reduce the U.S. carbon footprint—which happens to be the largest per capita in the world among high-population countries, twice as large as China’s.

Instead, under the Project 2025 influence, the White House issued an executive order on April 8 that declared a “national energy emergency” that is seeking to stop what Project 2025 calls an “unprovoked war on fossil fuels.” Their preferred energy policy can be boiled down to a bumper sticker slogan: “ Drill, baby, drill.”

The executive order calls for significantly more investment and production of oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. Trump’s appointed secretary of energy, Chris Wright—who formerly served as the chief executive officer of Liberty Energy, a fracking company based in Denver—has frequently expressed doubts about climate change and opposed policies aimed at curbing it. Wright has acknowledged the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change but he doubts whether climate change is having the impacts that scientists say, such as dangerous planetary heating and worsening extreme weather. “The world runs on oil and gas, and we need that,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

Indeed the Trump administration, under the influence of Project 2025, is so hostile to any type of alternative energy that it seems to relish its opposition to things like “eyesore windmills built at taxpayers’ expense” and any incentives-based policy that is construed as trying to “force people into electric vehicles.” The White House has withdrawn appliance efficiency standards and postponed other conservation rules, including standards on electric motors, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, and external power supplies. It appears that Donald Trump, under the influence of Project 2025, is trying to turn back the clock on energy awareness and development by 50 years, burying the climate change threat in the sand.

But that’s not all. The Trump executive order regarding the DOE also calls for the U.S. to be “energy dominant” in the world. Taking into account recent belligerent rhetoric by the Trump administration—whether it’s threatening to invade Greenland, to annex Canada to gain easier access to their energy resources, or to strike a deal with Putin’s oil-rich Russia over its military invasion of the sovereignty of Ukraine—this energy dominance may apparently be achievable via coercive and even militaristic means, according to the White House.

The contradictions in the Trump plan

While the Trump administration seems eager to reorient the mission of DOE in support of its aggressive goals, at the same time, it seems intent on downgrading the department’s capacity through a reduction in both personnel and funding.

In early April, Energy Secretary Wright sent an email to DOE employees, informing them that the department will be undergoing a “ wide-ranging reduction in force,” i.e. in staffing, to “align with broader strategic priorities outlined by President Trump.” That was an official nudge, encouraging DOE staffers to accept the Trump administration's resignation incentives. So far, nearly 4,000 staffers—about 25% of the DOE workforce—have accepted. Particularly hard-hit have been offices overseeing power grid stability, energy supply chains, clean energy deployment, and renewable, nuclear, and high-tech energy projects.

The Department of Energy has been the nation’s leading funder as well as a leading practitioner of cutting-edge research on the latest in energy innovation. But the Trump administration is cutting that as well. This is particularly concerning with regard to renewable energy and climate change research, with Trump’s Department of Commerce recently claiming—without evidence—that research on the topic was contributing to what it called “climate anxiety.” The DOE has signaled its intention to pull funding from hundreds of DOE projects, many of which were launched following President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law and are funding numerous climate-friendly initiatives for solar power, heat pumps, battery storage, and renewable fuels.

The White House is not always cutting the funding directly, since that funding was mandated by Congress and questions have been raised if Trump can legally cut this funding. Instead, it is cleverly invoking “rule changes” that will result in, for example, research departments at universities seeing significant cuts in funding. This threatens to upend critical areas of scientific research.

This shift in DOE funding procedures mirrors announcements at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, whose funding also is being cut. The cuts in multiple departments and agencies amplify a growing anxiety in the scientific research community as the Trump administration and its Elon Musk-led DOGE upend the country’s vast, world-class research system, firing scientists, researchers, and staff members responsible for crucial work. A university chemist, funded by the Department of Energy, says this means that “time-sensitive research will not be performed, or will need to be significantly scaled back…We are curbing our future economic growth and ceding technological ground to other countries.”

The brewing battle between Trump and the states

The White House executive order also escalated a growing battle between the Trump administration and Democratic-led states that are implementing climate-friendly policies. The President’s order stated that “American energy dominance is threatened when state and local governments seek to regulate energy.” Trump’s executive order zealously singled out California’s “cap and trade” regulations that create financial incentives for businesses to “trade” carbon credits and cap their carbon usage, even though that law was strongly championed by then-Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2009. Also in the crosshairs is Pennsylvania, where Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro is contesting a court challenge to a regulation that would make it the first major fossil fuel-producing state to force power plant owners to pay for greenhouse gas emissions.

In the Trump/Project 2025 world, no policy genuflection toward reining in carbon pollution is acceptable. Trump has instructed the U.S. Attorney General and the Department of Justice to target state laws focused on climate change, a broad order that unmistakably puts Democratic states in the crosshairs. Roughly 80% of the 262 projects on a DOE “kill list” are based in states that did not vote for Trump in 2024. Tellingly, the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and natural gas industries, applauded Trump’s executive order.

No other federal department is more important to the nation’s future economic and infrastructure development, and for charting a course on how the U.S. will respond to the increasing threat of climate change, than the Department of Energy. Is President Donald Trump, who is not known as a man of science, prepared to manage America’s energy needs well into the future?

We are about to find out.

Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.