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.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.