WASHINGTON, D.C. – Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, while testifying and receiving questions in the Senate, said he is working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to get more than just a “skinny budget” to Congress.
“We’re working with OMB to release more of that, but that’s still a work in progress,” Wright said in a hearing Wednesday on the Department of Energy’s budget request with the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Energy and Water.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the subcommittee, said to Wright that “we’re having a budget hearing today, we have not seen your full budget request. We need that in front of us, it is required, it’s critical information. When are we going to see that?”
“It’s awful skinny,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) added. “It’s about a page. So I’m working off of an outline.”
Coons added that the “skinny budget” claims to only defund money going to climate change and the “Green New Scam research,” but doesn’t define those terms. “I’m concerned we’ll end up defunding critical research,” he said.
According to the version of the skinny budget released by the Office of Management and Budget on May 2, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would get $24 billion, the same as in 2025. When including resources from the $150 billion defense reconciliation bill, NNSA would get $30 billion total, or an increase of 25%.
The funding request listed priorities for “American Energy Dominance,” wherein the administration would cancel $15 billion from DOE funding from the “Green New Deal” and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and reorient it toward domestic fossil energy, nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels.
This hearing follows a similar budget hearing in the lower chamber earlier this month, where members like House subcommittee ranking member Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) expressed similar frustration over a budget not being ready.
“He’s traveling to all these places, but if I were him I’d be sitting in my office getting the budget done for his department,” Kaptur told the Monitor at the Capitol outside the House hearing. “”He’s going to be at over a dozen labs all over the country, but he should be spending time focused on the numbers and getting money out the door.”
Kaptur, in her parallel hearing with Wright, grilled him on his lack of response to “bipartisan” and “bicameral” level letters sent to him regarding both $67 billion in alleged frozen funds and the firings at NNSA. Murray brought up this exchange in this week’s hearing and how Wright said he was “too busy” to respond to the letters, and added the lawmakers received “radio silence until yesterday,” when Wright responded to the letters, which Murray said was “clearly to get ahead of today’s hearings.”
“That was convenient,” Murray said. “And ‘response’ is being charitable, since you failed to provide any real answers.”
Wright’s response, provided to the Monitor this week by Murray’s staff, said “DOE’s Deferred Resignation Program has proven to be an effective tool to reshape the workforce on a voluntary basis. We do not yet have final numbers to share.”
When subcommittee chairman John Kennedy (R-La.) asked Wright how many people no longer work at DOE in the time period from President Donald Trump’s start of term, Wright said “the allegations were thousands,” but “our headcount will ultimately be reduced by thousands, but we will do it slowly.”
Kennedy asked rhetorically, “and what’s wrong with that?” Coons, however, said his “core concern” was the “way that DOGE has impacted your workforce and the folks you have to carry these goals out undermine” the goals of the DOE.
