Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in testimony at Congress Tuesday that there should be “clarity” soon on the reorganization and workforce shrinking at the Department of Energy.
“The Department of Energy is filled with a bunch of tremendous, hardworking, committed men and women trying to better the direction for our country,” Wright said at a hearing with the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Energy, where he testified on the DOE’s fiscal 2026 budget.
Wright continued to say that in the previous Joe Biden administration, headcount grew 20% at DOE, and costs did not drop. He added that “clearly that’s a trajectory we don’t want to go on.”
Wright said he wants to critically look at the DOE’s workforce and “bring the headcount more aligned with an appropriate budget for the times we’re in,” and insisted that he and the DOE has “done this almost entirely through voluntary measures.” Later in the hearing he said growing the headcount “was not a productive use of people or capital.”
Wright did not say when the hiring freeze at DOE would end, but said that “in the next few weeks, we will probably get more clarity on where the reorganization is going to end.”
In a DOE budget hearing with the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Energy and Water in May, 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 responded that “the allegations were thousands,” but “our headcount will ultimately be reduced by thousands, but we will do it slowly.”
This is the first of three hearings on the DOE’s fiscal 2026 budget wherein the presiding committee has had a skinny budget outline, an appendix and a DOE 2026 congressional justification budget in brief to work off of.
