President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order directing federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, to eliminate “duplication and redundancy” as part of what he called a “long-overdue reorganization of our federal departments and agencies.”
The text of the executive order was not available at press time for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, and details Trump himself offered few details during a brief signing ceremony Monday.
Trump did say the cost-cutting effort would be led by Mick Mulvaney, the newly installed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget: the executive gatekeeping office that essentially tells agency heads how much funding the administration will or won’t request for their departments each year from Congress.
Cabinet agencies and Mulvaney’s office will work “with experts inside and outside of the federal government” to complete the study of inefficiencies within the Executive Branch, Trump said.
DOE has an annualized budget of about $30 billion in the current fiscal 2017, under the continuing resolution that funds the government at prior-year levels through late April. The agency’s budget for fiscal 2018 could be issued Thursday, when the Trump administration is slated to release more information about the budget cuts the president proposed for non-defense discretionary spending: the category that includes DOE.
The reductions, if applied evenly across the entire federal government, would lop about $3 billion off DOE’s top line, compared with current funding levels.
