House Science, Space, and Technology (Begich): An Overview of the Department of Energy’s Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request

Good morning. How's everyone doing this morning? I hope well. The Committee on Science, Space and Technology will now come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare recess of the committee at any time.

Welcome to today's hearing entitled An Overview of the Department of Energy's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request. I'd like to recognize myself for 5 minutes for an opening statement. Thank you for joining us here today. An overview of the Department of Energy's fiscal year 2027 budget request. It is a pleasure to have the Secretary of Energy, Secretary Wright, with us this morning as we examine the department's priorities, ongoing reforms, and vision for America's energy future.

Over the past year, the Department of Energy has undergone a dramatic transformation. The current administration inherited a department that had shifted away from its traditional focus on basic science toward a greater emphasis on applied research. The basic research serves as the backbone of scientific and technological breakthroughs. However, because those breakthroughs are often years away from commercialization, industry frequently struggles to justify funding such work. Applied research, by contrast, focuses on solving specific challenges and bridging the gap between scientific discovery and practical application.

To address this imbalance, DOE announced a sweeping recognition— reorganization in November, and led by Secretary Wright, the effort sought to refocus the department on its core mission and improve its ability to deliver for the American people. As a result, new offices were created, and the Undersecretary of Science and Undersecretary of Energy portfolios were rebalanced. By realigning offices and responsibilities, DOE established clearer— more clear priorities, I should say. Current geopolitical tensions have only underscored the importance of this effort. Combatting the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to corner the market in emerging technologies should be a bipartisan and a bicameral mission.

We have seen the CCP implement its market takeover playbook in sectors ranging from critical minerals to solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries over and over again. The U.S. cannot afford to rely on a single country for technologies and infrastructure that power our future. We are in a global competition where energy is the common thread. For decades, electricity demand in the United States remained relatively flat, but in recent years it has surged. Maintaining our technological advantage over China requires expanding reliable baseload power generation.

In an effort to surpass us and dominate emerging technologies, The CCP races to add as much power as possible to its grid, including approximately 78 gigawatts of brand new coal-fired power generation just last year alone. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has further strained global energy markets. Before the conflict, approximately one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas, or LNG, supply flowed through the Strait of Hormuz. More than 13 million barrels of oil per day are now at risk due to the Iranian regime's harassment of shipping. Relying on foreign energy sources exposes our nation to macroeconomic volatility, national security risks, and supply chain bottlenecks.

I want to applaud Secretary Wright and the Trump administration for championing domestic energy production to strengthen our energy security, support economic growth, and ensure that the United States has the power needed to compete and to win in the technologies of tomorrow. Many factors contribute to rising electricity demands, and while artificial intelligence, AI, and data centers receive much of the attention, the electrification of everyday American life and the return of manufacturing and industrial activity, manufacturing change, to the United States are also increasing the demand for reliable, affordable power. These challenges were compounded during the Biden administration, which pushed regulations that accelerated the retirement of reliable power plants without ensuring adequate replacement generation was available. As demand grew, these policies placed grid stability at grave risk. Simply put, America must produce more energy, not less.

I look forward to hearing from the Secretary today about the steps that have been taken over the past year to modernize the department and how this budget request builds up on that progress. So again, I would like to thank the Secretary for being here today and appearing before our committee, and I will yield my time back. And now I'd like to recognize the ranking member of the full committee, Ms. Lofgren. Good morning and thank you, Chairman Babin, for holding this hearing today. Secretary Wright, it's been over 16 months since you were sworn in as Secretary of Energy, yet this is the first time you've testified before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

This is quite unacceptable. As you and your team know, this committee has sole jurisdiction in the House of Representatives over the authorization of all of DOE's non-military science and energy research, development, demonstration and commercialization programs that you have said you care deeply about. In fact, this is the first time I've even speaking with you. I expect to engage with you far more directly and frequently going forward. Moving on to examine your tenure as Secretary to date, the damage that you and the broader administration have already inflicted on our national energy innovation enterprise is frankly staggering.

You had a team of seriously unqualified political appointees cancel billions of dollars in DOE awards across the country that had been provided as directed by Congress through extremely rigorous, independent, merit-based processes. A federal court has found these terminations concentrated in so-called blue states, per the unhinged public boasting of OMB Director Russell void, to be blatantly illegal. These politically motivated cuts include well over a billion dollars in support for vital next-generation energy projects throughout my home state of California. Now, all—. No, 3 weeks ago, and without congressional authorization, President Trump attempted to set up a slush fund to pay out money to people, mostly convicted criminals, fraudsters, cop killers, no shortage of sex offenders, that he claims were victimized by the government.

I hope Congress will take actions to prohibit the establishment of this fund, but if not, maybe the 40 million people of California should apply for funding under this program, given the administration's illegal actions against our citizens. There must be accountability for the mass firings and coerced departures of thousands of dedicated experts throughout DOE and our national laboratories, as well as the illegal elimination of a functional Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, as spelled out in the law. You can call these efficiencies or business-informed decisions all you want, but that doesn't make them smart or good for the American people. Last year, you yourself recognized that perhaps arbitrarily firing hundreds of professionals at the National Nuclear Security Administration, whose job it is to safeguard our nuclear secrets and ensure the reliability of our weapons stockpile, was not the best idea in the world. We now have reports from practically every relevant sector that these personnel cuts at DOE have severely harmed the ability of congressionally mandated research and security programs across the department to carry out their statutory missions.

But I suspect that was the point all along. I don't know how we can reconcile your vaunted expertise in the energy sector with your absurdly inaccurate statements on the role that wind and solar power play in lowering consumer costs and ensuring the reliability of our electric—. Yeah, we all know the wind doesn't always blow The sun doesn't always shine. Believe it or not, we're not idiots. But look at those crazy liberal bastions called Iowa and Texas.

Their grid operators will tell you they have been managing variable electricity demand with large amounts of electricity generated by renewables for decades. And the energy costs are far less expensive for their citizens than they would be if wind and solar weren't a major part of their portfolios, even without federal subsidies. So, are Iowa and Texas stupid? I think not. Lastly, I know you went to MIT, I'm sure you're a very smart person, but you must recognize that you have lost credibility as a scientific expert after commissioning a widely debunked, error-filled climate so-called science report through a slapdash process that has proven to be illegal in a court of law.

So much for restoring gold standard science. This would be funny if it weren't true. I would have loved to have focused with you today on our mutual support for dramatically accelerating the development and commercialization of fusion energy, but as you hopefully understand by now, you have a lot of explaining to do before this committee today and throughout the remainder of your time in this job. And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. The gentlelady yields back.

Thank you. Today I want to recognize our witness, Secretary Chris Wright. He's the 17th Secretary of the United States Department of Energy. And now I'd like to recognize Secretary Wright for 5 minutes of your testimony. You are recognized, sir.

Thank you, Chairman Babbitt, Ranking Member Lofgren, and members of the committee. It is an honor to appear before you today. Mr. Secretary, you want to put on your mic. Thank you. First mistake already.

It is an honor to appear before you today as Secretary of Energy to to discuss the President's fiscal year 2027 budget request for the Department of Energy and the remarkable progress we are making to advance American scientific and technological leadership. Under President Trump's leadership, we are strengthening America's scientific edge and securing our position across critical frontiers of innovation, ensuring that discovery translates directly into American economic strength national security, and technological leadership. Throughout our history, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo missions, America's innovators have always risen to meet the moment. Today, we are doing it again. President Trump launched the Genesis Mission with one clear and urgent goal: to make the United States the undisputed leader in AI and unlock a new era of American scientific discovery.

This is not just a program. It is a nationwide mobilization bringing together all 17 DOE national laboratories, the full force of American computing power, and the brightest scientific minds to solve the defining challenges of our time. Thanks to funding from the one big beautiful bill, we initiated the American Science Cloud Platform and MODCON projects and foundational investments in data curation and model development. We have launched 26 National Science and Technology Challenges spanning energy, advanced materials, biotechnology, quantum science, and other critical domains, each one identified to deliver measurable, real-world impact for the American people. Take nuclear energy.

The competitive drive of American industry is flowing directly into our pilot program. President Trump set an ambitious goal: 3 reactors critical by our nation's 250th birthday. Today, I'm proud to say the first new non-light water reactor in over 4 decades reached criticality on June 4th. This is a historic moment. And it is what happens when American innovators are empowered to lead.

By marrying science, technology, and private enterprise, we are not just marking a milestone, we are launching the American nuclear renaissance. The momentum doesn't stop there. The response to Genesis Mission was historic, the largest number of submissions in DOE history, twice the next largest solicitation. Over 800 institutions applied spanning industry, national labs, and academia. American science showed up.

We are doubling down on quantum. We renewed the 5 National Quantum Information Science Research Centers focused on accelerating next generation technologies and securing American leadership in quantum computing hardware and applications. Two of the 2025 Nobel Prize winners in physics are associated with these quantum centers. We are driving two bold initiatives. First, an incentive-based competition to build and demonstrate the first scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything that exists today.

Second, a National Quantum Supercomputing User Facility to house these technologies, partner with industry to build the workforce ready to harness them. America will lead the quantum age. We're using science to accelerate the future of energy. Yesterday, DOE realized the finalized Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap, a national strategy to develop and commercialize fusion energy. DOE's ARPA-E office has committed $135 million to further fusion technologies over the next 18 months, the largest concentrated commitment to ARPA-E's history.

Fusion's potential is transformative. We are treating it that way. We are investing boldly in technology that will shape America's future. In 2026, ARPA-E has already committed $170 million in investments across administration priority areas: next-generation lithium extraction, deep nuclear waste storage, grid modernization, quantum advances, and AI-accelerated catalyst discovery. We are seeing this— we are seeing progress that shrinks experimentation from months to days.

And with that, I will conclude my remarks to stay on time. Thank you very much, Secretary Wright, for your testimony. Now we will move on to our questions, and the chair would like to recognize himself for 5 minutes. Let's cut to the issue on most American minds today: gas prices. I find it ironic that the other side of the aisle is bemoaning high gas prices when this time 4 years ago the national average for gas was at $5 a gallon.

And they were nowhere to be found. Secretary Wright, can you speak to everything that you and the current administration are doing to bring down not just gas prices, but energy prices writ large for the American taxpayer? I— that's a long dialogue, but I would love to have it. You know, as you know, gasoline prices in inflation-adjusted terms were about as low as they had ever been before this conflict, under $3 a gallon in today's nominal dollars. And we've done it by just bringing common sense back, getting out of the way and let Americans produce energy and focus on the human impacts.

Humans prefer more reliable energy, affordable energy that not only lowers their cost for their daily lives, but enables businesses to locate in their districts. But we— but I am very proud of President Trump's courage. I've not met anyone that's comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran. And he said, we just can't kick the can down the road and leave the next administration with an Iran that becomes untouchable because they're empowered by nuclear weapons. So he has leaned in to prevent that from happening.

I support it 100%. Yes, it's moved gasoline prices up by a little more than a dollar a gallon from just under $3 to a little over $4. I'll note that gas prices in the midst of an existential conflict are lower today nationally than they were in the state of California before the crisis even began. The energy prices escalation from this conflict is real on American people. We are working every day to drive that down by releasing Strategic Petroleum Reserves, changing regulations on gas formulations this summer.

I could go on with 7 other actions, but that, that is temporary. Democratic policies that drive up electricity prices, gasoline prices, diesel prices, they have been permanent and they are a larger force, a larger factor in energy prices today than the Iran conflict. And this conflict will pass and we will prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapon and long-term threatening energy supplies and peace and stability in the Middle East. We will lead to an era of lower energy prices, more abundant energy resources. And a more secure and prosperous world.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Forecasts continue to show growing electricity demand in the years ahead and placing increased pressure on the nation's electric grid and generating resources. Under the previous administration, DOE released several studies and analyses that raised concerns about expanding liquefied natural gas exports and the long-term role of natural gas in the nation's energy mix. Did DOE review these studies to ensure that they were signed scientifically sound when that happened and informed by input from the national laboratories and industry. As short as you can, did they do so?

Well, the story is actually a little different. They produced a report and completed it in October of 2023, and it showed what they didn't want to find. It showed that exporting LNG from the United States would actually on average drive down global carbon dioxide emissions and it would have no economic impact on the United States. They buried that report and never released it. They came out 3 months later saying they were going to study the issue of LNG exports and therefore put a pause.

And at the very end of their administration, they released a report which was just a subset of the original scientific report that showed a couple cases where, and very much at the margin, you could have a slight increase in greenhouse gas emissions with US LNG exports. And then they said that it would raise gas prices by 30% if you looked over a 30-year timeframe. So the abuse of science and facts was reprehensible. Yes, sir. Based on that review, what conclusions did DOE reach regarding the potential impacts of these policies on energy prices, energy security, and the American consumer, particularly in light of the recent global developments?

Uh, and if these policies had been implemented, what effect do you believe that they would have had on energy costs for American families and businesses? Oh, energy prices would be significantly higher today, not just in the United States but globally. Our ability to help and support our allies would be hindered dramatically. And the fastest growing export from the United States of America, liquefied natural gas, would have been dead in its tracks. On inauguration night, the Indian foreign minister said, will you be there to supply natural gas to our future?

Fortunately, I could tell him, yes, we're reversing those ruinous policies. We will be there. Thank you. And my time has expired. So we'd like to recognize the ranking member from California.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, last week, the Government Accountability Office issued a legal decision about your department's spend plan for fiscal year 2025 under a year-long continuing resolution in which Congress clearly directed you to maintain the programmatic funding levels that we enacted for the previous year. GAO determined that your plan to reallocate hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress appropriated for R&D in wind, solar, hydrogen, buildings, vehicles, and other energy technologies to your own favorite industries is unambiguously illegal. A GAO concluded in—. This is a quote—.

DOE is required to obligate and expend its FY 2025 appropriations in accordance with the reference congressional control point amounts in the FY 2024 explanatory statement. Now, if DOE implemented the FY 2025 spend plan, the department would be in clear violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. GAO clearly states, and again I quote, to the extent that DOE obligated or expended FY 2025 funds in excess of appropriate amounts, that is the FY 2024 levels described above, DOE should report an Anti-Deficiency Act violation. I'm interested whether that occurred. The GAO says they are unable to make a final determination of whether the department actually violated the law because DOE, quote, "has not provided adequate information or an explanation concerning the source of funds to enable a determination." I'm wondering if you have made your staff aware that obligating funds beyond what Congress prescribed could lead them, not just you, to incur significant civil as well as criminal penalties under Title 31, Section 1350 of the U.S. Code, which includes fines and potential imprisonment.

Uh, we are aware of the GAO report. Uh, it's been referred to OMB, and they are engaging on that issue, and there will be a dialogue back and forth to find out, uh, what the resolution of that issue will be. I'd just like to note, in April this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the President said, quote, "I'll pardon everyone who's come within 200 feet of the Oval Office." I'm wondering whether the President has made such an offer to you or your staff in terms of the violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. Uh, no, I've heard no such offer, and of course we take our mission and the law and the rule of Congress quite seriously. Despite your implication that we're flippant about it and violating the law, I think that's a mischaracterization.

Secretary White, I'm concerned about decision-making at the DOE in awards that undermine the competitive market and the department's own processes to ensure integrity. In late October, you announced that DOE would build 9 new supercomputers with 5 companies at the cost of $1 billion in taxpayers' money. There were no open competitions for these awards, no notice to Congress as required by the Anti-Deficiency Act, and no indication of where this funding would come from. My understanding is that the deal was inked and announced before the public servants at the Office of Science even knew about it. Can you tell us about the process for selecting these awards and how you ensure integrity in your deal-making?

So we put out a solicitation for, for developers of advanced computing systems data centers and said, if you're having trouble permitting them, we have a lot of land at the Department of Energy National Labs. And we want to increase our scientific computing capacity as rapidly and as cost-effectively as we can. And what we— and we had overwhelming response. So what you're referring to are deals where developers will pay entirely the capital cost of building compute at our national labs. We will run and maintain those systems and get delivered to us a meaningful percentage of the total computing power developed.

So in fact, I think it's quite a creative way to bring on computing power faster and at wildly lower price so we can drive innovations to solve health challenges, to drive energy challenges at a much faster pace and dramatically lower cost to the American people. Super proud of the effort and the work we're doing there. And we've been open about it every day. We announced our solicitation. We announced we got hundreds of feedback from them.

We announced, as you just said, the deals we agreed to have computing systems built at no taxpayer cost on our laboratories. It's— they are tremendous deals. Very proud of them. I have more questions, but I'll submit them for the record, Mr. Chairman, as my time has expired.

Yes, ma'am. Now I'd like to recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Weber. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for coming to our district over the LNG plants 2 or 3 weeks ago. We appreciated that.

I want to go back to— a lot of Americans are complaining about gas, high gas prices. For example. But I think it would be safe to say that once the Iranian regime is done away with, then the whole world will benefit from that. We have to remember that we've— the Iranian regime is an apocalyptic government that wants to destroy. They say they want nuclear energy, but people don't build nuclear plants down in the mountains, right?

They usually build them up where they're in plain view and they can be accessed equally. So in police work, they call that a clue. The Iranians are an apocalyptic government. That wants to destroy America, wants to destroy Israel, and wants to destroy any of their allies. They cannot be allowed to get nuclear weapons for that very reason.

And the president is extremely on track with that. Once that happens, then when the— when the Hormuz Straits are opened up and ships are flowing and energy is flowing again, the gas prices will come down. And I want to remind our committee here that there was 8 presidents There was President Carter, who could have done something with the Iranians. President Carter, President Reagan, President Bush Senior, President Clinton, President Bush Junior, President Obama, and President Biden. There was 7 or 8 presidents that could have done something about this, which we wouldn't be experiencing these high energy prices today.

President Trump had the guts to take the bull by the horns, we say in Texas, and to make that happen. Anyway, that's my— apocalyptic discussion about the Iranians. Secretary Wright, thanks for your testimony. I want to take the opportunity to talk about the ongoing SPR. As you probably remember from our discussion, Strategic Petroleum Reserve is 60% in my district, so that we have a lot in there on the Texas Gulf Coast.

What's the current status and timeline of the emergency exchange arrangements made in coordination with the IEA, International Energy Agency? How many barrels do you think we can expect to be returned and how soon? So thank you for that question, Representative Weber. And as you just said, those barrels that are exchanged, that's the dramatic difference. The Biden administration 4 years ago sold 200 million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down gasoline prices before an election in the early parts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where there was not an interruption of Russian oil exports.

At all. We had same flow of oil around the world, but they released a bunch of oil for political purpose and they sold those barrels. We, we have not, as you pointed out, we've not sold a single barrel. We have traded those barrels. We have released a barrel now because we have short-term interruptions in flows.

And to date, on average, we're getting back 1.28 barrels for every barrel we release. So ultimately we will release 172 million barrels and we will get well over 200 million barrels million barrels of oil back that will start coming back early next year. So we'll end out with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve more full than we started this conflict while still mitigating the price impacts of this conflict and the flow and mitigating the interruption in the flow of oil. Well, that's a great exchange rate. You'd almost think that our president was used to being in business, wouldn't you?

He's doing a great job. I want to jump over to our Congress District building maritime sector things here on the Gulf Coast. In March, President Trump issued a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act. That's been a bit controversial given the Jones Act impact on domestic industries. Do you have an update on the economic effects these waivers have had?

So it has been used enormously. I think close to 100 ships already have used that Jones Act waiver. And the main route that is used is that, that allows your region, the Gulf Coast, where most of American refined products are produced to deliver those, you know, to New England, to California, and to West Coast that are not covered well by pipelines. California's just stood in the way of energy infrastructure. Democrats have decided to make energy of all kinds expensive in California.

And President Trump has thought that's deeply unfair. And we need to do everything we can to lower the price of energy for all 340 Americans. Whatever state they live in. And so a lot of products from your district have been able to transit more cheaply from the Gulf Coast to California. Where does California get over 60% of its oil from?

From the Persian Gulf, from South America, from across the Pacific Ocean. They get refined gasoline from Asian nations that comes on cargoes all the way across the Pacific Ocean. They call that green. I don't see anything green about that. But now they're getting those products from the states of Texas and Louisiana, American sources, cleaner and lower cost.

Well, we appreciate that, but we want to make sure that our great maritime industry, we get the Jones Act back in place quickly as we can. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you. Amen. Gentlemen, now I'd like to recognize the gentlewoman from Oregon, Ms. Bonamici.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Secretary Wright, too many Oregonians and Americans are struggling to pay their energy bills., and your department is making it worse. Gas in Oregon is more than $5 a gallon, diesel is nearly $6, and last fall you terminated 19 awards in Oregon on political grounds, depriving the state of nearly $405 million to modernize our strained grid, to provide rural workforce training, and upgrade transmission planning. You've gutted the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub, which would have brought thousands of jobs to Oregon, Washington, and Montana, and hundreds of other projects remain in limbo. You said just weeks ago that prices are going to be high and maybe even rising.

Well, American people are already struggling to afford rising costs, and you should care as much about them as you do about your fossil fuel friends. You've demonized wind and solar, the same sources that, paired with Oregon's baseload hydropower, keep Oregonians' residential electricity rates about 25% below the national average, and instead support aging coal and gas plants that actually drive up costs and continue to spew carbon pollution. This budget is a gift to fossil fuel corporations at the expense of working families and their health. And Secretary Wright, Congress created OCED, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, because the department had a poor track record of managing large-scale demonstration projects. The GAO found that OCED lost 85% of its staff last year, including all independent assessment staff.

And I'll note that OCED previously managed the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub. So how many people currently work in OCED and what projects do they oversee? So the OCED team is now dispersed in the various technical departments that are relevant to the projects they're overseeing. They're overseeing all of the existing projects and whatever new projects come into that. So there, you're, what you're saying is that there's no staff at OCED?

No, I said they're overseeing all the projects. There's several dozen people working for OCED in overseeing those projects. How many? Several dozen? Yes.

Okay. And GAO also reported that it is unclear— this is a quote— it is unclear how DOE plans to meet its statutory requirements to manage projects. And you agreed that the department would develop a plan to do so by March. Well, this is June, and we haven't seen that plan yet. So what specific actions has the department taken to meet the statutory requirements for large-scale projects that Congress has established in law?

We, we are managing all of those projects. The, the Department of Energy may have less employees now than it did 18 months ago, but the professionalism and the work output of it is dramatically, dramatically increased. Please come over and visit or engage with us in a dialogue about any specific projects. Did you submit any sort of plan for how you would manage these projects? Have you given that to Congress?

Have you released a plan showing how you were going to manage these projects?

I'd have to ask my staff, staff behind me. We have been incredibly transparent in anyone who calls me from the House, from the Senate, from anywhere, gets a return phone call and a dialogue about whatever they want to talk about. We will follow up on that. Well, I just want to note that the budget, as I read it, It looks like a blueprint to prop up fossil fuel corporations that pollute and that drive up prices. It seems like it's a retreat from American innovation and clean, cheap, renewable energy.

It ignores the unaffordable costs that Americans already face to fill up at the pump, to heat their homes, and to keep the lights on. And I know you were talking a lot about LNG. Oregonians don't want LNG. They've refused to, to permit two large LNG plants for reasons that they don't want to contribute to the fossil fuel economy. We had a lot of concerns about locating those plants on the coast where there's a Cascadia subduction zone and risk of tsunami.

So we've rejected LNG in Oregon. In the meantime, China is making massive investments in wind and solar. They're selling more EVs than the rest of the world. So this budget isn't about American dominance. It's about ignoring science, ceding leadership to China, in contributing rather than stopping climate change.

Americans deserve better. And I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Gentlewoman yields. I'd like to recognize Mr. Webster from Florida. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Appreciate it. Secretary Wright, the president prioritized the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, EDF, and in his budget request. And you know that office provides access to debt capital. For high-impact, large-scale infrastructure projects in the United States. If the DOE had an option to use a new finance tool, the creation of a federal infrastructure finance corporation that is totally funded by local— by private funding, not local, not state, not federal monies, to supplement existing funding tools to address infrastructure needs, would this new approach, in your opinion, help the EDF address our infrastructure needs?

So addressing infrastructure needs is central to our office. That's what EDF focuses on right now. With the relatively small credit subsidy we have compared to lending capacity, it means we lend almost entirely to investment-grade, low-risk borrowers. And we'd love to work with you to find ways to make that more effective. But we are indeed spending that money to allow companies to build large-scale, long-lasting infrastructure to deliver lower-cost energy to Americans across the state.

I'd love at some point in time a chance to respond to our Oregon representative who made so many false assertions that hopefully at a future date, maybe with another congressman, I'll get to engage on that dialogue. Right. But, but I appreciate your interest. On how can we use— and you're right, private capital is the key. Private capital is the key.

All of the lending we're doing is paired with lots of private capital. And one of the areas we're lending into, for example, is these new nuclear reactors. Once a few are built, they will be funded entirely with private capital going forward. We're just getting that ball rolling. And again, with creditworthy investment-grade borrowers.

So that we don't put the American taxpayer at risk as the previous administration rushed out $85 billion in the 76 days after they lost the election and before inauguration. Fortunately, we could prevent most of that money from going out the door because a lot of that money never would have come back into the door. So how will permitting and regulatory reform help with the All of Above energy strategy? It is a big issue. It is a big issue.

It's just so easy to stop something from being built in the United States. And it's hard to build big things in the United States. We didn't get this beautiful, fabulous nation without bold people building big things— our highway systems, our bridges, our cities. Today, it's become just far too hard to do that. I am passionately committed to the issue of permitting reform.

Have been working with your colleagues on that as well. If we can ensconce in law some of the common sense that we've brought with this administration so that people can build whatever it is they want to build, if they go through a reasonable permitting process in a reasonable timeframe and they grant permits, they can build their projects. Awesome. Okay, the Department of Energy's National Laboratories generate an enormous volumes of engineering modeling simulation scientific data, all of that. What steps is DOE taking to ensure researchers can collaborate across laboratories, agencies, security domains, and contractors without requiring all the data to be centralized into one single repository, which creates cybersecurity risk?

A great question. Great question. We're calling it the American Scientific Cloud. So we're connecting and putting in an accessible format all the datasets, you know, from this particle accelerator and from this light source to gather the world's largest and most exquisite scientific dataset. Because that AI doesn't have its— it doesn't make up its things on itself.

It just learns from existing data. So we are creating and ability to access all these datasets. They're not all in one location, but we're making a secure cloud that allows researchers in our national labs, in our universities, and our partners to access these just incredible datasets that will allow AI to rapidly increase the rate of scientific progress. We will have breathtaking energy and medical breakthroughs in the next, in the next year or two. I could not be more excited.

Okay, well, I got one more question, but I'll submit it to the other process. Yield back. Gentleman yields. And now I'd like to represent— excuse me, recognize Representative Ross from North Carolina for 5 minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good morning.

Thank you, Chairman Babin and Ranking Member Lofgren, for convening this very important hearing. And thank you, Secretary Wright, for being so kind to finally appear before this committee today to talk about the president's budget request for the Department of Energy. We saw Secretary Granholm many times before this committee. I'd like to discuss the so-called independent portfolio review process, which allegedly reviewed more than 2,200 projects in your department. One of those projects, uh, which is in my home state of North Carolina, appeared on a leaked list of projects slated for cancellation.

This award was helping Duke University study the potential impacts of offshore wind farms and would help us develop those projects in a safe and effective way. The status remains unresolved, in case you were wondering. And in October, right after you canceled hundreds of clean energy projects in blue states, you told the press that this project was being conducted by a team of 7 or 8 people. Your staff since admitted to this committee and to the committee staff that the portfolio review process was run entirely, entirely by political appointees who approached the review with a subjective, inconsistent analysis for each project. This is a stunning departure from the department's longstanding merit-based review process by career experts under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and it is fundamentally unscientific.

Despite repeated requests for documentation on these decisions, none, none has been provided. Not to the committee, not to the GAO, and most importantly, not to the American people whose taxpayer funds this— taxpayer money funds these projects. The GEO— GAO recently reported that they couldn't assess the portfolio review process for canceled projects that had been stewarded by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations because your department had not provided them with any documentation or analysis to support those decisions. Elevating political appointees over merit-based review sends a clear warning system. Clear signal: if you want to do business with the federal government, you need to be friendly with the Trump administration.

We've seen this process play out repeatedly, from this administration's shady offshore wind deals to ideological purges of clean energy projects. North Carolina is a purple state. We have many Republicans in Congress and in our legislature who have actively supported clean energy. It is part of our economy. It is where we have seen job growth even during a recession.

This should not be a partisan issue, and it shouldn't be ideological. The people involved in these decisions should be held accountable. We should know who they are, and the American people deserve an explanation. So could you tell us the names of the people who did the portfolio review? I will not— I would not list the names of the people right now.

The last thing we need is more inaccurate. Would you provide those names to the chair and the ranking member of this committee? They have oversight over your department. You are not fully in charge. We're very happy to walk through what we did.

And if you'd had any real interest, pick up the phone and call me. I would walk you through all that. You are—. I will get your— I will get your cell phone number. So you are attacking me.

It is— oh, and you are just obfuscating the situation for your own political benefit. Clean energy Clean energy is an entire sector that has benefited this country. It has weaned us off of fossil fuel and it has created jobs. This administration has declared war on clean— It is my time. You only speak when I ask you a question.

It has declared war on clean energy. It has cost jobs. It is risking our environment. I have not I have not taken any objection to making sure we do things more efficiently. I want to do that.

I've practiced energy law and represented almost every sector. We cannot just say one way of doing it is the right way. And I yield back. Gentlewoman's time's expired. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. Obernolte.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Secretary Wright, nice to see you again. Nice to see you. Appreciated your testimony and particularly appreciated your emphasis on the Genesis mission. You and I have had several conversations about this.

As chairman of the House AI Task Force in the last Congress and as chairman of the House Fusion Energy Caucus in this Congress, I am particularly interested in those parts of the Genesis mission. I find it tremendously exciting that the DOE is helping to lead that effort. We last month sent a letter to you expressing our support for the Genesis mission and asking some specific questions about what the administration's priorities were. Undersecretary Gill was kind enough to respond to that letter last week on your behalf, but we have a couple of questions that remain that I wanted to get your feedback on. First of all, we in that letter called for a dedicated Genesis title in legislation this year that fully funds the Genesis mission.

And we also opined that it would be useful to have a demonstration phase for the Fusion Milestone Program. Can you tell me what the DOE stance is on those two issues? Ah, yes, look, fusion energy is, is certainly a passion, as science in general, that you, that you and I share. We have We're— I don't know if you— you probably got an advanced copy of what we've got, our roadmap on fusion. And what we're trying to do is leverage both the budget we have from the government end together with private capital about how do we— what are the basic, you know, neutron survivability?

What are the basic issues that are not handled well in the commercial space to focus on at our department research? And then how do we engage as productively as possible with private efforts in it? I'm sorry, give me a little more color again on exactly what you want me to address. So how about talking about fusion? How do you feel about a demonstration phase for the fusion milestone program?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We've got to figure out what the— yeah, what the right— and of course, there are different approaches to fusion, but I like that idea. Yeah, well, I'm very excited that we're moving from investing in the basic science, which the DOE has done in fusion for decades now, into commercialization. So your budget request has a little over 3/4 of a billion dollars, $755 million for fusion.

Can you give us a breakdown of how much of that is focused on commercialization and how much remains focused on the basic science? Um, I don't, I don't have those numbers in front of you, but my bet is that more than half of that is probably still on the basic science, but again, in partnership with, with commercial companies of what are the issues that are ultimately going to be those last barriers for them to cross to do it. But, uh, but we are, uh, working with multiple commercial companies as well, and obviously with time that budget will go more and more to partnership funding with commercial businesses. Right. Well, I think it's tremendously exciting that we're seeing such huge private investment in fusion commercialization.

I mean, this is the virtuous cycle that happens when we do our jobs in investing in federal research into basic science, and then when private industry and private capital can see, you know, a pathway to actually commercializing things and turning a profit is when that investment starts. And the fact that we had over a billion dollars of private capital invested in commercialization last year, I think, is an indication that this is a process that works. Talking about the goals of the Genesis Mission, one of the stated goals in the executive order was to double the productivity of American research by giving people access to these high-quality datasets and leveraging artificial intelligence. That is an audacious goal, and I welcome it. I think it's great that we're thinking in those terms, but the engineer in me can't help but think, like, how are we going to measure that?

Like, how do we have a measurement, a metric for research productivity? You know, how are we going to figure out what progress we're making towards that goal? It is a challenge, but we're going to, you know, it's going to be specific. You know, we're trying to develop this drug to address this issue. It used to take 3 years with this method, but we've got a methodology that of course will have to be much more than twice as fast because we're not going to have new tools or new advancements to every aspect of scientific productivity.

But I think it's a— I think it's a reasonable estimate of what could be achievable. And it means we— the United States spends $1 trillion a year on basic research. What we're hoping is if we can get the equivalent of $2 trillion a year of research advancement with spending only $1 trillion. We can drive innovation much faster. I appreciate your testimony.

I see my time's expired. Let's keep this conversation going. Thank you, Representative. Appreciate your support in these areas. I yield back.

Gentleman's time's expired. I'd like to recognize Representative Foushee— excuse me, Salinas from Oregon. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our ranking member. And thank you, Secretary Wright, for being here today.

President Trump made a series of promises to bring down costs when he was running for president. And I want to review and see if he kept those promises. So let's start with gas prices. The average cost of gas on the day President Trump took office, not under Biden, but the day he took office, was around $3 a gallon. On the campaign trail, he said he would bring the price of gas to under $2 a gallon.

What is the price of gasoline today? It's different in all different districts and in all different—. In the US, an average—. The average price of gasoline in the US today is about $4.15. That's right.

It's up over 33% or a dollar a gallon. That is well over the $3 per gallon. It's gone way up, not down. So what's happened since President Trump took office on electricity? Have electricity rates been cut in half as he promised, or have those gone up?

Electricity grids are long-term processes, and the Biden administration would not allow the construction of any reliable economic energy sources. So of course, all the new kit that's coming on the electricity electricity grid. Almost all that's coming on today is still what was approved under the Biden administration. And yes, it's continued its upward progress in electricity, but that will be reversed. Okay.

Reclaiming my time. You work for the Trump administration. I asked a simple question. The answer is that electricity prices have gone up 10% under President Trump and much more than the rate of inflation and certainly more than my constituents, my farmers, my hardworking Oregonians can afford right now. So let's get this straight.

President Trump said he would bring down the price of gas to under $2 a gallon and would cut our energy bills in half. This has not happened. And not only has he broken promises, gas and electricity prices have soared under his leadership. And I want to look at why. Did you warn President Trump that going to war with Iran would drive up gas prices for American families?

The Trump— I have lots of dialogues with President Trump, which are presidential privilege, but the administration was well aware of the energy price impacts of this war would cause. They knew there would be a cost for it. But are you comfortable with this regime in Iran with nuclear weapons? Okay. I do not want Iran to have— I'm guessing not.

Okay. We're claiming my time. I do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Great. So you knew ahead of time that this would cost American families, and President Trump still went to war and has not achieved any kind of, of being able to get his arms around the nuclear, nuclear weapons from Iran.

Many experts have basically said— the International Atomic Energy Agency has said we have not actually satisfied that. And at the same time, the Strait of Hormuz that President Trump can also not get his arms around is being constricted and oil prices are going up. That is the case right now. The fundamental problem here is that Trump energy policies are completely backwards. And if we want affordable energy, we need to invest in clean energy and not be going into senseless wars.

You have testified before several committees that states with renewable portfolio standards have electricity prices that are 50% higher than the national average. Is this true? That is true. All right. It is not true.

My state of Oregon alone has strong renewable energy requirements and lower than average electricity prices. And we aren't alone. Many other states have similar requirements to Oregon and have electricity prices below the national average, including Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, and Washington. We know— Legacy hydro states. There's a reason for that.

It's not because of your wind and solar. And the 50% is true. It's an average. You can always find exceptions. Reclaiming my time.

Just trying to stay with accuracy here. We know what what happens when we rely on fossil fuels and exclude renewables. Gas prices are up because of Trump's war of choice in Iran, and for the sake of our pocketbooks, our environment, and the jobs and the economy of the future, we need to invest in low-cost, diverse sources of renewable energy. Instead, you are doing the exact opposite right now and driving up costs. President Trump has broken his promises.

You are promoting backward policies and my constituents, my farmers, my families, my workers are suffering for this. I would love to work with you to get us back on track, and I yield back. Gentlelady yields back. I'd like to recognize Representative Self from the great state of Texas. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, I think we need some historic perspective in this conversation today. Not only are— does California cause gas prices to be higher in other states because of their demands, I want to go through a litany of what you inherited. I want to specifically comment on— I am basically answering the merit-based by experts comment that you heard earlier today. The DOE— this is the Biden era. This is the DOE Loan Programs Office conflict of interest.

$385 Billion in green energy loan authority Your own— the DOE IG themselves found that they had conflicts of interest in $385 billion of loan.

We also had the DOE IG found $1 billion in potential savings and recoveries in programs that had fraud, waste, and abuse risk. Extreme fraud-based and abuse risk. The Clean Energy Demonstrations Office had $27 billion that they appropriated, and they hadn't built the oversight necessary for it. That tells you that we're not looking at merit-based by experts execution. Then we had the Industrial Demonstrations Program internal controls failure at only $5.8 billion.

Again, they didn't have the environmental controls ready to control the program. And then probably my favorite— well, no, I've got one more. The Microvast grant reversal, $200 million to a Chinese-based company. Thankfully, we caught that and reversed that. Then we had the Strategium Petroleum Reserve sale to a— you guessed it— a Chinese-based company.

Chinese-based company. I say it again, we sold our Strategic Petroleum Base Reserve to a Chinese-based company. Which, by the way, took our SPR down to its lowest level in, in years. And then my favorite, 12 days, 12 days before Biden left office. They tried to rush $23 billion out the door for Green New Scam grants.

So with that historic perspective, Mr. Secretary, I'll change. I'll just let you— in fact, why don't you comment on that? Because that's what you inherited. That's the environment you inherited. Thank you, Congressman Self.

When we came in, yeah, $85 billion had been committed from the Loan Program Office from the Biden administration losing the election and President Trump's inauguration, $85 billion more than had been committed by that office in its 20-year history. So that was the responsible professional stuff I keep hearing about. It was nothing, nothing of the sort. And let me comment, if I can quickly, on the energy stuff I keep hearing, you know, that we're narrowly focused on fossil fuels. Wind, solar, and batteries are, are just under 3.5% of American energy.

3.5%. The Biden administration spent all of their money focused on this 3.5%. You know, they moved it from 2.75% to a little over 3%. They ignored where we get 97% of American energy. In fact, the expenditures out of the DOE now are still disproportionately as a percent of the energy they produce focused on solar than they are on the other energy sources that actually run our country.

Just, we're focused on research and progress and not sort of inefficient corporate subsidies, giving money so people can make something to make energy more expensive. So the claims of unprofessional of us, narrowly focused on fossil fuels, are just false. Just false.. And so thank you for bringing some facts and some truth into the dialogue. Uh, thank you for that, Mr. Secretary.

And I will close with, I chair the Europe Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs. It's vitally important we have LNG to ship to Europe so that we can wean them off of Russian energy. It is a strategic need of the US. If you have any comments, uh, please, so you have 20 seconds. Fastest growing American export there is is liquefied natural gas.

You know, this is a giant global primary. And for the Democrats who are theory concerned about climate change. It's the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions reductions of any— it's more than half of the United States' entire emissions reduction. It's also the largest global source of emissions reductions. And I could have— and I could have mentioned the Biden era pause on LNG exports.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Gentleman yields back. Being from the great state of Texas was illegal to export LNG. Up until President Trump. Now, I'd like to recognize the gentlewoman from North Carolina, Ms. Fooshee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member, for holding this bipartisan committee hearing today. And thank you also, Secretary Wright, for your testimony and for appearing before us this morning. It is long overdue. I want to ask you some questions about the Climate Working Group and its July 2025 report. Entitled "A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate." When did you or your staff first notify EPA that you had formed the Climate Working Group?

You know, I raised this idea early on in the administration sort of widely, so EPA would have known about it and other potentially interested parties in it. To me, it's very important to have a real serious dialogue about climate change based on facts and data. And I try— and I'm very passionate about having that. I want to have public events and do much more on this. Unfortunately, environmental groups and so many others don't want to actually have that dialogue.

So we've had crazy lawsuits, legal entanglements, to a very professional report that I— if you haven't read it, I highly recommend reading it. And I'd love to sit and talk with you about it afterwards. Thank you for that. And how did you balance balance EPA's desire to obtain the Climate Working Group report as quickly as possible with your own priorities as Secretary of Energy? And how did you ensure that both EPA and DOE understood that balance?

Uh, well, I mean, my thing is, for a scientific paper, I reached out to authors. We told them nothing about what to write. I exercised no editorial control whatsoever about about it, but the goal was to get a dialogue going as quickly as possible. So in the publication process, you write a draft, you put your thoughts and organize your ideas down, and you release a draft, and then you open it up for, for comment, and then you have an iterative process before you issue a final report. A very open, very transparent dialogue around the facts around climate change.

And actually, I would say it's been quite successful in that— enormous amount of comments, on that report, enormous amount of dialogue, but not in the— not in as public of a frame as I'd like. In April 2025, did you personally discuss the deadline for the Climate Working Group's report with EPA Administrator Zeldin? And if so, did Administrator Zeldin tell you why he wanted the report to be transmitted to EPA? I don't remember. It's certainly possible.

My goal when I called the authors was, how quick can we do it? You know, of course I wanted wanted it as quick as possible, they wanted to make sure they had enough time. We struck a balance of what, what could get a credible, serious, uh, relatively comprehensive report out there. Let me ask you this: were you aware that your staff was providing updates to EPA staff about the progress of the Climate Working Group, and did you designate a staff lead for coordinating it with EPA?

Uh, I don't know if coordinating with EPA, but we had a lead who was coordinating with the authors of the report and probably with any other interested parties. So yeah, would we have been open and communicating about that? I suspect we would have been, sure. Let me just say, I want to tell you directly that the Trump administration's approach to policymaking has been a disaster for the people in my district, North Carolina's 4th. It was bad enough when Secretary Lucknick and the Commerce Department arbitrarily terminated a $285 million contract for the SMARTUSA Institute in Durham, even though SMARTUSA had met all of its performance targets so that the money could be redirected to some kind of CHIPS slush fund.

And I will say to you that my folks say to me that you don't pick up the phone when awards have been canceled. But it doesn't stop there. You have also failed miserably, Mr. Secretary, to protect my constituents from rising energy costs due to data centers. And because of this president's illegal war with Iran, gas is now, as we've heard continuously in this hearing, over $4 a gallon in my district. The White House announced its so-called ratepayer protection pledge with a whole lot of fanfare back in March.

It sounded good, but guess what? Duke Energy is proposing to raise utility bills in North Carolina up to 18% over the next 2 years, and a lot of that is because of new data centers. 3 Of the 4 counties in my district have passed data center moratoriums, but this is not just a local problem. It's a national problem. And you have dropped the ball when it comes to data centers.

Why should the people of North Carolina's 4th District believe that this administration has a plan to protect them from data center energy costs when your first plan has failed so miserably? And with that, Mr. Chair, I yield back. Gentlewoman's time's expired. I'd like to recognize the gentleman, Dr. McCormick from Georgia.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate you and appreciate you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today on this very important topic. Uh, it's interesting, I was just listening to my colleague talk about, uh, global climate change, and I've heard about this, uh, with data centers too and the price of energy and all this. And what's funny, she echoes China's talking points directly.

Uh, this is the thing that we know for a fact that China is investing amazing amounts of money into America to make sure that our youth and our politicians believe that we should not be producing data centers, we should not be doing anything other than renewable energy, that we should be falling behind China in this race to basically lead the world into the next generation of intelligence and energy. Cheap, affordable energy has been the mainstay of an economy in America. What you're doing to build our nuclear facilities, what you're doing to streamline energy production to make it affordable for Americans. The war aside, is going to be the future of America. What's funny, she's like, ah gosh, $285 million for a program that basically buys into what China has said is global climate change while they produce the coal, while they pollute the earth, while they say you need to be part of the Paris Accords so you can basically be hamstrung and pay for us doing the wrong thing.

It's so ironic. My constituent on the— sorry, my colleague on the other side of the aisle is basically buying into the China propaganda. And that's what drives me crazy right now. Would you agree that everything we can do to produce energy— and by the way, we already know that data centers are going to be offset by those people who produce that energy— sorry, that consume that energy and that water. We know it's going to offset it.

Would you agree that we basically could produce energy cheaply effectively without polluting the Earth and do it as leaders in the economy of the entire world as Americans? Absolutely. 100%. Pretty simple. I think we have so many different things outside the box thinking.

We're not going to power our data centers with solar panels. If we don't produce data centers, we will fall behind in every major category of information systems. It will hamstring our economy, hamstring Americans. We won't be able to solve all the problems, including cancer. And all kinds of other things that will afflict Americans into the future.

This is a generational time of choosing. One of the things that I came up with when I was in the armed services— I was a Navy guy on Navy vessels, I was also a Marine on nuclear-powered vessels— when we retired those, those, those ships, one of the things I was like, we have a nuclear modular reactor which we've never had an accident with, which is it's going to be retired, you have to strip it out of the ship and then scuttle the ship or put it in mothballs. I've always said, why don't we just plug it into the grid? That's a considerable amount of, of energy. And by the way, you have a built-in defense structure, security system, one way in, contain, double hold.

I think it's a great idea. What are we doing to do something like that? Now, it is a great idea, and, and the performance of those reactors that power our submarines and aircraft carriers— I agree views, phenomenal. Hyman Rickover, the leader of the development of that effort, true outstanding innovator, great American. And so yes, they are there, they are real.

Obviously for our grid or whatever, we need much more scale than that. But yes, they are viable reactors. Because of the materials in them, there is concern about— they need to stay in that submarine or be in some other secure location. But I think that's a very creative idea, and of course we could do it. I'd love to see that instituted as policy, that we can actually take our retired nuclear vessels and plug them into the grid, because I think it's a built-in energy source, takes very little modification, very little money, and it's built-in security.

I think it's something to look into, uh, for your department. Uh, another thing, we obviously know that China is trying to corner the market on alloys, uh, on whether it be lithium, cobalt, other rare earth minerals, but we have alternative sources and we have resources right here in America that we've been hamstrung to get to, which could put us at a tremendous disadvantage. I was down at Georgia Tech recently looking at their development of battery elements that they use, and they have other alternative. What are we doing to make sure that we secure our future and that we're not hamstrung by the fact that China is trying to corner the market in rare earth alloys? So we, you know, we started what— in part of our reorg of the DOE, we created the Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Department.

That's a major department at our thing. So we are doing— we are working with local mines about extracting rare earth elements and other critical minerals in the United States. We're working with people who are processing them into usable forms, people that are manufacturing them into the final systems, whether they're magnets or, you know, munitions that take— that need antimony, which we're going to reorg start mining again in the United States as well. So all in on that effort. You are so right, China strategically took over a number of industries that are not giant in size, but they're critical to all the things we make.

And they ran other people out of business for a strategic reason to control that and have us dependent on them. And we are— this Trump administration is all in to break that dependence. A lot of these are technologies that were developed here, and then they just We just took them over there and ruined the economics of them. But we are reversing that. I'm glad you're passionate on that.

Yeah, I'm glad we're getting back to science and not just the religion of global climate change, which actually has absolutely been debunked even by scientists who are Democrats. I'm excited about the future. As long as you're at the helm, keep doing great things. Thanks. Gentlemen's time has expired.

I'd like to recognize Representative Amo from Rhode Island. Thank you, Chair Babin, for holding today's hearing. And thank you, Secretary Rice. Mr. Wright, for testifying. In August 2024, Donald Trump made a promise.

He said, quote, I will rapidly drive down prices and we will make America affordable again. We're going to get your energy prices down by 50%. Secretary Wright, has Donald Trump fulfilled his promise? He sets ambitious targets and he is all in on driving in that direction. And the number of structural changes he's made in how we view energy and what we're doing will absolutely over time deliver that goal.

Okay, so my answer is no. Not yet. And you know, well, you can waffle all you want, but the American people know the truth. They can feel it in their wallet every time they fill up at the gas pump, every time their energy bills come in the mail. Look, Rhode Islanders, the people I work for, have spent an additional $288 on heating oil and an extra $350 at the gas pump since Trump launched his war of choice with Iran..

And I know this might sound strange to someone who has made tens of millions of dollars in oil and gas, but my constituents cannot afford $638 of a Trump surcharge to heat their homes and to drive their cars. So, Secretary Wright, when Trump made his hollow promise to make America affordable again, was he referring to a specific group of Americans or all Americans? All Americans. Well, that's good to hear. That's something that we should agree on and should be be a matter of practice, uh, because no matter how people voted, your job is to lower costs for everyone.

Unfortunately, your actions tell a different story, as is the case with Trump and folks like you who answer to him. In October, you canceled more than 300 projects in so-called blue states, including $14 million for 3 grants in Rhode Island. You claim these decisions were not politically motivated. You said the cancellations were part of an ongoing process and that more cancellations would be announced later in the But the announcement never came. And by your own admission, the review process is done.

So now we're left with troubling statistics. Of the 2,200 projects you say you reviewed, 95% of projects in Republican-leaning states were retained, while 95% of the projects in Democratic-leaning states that you terminated in October remain canceled. That doesn't sound unbiased to me. 7 Awardees sued DOE over their partisan award terminations, and in the litigation, you said, quote, quote, a primary reason for the selection of which DOE grant termination decisions were included in the October 2025 notice tranche was whether the grantee was located in a blue state. That is a direct quote.

I ask unanimous consent to enter this document into the record.

So ordered. The court rightfully found that you violated the Constitution. The only meaningful difference between the 7 projects that won in court and the hundreds of others you terminated is that those plaintiffs So, Secretary Wright, my question is simple. When will you restore the funding for all the projects that were wrongfully terminated? So, number one, you even read the document or misinterpreted the document.

We did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process. Hands down. Explain 95%, Secretary. Did not. You also were creative.

You talked about two different 95%. We did not involve politics in the decision-making. What the— what about the outcome? The court ruling you read was a choice of announcements of some of the awards. The choice of the announcements not made by our department.

No decisions, no decisions were made on politics. I keep hearing that charge. So it's bullshit. We're going to say it a million times. Mr. Secretary, not true.

I've got a point of parliamentary procedure.

What are we permitting language like that from witnesses? Watch your language there, Mr. Secretary. But let's keep this— we'll do, sir. Mr. Secretary, here's the problem with your administration. You're willing to huff and puff when it comes to showing up in front of Congress when your audience of one is paying attention.

But the fact of the matter is, my constituents and the constituents of people across this Congress are struggling because of your decisions. And yet you want to use language like that. Act out of hand, behave poorly so you can prove that you have loyalty to the president. That's not how this works. Do your job.

Do your job and work to lower costs for the American people. Instead, you want to pick at statistics instead of working for people in every single state, whether it's a blue state or a red state. So my question for you, as my time is rapidly expiring: when will you restore these grants? Grants. We work every day for— we've gone overboard for New England, for California, for blue states.

That's not an answer. I'm reclaiming my time. That's not an answer. Do you believe the federal grant decision should be based in any way on how a state's voters cast their ballots in a presidential election? They shouldn't, and they weren't.

Mr. Secretary, this hearing started with Trump's promise to lower energy costs. We've got to end this nonsense. The gentlelady from South Carolina, Ms. Biggs.

Thank you, Chairman Babin, for holding this hearing today with the Department of Energy. And I would like to thank you, Secretary Wright, for coming to Capitol Hill today to testify. I appreciate your efforts and the steps that you've taken to support the Trump administration to ensure American energy dominance. Contrary to my colleagues on the other side My constituents in South Carolina, they're very grateful for your efforts and they want to rid the waste, the fraud and abuse, and they want real, true, meaningful policy to lead America forward. And I can tell you from our veterans and our military members, they understand exactly what's going on and the importance, because if we don't rid the possibility of the nuclear weapon In Iran, nothing else matters.

But moving on, I feel like it's an exciting time in the energy landscape right now. American energy independence, it has been restored while scientific advancement has increased the reliability, safety, and efficiency of a new generation. Our national labs play a critical role in innovating these technologies that will propel from energy independence into energy dominance. These 17 labs, the research, they cover a broad range of scientific endeavors that push the boundaries of American research. South Carolina is very proud to host one of these labs, the Savannah River National Lab, at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina.

Their expertise in nuclear waste, the tritium fuel cycle, and national security provides our state a wealth of expertise that make them— make them invaluable. They are one of the largest nuclear workforces in the United States. I also serve on Homeland Security, so that's an important aspect. Secretary Wright, can you tell us the importance of the Savannah River site to the energy security and national security of the United States. Savannah River National Lab, an absolute gem.

The humans there, the research and work that's been done there, the technologies there, and the land and resources for the future of our nuclear, uh, renaissance. All the ingredients, all of the ingredients are in Savannah National Lab. Most of its work of course, was in fission energy, which is what we're starting a renaissance right now. But it leads the nation in addition in tritium production, the essential fuel for fusion as well. So yeah, Savannah River National Labs is— and reprocessing of fuels.

So many of the things that we did 50 years ago, we stopped doing, but we need to do for our renaissance in fission and fusion. Those technologies are pioneered, and many of them are still practiced and operating at Savannah River National Lab. So we would have a slower progress in getting an American nuclear renaissance going if not for Savannah River National Labs. My only disappointment with Savannah River National Labs is that fantastic director there, Johnny Green, and I are both Denver Nuggets fans, and we thought we were going to the championship this year. And we're disappointed in that.

But Johnny and I are aligned in what goes on in that labs and the role it can play, not just in the laboratory, but in the commercial evolution and growth again of nuclear power. Thank you. Can you tell me how Congress can support the Department of Energy to secure American energy dominance for our children and for our grandchildren? Well, one thing that was brought up earlier too is permitting reform. We'd love to get a permitting reform bill because to build new energy production plants, to build new manufacturing plants, to build big things in America.

We've made it very hard these last 20 or 30 years. We've made it very hard to build big things in America. We need to be able to build big things in America today. And continued support for the nuclear renaissance. A lot of Trump administration has driven enormous progress there.

I don't— my opening statement, in June 4th, we had the first non-light water reactor go critical the first reactor in over 40 years in the United States. We'll probably have 2 more of those before July 4th. So nuclear is gonna move forward. And I think to, to keep your attitude, your view that more energy is a positive, and that's, that's technologies with 80 years of safe record, we should believe in those technologies and we should lean in on them. Support for the national lab, support for the Genesis mission that's gonna allow us to drive nuclear costs down and build places create plants faster and cheaper.

Continue doing what you're doing. It's so helpful, and it will matter for all Americans, for our energy future. Thank you so much, and I yield back. Thank you. The woman yields.

I'd like to recognize Representative McBride-Villewerd. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to you and Ranking Member Lofgren for holding this hearing. And thank you, Mr. Secretary, for joining us. In the last few months, President Trump has given the world a master class on what energy security looks like. President Trump's war on Iran has shown us that energy security cannot mean dependence on a single fuel source.

It cannot mean dependence on one supply chain. And it cannot mean dependence on one region of the world. It seems every other country is learning that lesson except for us. In January, at the World Economic Forum, President Trump told the world that he hasn't, quote, been able to find any wind farms in China. China and said China sells wind turbines to, quote, the stupid people that buy them, but they don't use them themselves.

Secretary Wright, have you or anyone in your department been able to find any wind turbines in China? We haven't looked. You haven't looked. Well, it seems like the president apparently has explored all 3.6 million square miles of China and apparently declared at Davos that China isn't using any wind turbines. As I mentioned, the president said that stupid people buy them.

You've articulated increasing the energy supply here in the United States and our energy exports. I assume that includes wind from your perspective. Yes? I'm for all energy sources that are affordable, reliable, and secure. To me, it's just about math.

I don't have a technology I love and a technology I hate. It's just about the math. So does that include wind? Its contribution to date so far has, has not been so good. But are there going to be areas or applications where wind makes sense?

I suspect there are. We just want to get rid of the subsidies and get rid of the tilted playing field. But energy, energy sources that can compete economically and can better human lives, I'm for all of those. So, so I'll take that as you believe that wind should be part of our portfolio. Again, it's about that we've only seen wind where it was subsidized and it was mandated.

So we We've forced a lot, a lot of wind power to be built in the United States. Its net impact has been upward on electricity prices because it's not dispatchable. It's just when you get a cold front that sits there, the wind doesn't blow. If you're not there at peak demand, you don't matter to our electricity grid. So on that note then, do you believe that the United States should not be playing in the global renewable marketplace when it comes to wind then?

China is. Other countries seem to be buying. Whether you think or the president thinks those countries are stupid, they're buying from China. Do you think we should be selling wind turbines to other countries too, producing them here and selling them to other countries? I'm, I'm for growing American industry and businesses, but you, you're talking a lot about wind.

Let's just give the numbers real quick. Wind is 1.5% of global energy. And if you look at the nations that have been big in wind, they lead the world in the most expensive electricity prices, which is all the nations of Northwest Europe. They're the wind powerhouses. They have the most expensive electricity on the planet.

Well, the president himself complained about other countries buying wind from, from China. He called them stupid, but he admitted they are buying wind from China. So do you think we should cede this marketplace to China? I don't believe we should cede any marketplaces to China. Okay.

Well, unfortunately, your actions, the actions of this administration are undermining our capacity to compete with China in this marketplace. Place. You've not only cut hundreds of clean energy projects, you've also eliminated the very incentives that help to spur this industry here in the United States that would allow us to compete with China. So why are you letting China win in this global economic battle? She said remove the incentive.

So 34 years of subsidy for wind weren't enough to get an infant industry off its feet and going? The 34 years, to me, if you can't compete without subsidies after 34 years, your industry doesn't work. Let's be clear. You're not opposed to subsidies for energy producers. You're just opposed to subsidies for renewable energy producers because the fossil fuel industry gets a ton of money from our government.

It does not. Please tell me what those subsidies are. I'm not aware of them. They are getting a ton of investments. They're getting a ton of tax incentives.

They're getting a ton of breaks. They are getting a windfall. The executives are getting a windfall while the American people pay the price right now with the increase in gas prices. There are a ton of policies. There is a ton of funding.

There is a ton of tax incentives that are going to fossil fuel companies. And so you are fine. That's not true. You are fine. That is—.

That is— tell me what they are. Tell me what they are. There are absolutely—. What are they? You are the one answering questions here.

You know for a fact that there are tax incentives that are going to fossil fuel companies. You know for a fact that that industry has been subsidized in the past and today by this government, by the actions of our government. You just don't want the renewable energy industry to get the same opportunities as the fossil fuel industry. You're playing winners and losers and you're picking winners and losers. Times expired.

Thank you. Times expired. The statement is false. I'm happy to— we should discuss it further together. We could discuss that one-on-one.

I'd like to recognize Dr. Kennedy from Utah. Chair Babin, thank you for the time. Secretary Ray, thank you for being here. We appreciate your willingness to sit for long periods of time and take these questions from us. Utah is an all-of-the-above energy state.

We are very invested in oil, gas, coal, renewables, powering this fast-growing state of mine and strengthening America's energy security, which I know you and President Trump are focused on. We're also heavily invested in bringing nuclear power onto the grid and supporting critical minerals mining and processing. Continued investments in responsible energy development, innovation, and grid reliability will ensure Utah remains a key contributor to meeting our nation's energy needs while fostering the economic growth we both want. China currently dominates the global critical mineral supply chain, accounting for approximately 60% of global rare earth mining production and 92% of refining and processing capacity, which disturbs me and you. This administration has made clear that expanding domestic critical mineral production is a national priority in order to reduce our dependence on strategic competitors and strengthen America's economic and national security.

What steps has the department taken to accelerate domestic mining, processing, and permitting efforts, and what is currently being done to make use of such critical deposits of crucial minerals, such as the Silicon Ridge mine in Utah? Yes, yes. Look, to give one data point at the start, the average time from a mineral discovery to a mine open in the United States right now is 29 years. Total nonsense. Just no wonder we ceded all critical minerals production and processing to China.

America is a mining powerhouse, or we used to be. We have tremendous resources, including incredible copper mine and other resources in your own state.— these are— you cannot have a modern world without these minerals and materials. So by squelching that in the United States and just pushing that abroad, we thought that was fine, but it wasn't fine. And China has used that leverage, as you know as well as I do, recently over us. You know, they can cut off the supply of things we need for our systems.

So we created at the Department of Energy the Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Office. It's one of our bigger offices.. We are focused on working with existing miners about how to either advance the mining they're doing, take coal tailings and, and get critical minerals out of them, restart, for example, this Stibnite gold antimony mine in Idaho, other ideas in Utah. We're working with companies that want to build processing of rare earth elements here, fabrication of the systems that use these things. It is probably our single biggest focused effort, launching a nuclear renaissance and critical minerals.

Those are the two biggest commercial efforts at the Department of Energy. I and my state join you in that, and I'm excited about White Mesa Energy Fuels and their capacity to refine. They're the only operating refinery in the country at this point. So I also want to thank you for your vision on nuclear lifecycle innovation and the campus to support the research, development, and demonstration activities activities that are related to the nuclear life cycle. Utah's applied to host this campus in Tooele County, and I believe Utah is ideally suited for this given the research institutions that are nearby, as well as the skilled workforce and our willingness on a state and federal level to invest in that.

Can you provide us with an update on the process of establishing the Nuclear Life Cycle Innovation Campus? Yes, the, the quick background: the U.S. made a commitment that the federal government would take spent fuel from reactors, and we were supposed to have done this almost 30 years ago, and we did it, I think, in the wrong way by imposing it on the state of Nevada, for example. We're— it's going to be here, you have to accept that. As you know, we've gone a very different direction and said, who wants to host this full fuel cycle nuclear life cycle innovation campuses? 28 States responded.

That just warms my heart. Like, this is a in. The nuclear renaissance is real. There's a lot of jobs and technology that are coming from it. Um, it, it's a process going on.

I think we already did leak that Utah's application was particularly outstanding. I hope so. Um, Utah, the, the, the people, the government, the business climate, the, the land, the public support— pretty tremendous state for the future of the nuclear renaissance. And, um, and obviously we're working right now with Utah to to see if we can finalize an agreement to work together for one of these nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses. But, and I did, so I don't know what's gonna happen with that, but I can say without reservation, nuclear, Utah will be a major player in the future of nuclear energy, in the future of geothermal energy, in the future of oil production, in the future of gas production, in the future of coal production.

Nuclear, Utah is an energy powerhouse. We're within all those levels of state and state legislative and governor, the bodies are very invested in that. My last question is, the, the Utah is key to unlocking the nuclear fusion energy efforts with the Materion beryllium mine at Spore Mountain, a site near Delta. Commercial fusion companies are projecting that they'll be able to deliver electrons in early 2030. How is DOE supporting that timeline?

Uh, we are all in on fusion. We just released our Roadmap to Fusion in America. It's a combined effort between our national labs in our research and, and a growing number of commercial companies and commercial capital. We are all in to bring fusion electrons to the grid as fast as we can. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Subramanian. Thank you, Mr.

Chair, and thank you, Mr. Secretary, for joining us today. I appreciate the time. So I'm going to bring up a little bit of old news, but you tweeted in March that the U.S. Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing to the global markets. Was that true?

No, that, that, that was an error. It was, it was not tweeted by me, but it was by my team that misunderstood something I said, but I take responsibility for it. What did you say to the team that, that they misunderstood? I gave a talk and, and in Colorado about the state of energy and what was going on in the Strait of Hormuz. I said, we will restore flows of oil to the Strait of Hormuz using the US Navy if necessary.

Makes this honest mistake. But the reason I bring that up is because yesterday you just said that this— in the Strait of Hormuz, traffic was rising very meaningfully. Is that true? And what does meaningfully mean to you? That is true.

We are not talking overly about it, but this is using the US military to increase flows of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz, and things are going well. I'd like to talk a little bit more detail, though. At least more than the word meaningfully. Like, what do you— what would you consider meaningful? Like, are we talking about many ships?

Are we talking about one ship? Because the IMF PortWatch seems to indicate that it hasn't actually increased meaningfully. That, that would be incorrect. That data would be incorrect. Okay.

So you have meaningful— you have data that shows that there's been a significant increase in the number of ships going through the Strait of Hormuz that would supply supply the rest of the world with oil. That's correct. And these are not Iranian ships. These are, these are ships that would supply us and our allies with oil. And but you can't go into detail about exactly how many or what meaningfully means.

Is that correct? That's correct. Okay. And then you also said that gas under $3 a gallon may not happen until next year. Do you still stand by that statement?

I shouldn't be in the business of making energy price predictions or predict predictions of any prices in the future. But the Strait of Hormuz will reopen will open and energy flows will grow and prices will come down. Right. I guess, but, you know, a lot of people want to know when that's going to happen. Right.

And I think you said it yourself that under $3 would probably happen next year, not this year. And so I just, again, want to know what you think. Do you still stand by a statement like that? Again, not going to engage in those predictions. I will say the policies of this administration on balance are gonna drive the price of energy down.

And the previous administration, their policies on balance drove the prices of energy up. So we're at least, we have the forces aligned to push energy down. The only offset to that is we decided it was completely unacceptable for this Iranian regime to have a nuclear weapon. And that, to achieve that mission has caused short-term disruption. So would you agree that to get gas under $3, we need to end the Iran war?

Iran War? We need to get the flow of oil fully restored through the Strait of Hormuz. So yes, is that— yes, you would agree that the Iran War would— What you need is fully to have flows uninhibited, not meaningfully inhibited flows of energy from the Strait of Hormuz. That is a necessary condition. Okay, I'm going to move on to a different topic.

So you also said that data centers lower utility not raise them. Do you still stand by that statement? Yes, on balance, they are the biggest force we have right now to stop the rise of electricity prices and ultimately to drive them down. Yes. What if I told you that I represent more data centers than any other member of Congress and data centers have actually doubled our energy costs?

What would you think of that? I would— they've been developing data centers in your area for a long time. So, but were data centers the driver of a doubling in the real cost of energy? I would say that— I would say that's false. And it's going to continue to actually increase our energy costs.

I can show you I can show you my utility bill, anywhere from 25% to 200% increases in our utility bills only because of data centers. And so we're not taking into consideration other increases in data center and energy costs because of other things. The Trump administration has been in power for 16 months. The ratepayer protection pledge and all the deals we have done with data centers are going to put downward pressure on electricity prices. Data centers— But isn't the ratepayer protection pledge— 5 years ago or 20 years ago— Isn't that voluntary though?

So they don't actually have to protect ratepayers unless they want to. Is that correct? Um, they, they have pretty— it is not in law yet, but I, I've not seen any violations of the spirit of that agreement for data center development happening during this administration. I'll tell you why they went up is because they made us, the ratepayers, pay for the transmission infrastructure for those data centers. And so that's something that needs to be considered when you're talking about data centers.

The last thing is, do you agree with that? Do you agree that diesel generators are a solution to our electric electricity shortage? They are emergency solutions, and they saved hundreds of lives in the state of Florida at the end of January, running, running the backup diesel generators. Absolutely. When you need them, you should run them.

They're very noisy and they're very— cause a lot of pollution, and people hate them in my district, too. So I'll yield back. Thank you. Gentleman yields. Like to recognize the gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Van Epps.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Secretary Wright, for your testimony. Under the Biden administration, American energy was crippled by green policies, ESG requirements, and progressive special interest groups. Coal, natural gas, and hydropowered electricity plants were at risk of closure, tracking us toward a massive energy shortfall. This anti-growth mindset prevented us from harnessing America's abundance, leading to energy scarcity and rendering us dependent on foreign nations for energy. Energy.

Under the Trump administration and Secretary Wright's leadership, we have reversed course. The DOE has taken decisive action to initiate an American nuclear renaissance. We are reshoring American-made supply chains for critical minerals, aligning energy policy with U.S. national security, and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign supply chains. Instead of shuffling taxpayer dollars toward unreliable intermittent energy This administration is prioritizing the protection of our energy infrastructure as we face sustained cybersecurity threats from foreign adversaries like China and Iran. The president's FY27 budget request establishes these priorities and secures the golden era of energy dominance by ensuring access to abundant, reliable, and affordable energy.

Secretary Wright, as you know, our critical infrastructure faces mounting threats, including our energy system. According to a recent North American Electric Reliability Corporation report, power grid asset owners and operators have expressed growing concerns around unmanned aircraft systems attacks. Last year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission noted that nuclear power plant security forces lack authority to interdict or shoot down drones. I introduced a bill yesterday to authorize critical infrastructure operators to detect, track, and neutralize unauthorized drones operating over protected sites. Rights.

The bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, the ability to determine which critical infrastructure facilities need these authorities. Secretary, what work is DOE's Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response doing to protect energy systems from drone threats, and to what extent would providing commercial energy system operators authorization to neutralize unauthorized drone threats support DOE's ongoing work in this area. So, Representative, you, you raise a key issue. Drones are just massively expanding around the world for many applications, but as a threat to our energy infrastructure, absolutely true. Drones fly over our, our national labs.

They fly over critical energy infrastructure. In fact, I was out in California at the, at the re-turning on of a legacy oil field that California in crazily foolishly had stopped producing for 12 years. It's in federal waters, it's producing oil, and the processing facilities right onshore have drones flying overhead. So is that a real issue? Absolutely, it's a real issue.

And we are working across the agency with the National Security Administration, um, with other— Department of the Interior— about how do we address this threat, this threat, what's the best way to respond to it. I love your engagement in it and your passionate knowledge about it. So we definitely want to work with you and across the agencies about, hey, the world's changed. How are we going to change our policies? How are we going to stop this growing threat?

Right. Thank you, sir. I was glad to see that the DOE reorganization resulted in the creation of Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, which you talked about a little bit earlier. Critical minerals and rare earths support key technologies such as EV batteries, semiconductors, and rare earth magnets.

Uh, Secretary, can you expound on— you discussed this a little bit— but the ongoing work the department's Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation is doing to advance our domestic minerals processing capabilities? And what are the primary roadblocks to building back our domestic minerals processing capabilities? God, I mean, the roadblocks is over the last few decades we've just exported so much of this expertise and equipment. We just haven't opened many mines in the U.S. in a long time. We have mining technology.

The leading mining companies often are American. They mine all over the world. So we have the know-how, but we need to bring that supply chain, that equipment, and that trained personnel back into the United States to get these mines going. Um, we do have existing mines, obviously. So a lot of our effort is you've got an existing coal mine, you've got a tailings pile there, it's got critical rare earths in it.

How can we work with you to bring technology out of our labs to deploy to harvest those rare earth elements right there in that existing mine. We're working with others to reopen existing mines. Critical as well is processing. You know, when we— we have one rare earth element mine in the United States for a long time out in California. It mines the ore and it sends it to China and they process it there.

So we are working with that as well to develop the processing of that in the United States. Mine that ore here, process it here, turn it into magnets, fabrication and manufacturing here. We've got a lot of private sector partners in this as well. There's a lot of private capital flowing into this space, but it's because we are willing to make different decisions. We're willing to do the things like setting price floors that'll give businesses the economic incentive to reshore these industries to our country.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you for your leadership, Mr. Chairman. I yield back. Gentleman yields.

Like to recognize the Representative Gillen from New York. Thank you, Chairman. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Secretary, for being here today. Secretary Wright, Nassau County residents in my district on the South Shore of Long Island are facing record costs, more than 32% above the national average.

That includes rising energy costs. Long Islanders pay some of the highest electricity rates in the nation, and power costs have risen 20% since January. We should do everything possible to lower costs, and that includes supporting clean energy tax credits and embracing renewables. Secretary, I'd like to work together with an all-of-the-above approach to help reduce energy costs and make life more affordable for people on Long Island. And for this reason, like you, I support the NESE natural gas pipeline project to increase energy supply and drive down costs in my district.

Secretary Wright, what kind of cost savings can Nassau County and Long Island families expect to see from this project? And can you confirm on the record when they'll see them? Well, the, the, the Nessie pipeline, last, last I heard, Representative Gillin, I think it will be ready, uh, not in time for this winter, but it will be ready for next winter, the winter of '27-'28. State. Um, number one, as you know, and I look, I share your passion for driving down energy prices everywhere.

It's so important. I can hear, I can hear in your voice, that's fantastic. And I do want to work with you, whatever the route, to lower the electricity costs for people in Nassau County. Uh, they're going to have better lives, they're going to have more job opportunities, and they're going to do it. The Nassau pipeline is a big deal for sure, because as you know, when it gets cold, natural gas gets diverted just to home heating because that's the highest use and it gets starved from the electricity plants.

So they have to burn oil, which is much more expensive and much dirtier to burn. Let's, let's have an abundant supply of natural gas, which is cheaper and cleaner. That'll help drive down electricity prices. And families in, in older, just communities that were developed a long time ago, New York, New York's been a, one of our original 13 colonies. If you convert home fuel oil heating in your homes in Nassau County to natural gas heating and we can supply reliable natural gas to you, that's something like $1,500 a year savings.

Mm-hmm. So very significant, dramatic cost reductions. I will tell you, President Trump, myself, and the administration, we wanna drive energy costs down everywhere we can, all 50 states. And I have worked probably at least as much of my time in Democrat, uh, governed states as Republican governed states. Frankly, I don't care.

I'm here for all 340 million Americans, and I share your passion. Thank you. Well, I do believe bringing back some of those green energy rebates will also help drive down costs as well. Secretary, as I mentioned, skyrocketing utility bills in my district, and a recent report in our local paper Newsday detailed how elderly, disabled, and low-income Long Islanders are struggling to pay their utility bills and having their power shut off. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to submit the article from Newsday into the record.

So ordered. So I think it's a mistake that the budget request proposes zeroing out funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program, which is a program that helps low-income householders— households lower their energy costs and saves them 20% a year in New York. Secretary, how does the Department of Energy plan to bring down utility bills and help families families save on household energy costs? Yes, uh, again, lots of mechanisms. One of the things we're working on, you mentioned the Nessie Pipeline, uh, we're also very passionate about bringing the Constitution Pipeline, another, uh, pipeline that would go into upstate New York and ultimately supply gas to New England.

The largest source of electricity in New York by far is natural gas, um, and if you can bring more gas and cheaper natural gas. And as you probably also know that the local oversight board in New York has rated its, its, the, the, the capacity as critical, meaning very close to blackouts, and which also limits job opportunities and growth in New York. So we want to bring more energy into New York. We want to see nuclear power get going in New York. I'd love to restart the Indian Point nuclear facility that was closed not too far from your district.

District. Um, that should come back on if we can build the Constitution Pipeline and add generating capacity to the state of New York. You can drive down energy prices. The last thing I'll say is there's a movement in New York and elsewhere to drive heating, to electrify heating. You can't burn natural gas, you've got to electrify your heating.

That electricity is coming from natural gas at a power plant. It's much more expensive to do heating heating electrically than it is straight combustion, particularly of low-cost natural gas. So if you can stand in the way or push back against electrifying heating, that will lower costs as well. Many ways to do it. And let's, let's continue that dialogue.

Thank you. I yield back. The gentlelady yields. I'd like to recognize Mr. Fong from California. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today.

I'm encouraged by your work to strengthen America's scientific leadership, energy security, security and technological competitiveness. I also want to thank you for coming to California last week to meet with our local leaders and energy producers. Your visit underscores the importance of ensuring America and California has reliable, affordable, domestically produced energy. And as you know, you started your career in Kern County. The Central Valley is over 70% of California's in-state oil and gas production.

We are the energy production capital of California. Unfortunately, our state is facing a self-inflicted energy crisis. Prices. Bureaucracy has hampered new oil and gas permits. California has lost significant refining capacity, with additional refineries and critical pipeline infrastructure now at risk of closure.

California once produced 40% of America's oil. Today it produces 2% and imports 60% of its oil from overseas. During your visit, you clearly saw firsthand how state policies have discouraged domestic energy production while increasing reliance on import imported foreign sources of oil, creating serious energy and national security concerns for a state that is home to 30 military installations and serves as our nation's gateway to the Pacific. Two questions: From DOE's perspective, what are the national security risks associated with increased reliance on imported oil with California's declining domestic production? And beyond your direct authorities, what coordination mechanisms are in place or what could be strengthened between Department of Energy, Department of War, Department of Interior, and EPA to identify and accelerate opportunities to increase reliable energy production as well as oil and gas production in California.

Thank you, Representative Fong. As a pro-energy and an energy-knowledgeable representative, um, in a state that sort of lost its way in energy policy, you play a valuable role, a very valuable role, in the United States' most populous state. Not only is California the most populous state, but we have more military installations in California than anywhere else. Something like 30 military installations, of course, served by great Californians that are there to defend our country. But yet the energy that comes to those military bases, as you said, over 60% of it is oil imported from overseas.

Again, only a tiny percent's from California. California has resisted pipeline interconnection with the rest of the country. Its other supply of oil is oil coming down from Alaska. That's American oil and coming down our own coastline. I feel much better about that.

But the oil that's coming from the Middle East, that's coming from Asia, I mean, who's our greatest geopolitical foe these days, right? I, God bless, we never go to war or never have conflict with China, but that's our greatest risk, our greatest threat. And, and the supply chain for California in our military bases comes from Asia. Asia. That, that is clearly risky.

And then of course, think of our forward bases in Hawaii and Guam, um, and throughout the South Pacific. We supply those right now directly from Asia, from, from foreign suppliers. California has incredible energy resources underground and incredibly, uh, energy-savvy people, capital. It was an energy powerhouse. If we can restore that, not only can we supply secure energy to our 30 bases in California, We can supply Hawaii and Guam and our forward bases in Asia from California.

That's the way it should be done. That's the way it should be done if you believe in American security, American affordability, and, and, and higher standards of living for the Americans living in California. So as you and Secretary Bergren work through the National Energy Dominance Council to advance policies and projects that increase domestic oil and gas production and expand reliable baseload power generation, what steps is the Department of Energy taking today or to ensure the necessary support infrastructure is in place? Specifically, how is the DOE addressing grid capacity, transmission pipelines, refining capacity, and other critical energy infrastructure so that future energy production can be brought online efficiently, reliably, and securely, particularly in states like California where infrastructure constraints are increasingly limiting energy production, investment, and development? Yeah, so we are in dialogue with many businesses in California.

Our Energy Dominance Financing Office, a loan program, It is there to provide capital for people that are going to build energy infrastructure, that are going to increase supply and lower prices and increase security. So again, that's all 50 states. We'll do that anywhere and everywhere. Unfortunately, as you know, the business climate to build real infrastructure in California is very difficult. And boy, I often wonder the net result of that.

I lived 19 years in the state of California, just spectacular state. State, uh, great people, great everything, but it has the highest adjusted poverty rate of any state in the nation. To me, that's how you can see the ruinous, expensive energy policies. They just flow downhill and they export businesses, uh, they raise costs for consumers, but they reduce jobs, particularly for low to moderate income workers. So getting your energy system right is just essential to your economy, particularly for the lower half of the economic spectrum in your state.

Thank you for fighting tirelessly for that. We're partners forever on that. Thank you. Well, I thank you for your leadership. I look forward to the continued partnership to help California solve our state's energy crisis.

And with that, I yield back. Gentleman yields. Like to recognize Mr. Whitesides from California for 5 minutes. Thank you. Thank you, uh, Mr. Chairman.

Secretary Wright, let's start with some common ground. I'm over here. Sorry. Hi. Um, as electricity demand surges, the fastest way to expand capacity is getting more out of the transmission system that we've already built.

Uh, reconductoring existing lines with advanced conductors increases capacity, improves reliability, and in wildfire-prone districts like mine, reduces fire risk. While these projects make long-term economic sense, upfront costs remain a barrier for utilities. Would you support additional tax incentives for advanced conductor technologies to help utilities move these projects forward faster And what does Congress need to do to clear the remaining obstacles? So the devil's in the details on the policy, so I probably should be cautious on that. But I love in principle what you're saying.

I absolutely believe reconductoring is a great way where you've already got right away, you've already got lines to increase throughput and capacity on that. It is one of the larger things we are lending money from our Energy Dominance Financing Office to do, reconductoring. Great. So agree with you 100%. That's, that's, that's a good investment in energy infrastructure.

Okay. I want to turn to— great. And I— we've got a bill on that. Look forward to working with you on that. Turning to hydrogen, I'm disappointed by the decision to cancel the Arches Hydrogen Hub despite independent technical reviews ranking it as the highest-scoring proposal nationwide.

Walking away from hydrogen, I believe, has severe national security implications. China, Japan, Europe are all investing many tens of billions of dollars because they see hydrogen as a strategic industrial technology. Technology. In my politically diverse district, California's 27th, local leaders from both parties enthusiastically support hydrogen as one of the industries and fuel sources of the future. It's not unusual for new energy technologies to take investment at the front end to yield results at scale.

For example, you're investing in early-stage geothermal and new forms of nuclear, which I support. What could be done to make hydrogen an important part of our energy future, and does the administration support working with Congress to preserve a financeable pathway for electrolytic hydrogen production. So look, I, as a career energy guy, I've, I've been in and around the hydrogen space for, for some time. And one correction, so hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's a store of energy. It takes more energy to create hydrogen that is liberated when you, when you use hydrogen.

Hydrogen. So it's essentially, it's a bigger battery. Okay, you got 30 seconds for your answer. So just like whatever, whatever the highlight is, is the key part for me. So the problem of hydrogen hubs in California is expensive electricity to go into them.

The proposal was to use renewable electricity on the grid to create hydrogen. Which is the cheapest form of energy now, technically. Sunshine, daylight sunshine is the cheapest form of energy available available to humans, a word that you like using a lot today. And that is an incontrovertible fact, Mr. Secretary. Is it a fact?

It is true. It is not a fact. The truth is that the cheapest form on a per unit basis right now is daytime solar. Is that not true? It depends how you do it.

It doesn't depend. It is true. It is not. The utilization is too low for it. You can't deploy capital and only have 24% utilization.

You are amazingly misleading the American public. The cheapest form of energy right now is daytime solar on a per-unit basis. It all depends how you measure it. No, it does not depend. Any rational way to measure it, it moves on.

Mr. Secretary, let's look at the structural reality of the current conflict in Iran. And I'm really disappointed with your answer because that is not true. And I depend on you for facts and you are a factual person. You have to define the question. It's my time.

It is— the war in Iran has achieved two devastating own goals against American interests. One, it's weaponized global energy prices against American citizens, driving up inflation to 4.2% as of this morning and costing Americans somewhere between $50 and $150 billion. But second, equally important, it's handed China strategic advantage. This crisis has proved China can aggressively reduce its reliance on foreign petroleum, cutting imports by 3 to 4 million barrels a day. Here's the point I want to make.

If our strategy traps us in the energy system of the— while it accelerates our competitors' transition to the energy system of the future, then we are making a grand strategic error which the American public and our children will rightly condemn. With that, I yield back. Gentleman yields. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Herodopoulos. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today. And I'm always interested in the politics of this place.

Playing politics with energy is never the smart thing to do, because as we recall, during the Biden years, they actually took 40% of our strategic oil reserves, uh, in an attempt to lower prices because their policies were failing. And I'll just remind people some of the failed policies: LNG delay, Keystone Pipeline destroyed. They were against fracking until they were trying to win Pennsylvania. Um, oil leases delayed. And the great news is that with your leadership, we're actually expanding our potential energy footprint so that we have more supply, because the way you reduce prices is actually increase supply.

And the semantics that are being played today are typical Washington, D.C. games. And it's frustrating because our goal is to reduce the cost of energy. And as you know, throughout 2025, gas prices were coming down. That was the good news. The only reason they're up right now is because we have have a global threat where a group of crazy people are willing to kill their own citizens to show you how crazy they are and have no respect whatsoever for freedom of the seas.

And so again, the politics are vast. But, um, let me just say this. As a Floridian, uh, we know how important, um, reliable energy is, especially during hurricanes, let alone tropical storms. So when severe weather hits, we want to make sure the electricity actually comes on and it's reliable. So with that, what is the Department of Energy ensuring— doing to ensure that we have dependable 24/7, not just daylight energy generation, and, and sources like natural gas and nuclear to keep up with demands on the energy grid?

Yes, thank you, Representative Herodopoulos, for those intro marks, which I agree with entirely. So one of the things— it started in the Obama administration and the Biden administration— they it very hard, um, raising capital and because of rules from their EPA to build reliable dispatchable energy sources. Um, not impossible, but very hard. Florida, I will say, is a state that led the way. Florida and California had similar electricity prices 15 years ago.

Today, California's electricity prices are more than twice as high as Florida's electricity prices. And another fact people don't know, Florida produces 20% more electricity than California does. Just common sense. Okay, Florida gets 75% of its electricity from natural gas. If you're gonna build from scratch today, just that, that is by far the cheapest way to build dispatchable, affordable electricity.

Florida also has nuclear power, also has solar power, which can play a role. I'm like, I worked in solar technology. I'm not anti-solar. I'm just pro-math. And so Florida in general has done pretty good math and on a relative basis.

But of course, it's had recent price rises that we want to stop and reverse. I think to your point, I mean, what we have taken is that is not one, one, it's all in energy solutions work. And depending, of course, what part of the country. Second, of course, I represent Kennedy Space Center. Congressman Whitesides and I actually worked a lot together on space issues.

And that said, what are the most important projects underway currently with DOE and NASA so we can strengthen our position as we have this significant challenge from the Chinese? Yes, I think that the projects with NASA are exciting. This, this effort to, you know, go to the moon, ultimately build a base on the moon, and we are working with NASA there for energy sources for that, you know, fuel for ultimately for reactors that will be operating in space. And for, you know, americium to get, you know, short-term— I got a blank on the term— of these sort of nuclear batteries before we go to reactors. But you're right, exploring, being a leader in space, being a leader on not just in Earth orbit but in far space, it's not only great for American science innovation and American spirit, but it'll matter for national defense as well.

Now NASA is like our national labs, is a national treasure. And getting NASA as a partner now with private business to drive space forward, I think, will bring huge benefits not just to Florida but to our country. I couldn't agree with you more, Secretary, and I appreciate your candor and your willingness to work with us so we, we win this new space race. And of course, some of the new technologies you speak of right now are going to be things that power us on the moon. And we'll be there in just a few short years.

Mr. Chairman, I do have a couple couple of additions that I'm going to add that the Secretary can answer a little bit later on the record, talking about some issues that are important to our community. And I'll just also mention that, again, there's the politics there, is always interesting. I brought up on our last meeting, Mr. Chairman, $27 billion to the, quote, "greenhouse gas reduction fund." And if you look through who got the money, that's a pretty political situation. I hope people can look more closely at that so we we can get some of those dollars back to actually transform our grid in a positive way. And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

Thank you very much. Gentleman yields. I'd like to recognize Mr. Menefee from Texas. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today. I'm holding today an article from last year when you testified before the House Committee on Appropriations saying the DOE Secretary lied to Congress, House Dems allege.

I know that you've accused multiple members of this committee of being untruthful. So I want to make sure today that we're dealing in facts when we have this conversation. Do you remember in 2025 making a statement saying, you hear all the time in the news that tornadoes are getting worse and hurricanes are worse and floods and droughts and storms, they're more frequent and larger in magnitude. But that is simply untrue. Did you say that, Mr. Secretary?

Uh, I'm sure I did. Okay. And so it's your argument that hurricanes and floods in this country and across the globe are not getting worse? That's correct. That's what the data shows.

But study after study has shown that human-caused ocean warming has intensified all 11 Atlantic hurricanes in 2024. Climate change made Hurricane Milton hit as a Category 3 instead of a Category 2. I'm from Houston, Texas, and I can walk you through where we've had 500-year storm after storm after storm in the past 7 years. As the Secretary of Energy, you're telling me today that you don't believe that hurricanes and floods are getting worse in this country?— that they just simply aren't. I published that data and stuff written by me.

It's in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Look at the US hurricane data. We have 125 years of data. No increase in hurricanes, no increase in the average intensity of hurricanes. What you're talking about is these attribution studies, which are just non-scientific.

These are things that could happen. Yes, I want to extend a personal invite to you to come down to Houston, Texas, and to tell the family families of the folks who were victims of Hurricane Harvey and the other major storms where flooding hit Houston in a way that it never hit it before, that these floods and hurricanes are not getting worse. Mr. Secretary, I believe you said before, you testified earlier this year that one of the things I do not want to shrink is the investments in basic science because only governments can do that kind of work. Do you remember saying that? Absolutely.

Houston has flooded catastrophically, repeatedly. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed 36 people in Harris County, my but more than 100 across the Gulf Coast, and it caused $125 billion in damage. So that would make it one of the most expensive storms in American history. The research that helps us understand why storms like Harvey are getting worse and how communities can prepare lives at the DOE in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, known as BER. Those— that funds the science that models how storm systems intensify and develop develop actionable predictions of extreme weather, which is how a city like Houston knows where to build its flood barriers and how to harden its infrastructure.

Your requested fiscal year 2027 budget cuts that department by 54%, from $854 million to $396 million. That's about $450 million gone. So you believe, and you have stated publicly and testified, that you want to fund this research and we should not be cutting this research because only governments can do that, but BER is exactly that kind of long-term investment. So how does cutting it by more than half align with that commitment? Our proposed science budget for this year is actually up slightly from what we proposed last year.

So we're not cutting our research on science. But of course, you move where dollars get the greatest bang for the buck. With AI, a big thing is Mars Genesis Mission. We're going to get massively improved ability to track further ahead where hurricanes are going, where weather systems are going. We have enormous money and research going in to get better at understanding these disasters.

Mr. Secretary, that may have been the answer to some question, but it was not the answer to my question. I'm asking you specifically, does your proposed budget that you sent to House Appropriations cut BER funding by 54%? It does. I mentioned that. I said our total investment in science— you have to prioritize where to allocate dollars.

I'd like to invite you to Houston and explain to people in the Houston area how a supercomputer can ensure that a family in Houston is protected from the next Hurricane Harvey. Let's move on. This is not abstract. The House Appropriations Committee already rejected your BER cut, and they funded it at $800 million. So that's $404 million more than what your agency requested.

So Congress is telling you that this cut is wrong. You say you want to work with Congress on these budget levels. Will you commit today to supporting the House Appropriations level for BER? Absolutely. Fantastic.

I want to talk a little bit about grid security. We have a distinct history with that in the state of Texas because Texans understand what grid failure can mean better than almost anyone. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri killed at least 245 people in Texas and caused an estimated $195 billion in damage. Now, I know that ERCOT is a separate grid system, system, uh, than the rest of the nation. But there is research that is shared that is important.

That grid failure drove those deaths and was a direct result of infrastructure that was not prepared for the stress that it faced. Your own testimony that you provided to us here today says the national grid is experiencing increased strain because of retirements of existing generation, data centers, and advanced manufacturing. Those are your words, Secretary. And yet your fiscal year 2027 budget cuts the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy, Security and Emergency Response, CSER, by $30 million. The House Appropriations Committee again rejected your cut and said CSER should stay flat at $190 million.

The gentleman's time has expired. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back. Okay. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Harrigan.

Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, uh, Mr. Secretary, thanks for being here today. Thanks for your testimony, and thank you for the tireless work that you have been doing to create more electrons across our country at a more affordable rate for American families. Uh, I truly appreciate it. My constituents appreciate it.

And along those lines of effort, I have a couple quick questions for you. The first is, how important are investment tax credits and qualified process expenditures, ITCs and QPEs? How important are those for the development of new nuclear power? I think they will be very important for the development of new nuclear power. I've been a lifelong fan of nuclear, came out of the gates in the 1950s strong.

We built a lot of nuclear in the United States at good economics, you know, and then we just didn't build any reactors for several decades. The supply chain is atrophied. We've made it slow and expensive to build nuclear in the United States. Fundamentally, it should not be slow and expensive, but that's where we stand today. So as a guy who's a capitalist and doesn't like energy subsidies, I do think that these helpful things in the legislation to get the nuclear ball rolling again, I think they're important and I think they'll be very helpful.

And then you'll get a nuclear industry that'll run on itself. I don't believe it'll live on subsidies for 34 years like wind power has done. We need, we need 5 to 10 years to get that nuclear ball rolling. Absolutely. I totally agree with you.

And, you know, when utilities come construct these new nuclear power plants of whatever variation or generation they might be, how important is it to actually minimize the rate impacts on consumers while still bringing the reliable new energy online? It's very important. And this is one of the— and I haven't talked too much about it, but data centers, the investments in them are helpful for a lot of reasons, scientific advancement and all that. They're also going to help us with nuclear, for example. The data center builders will sign long-term offtake agreements at prices that make the nuclear economic.

Even these early reactors that are built, they carry that— they carry disproportionately that cost burden of that reactor. That extra power that'll come out of that reactor, which will last for 100 years, will benefit consumers and ratepayers everywhere. But it can be structured to do just what you would achieved. I very much appreciate both of those answers, and I, I agree. I think both facets of that as it relates to nuclear power are absolutely critical.

I mean, we have to do what we need to do on the financing side in order to bring affordable nuclear— new nuclear power to ratepayers. It's absolutely mission critical for our country, the future of our market economy, the future of our nation's defense. And I'm very glad to hear you say that today. And just taking a moment moment of kind of personal explanation, uh, this is exactly why I introduced the Nuclear Rate Stabilization Act. And it's bipartisan legislation that provides new nuclear projects with the same ITC normalization opt-out currently available to other types of projects like battery storage projects, and allows for the QPE credits to actually be sold and transferred to third parties.

I think if you take all of these things together, uh, we can lower the costs for consumers, and I think we can also encourage investment and accelerate the deployment of this next generation of nuclear reactors. We have received some very strong support from utilities on this bill, certainly developers and other energy stakeholders who recognize the need for new nuclear in the next market economy. But my final question to you is this: would enactment of the Nuclear Rate Stabilization Act with the characteristics that we've described today, would that help you and the Department of Energy achieve its goal of ushering in a new era of American nuclear dominance? Look, from my understanding, yes, yes, yes. We, we, we, we need help to launch this renaissance.

In the long term, we will not need help, but to get the ball moving— and the specific provisions you mentioned— very helpful in launching nuclear renaissance. Well, myself and my office very much look forward to working with you on making this piece of legislation a reality. Thank you for all of your leadership efforts as it comes to new nuclear across our great nation. And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you.

Gentleman yields. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Mr. Foster. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and to our witness. Let's say I'd just like to try to clear a few things up.

Earlier you'd expressed enthusiasm for the concept of repurposing naval reactors past their end of life for the purpose of commercial power generation. This sort of startles me because these things are not designed to be refueled. They're, you know, subreactors are in the range of 50 megawatts, which is not a huge amount of power.. It seems like as a businessman, this is something you should be able to immediately dismiss. So my question is, could you provide a rough estimate for the record, provide a rough estimate of the dollars per kilowatt hour, levelized cost of electricity for reusing reactors?

You don't have to respond, just yes, would you commit to doing that? You don't have to put— I've never looked at the issue before, but I'm sure we could. Don't put a lot of work into it, but I think you would rapidly— you could rapidly conclude this is not a sensible concept. Let's see, you've also eliminated a large fraction of your scientific advisory committees. So how do you— how do you decide, for example, how to split your investment between, say, inertial confinement fusion and magnetic confinement fusion without that expertise?

People have spent their careers doing this, getting together in committees and actually looking at the hard issues for each of these technologies. How do you sensibly spend the taxpayers' money after having eliminated that expertise from your advisory councils? I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to there. We engage with the fusion expertise in our administration. No, you know, PSAC, PSAC, HEAPAP, you know, all of the advisory councils are some of them that were eliminated, you know, as a part of a general rejection of expertise among— across the administration, frankly.

So how do you operate and make these crucial decisions? Because, you know, if you put a bunch of money into things that are not going to work, either commercially or even scientifically, you're wasting taxpayer money. And what source of expertise do you go different than the advisory committees that used to exist? We get input on fusion energy from the fusion scientists across our labs, in academia, in the commercial world, within the Department of Energy. I don't think we've had any reduction of input.

Put. In fact, our engagement and interest in fusion, I would say we probably have more voices, more active dialogue about fusion than the DOE than previous. You have no process that I perceive. It just seems like it's all, you know, you announce a bunch of projects without the sort of independent set of eyes on this. Related to that, you know, it's my understanding that one of the core tenets of gold standard science is scientific peer review.

Peer review. Is that— am I correct in that? Yep. Yep. Okay.

So do you intend to submit your climate working group report to independent peer review? Absolutely. We did. You know, we published the report. We had peer review from an interior group.

Yeah. Which journal did you submit it to? We got a suit from an environmental group that didn't want to have this dialogue. So that process— No, no. Which— you said yes.

What We have not submitted to a journal yet. That's what I was just explaining. Do you intend to? We put it out publicly. It's gotten 10,000— That is not independent peer review.

You know, you would submit an article for peer review. It gets rejected because it's nonsense or it gets accepted because it's scientifically valid. So I really, I think it's significant that you do not intend to submit that to a scientific journal. I did not say we did not intend. We have not done it yet.

It's 5 outstanding scientists. Would love to submit that and will eventually submit that. It's out there. Meanwhile, meanwhile, you're using it for, you know, it's my— you, you were, you were in your conversations with Representative Foshee. Yeah, you said you didn't remember that you had conversations on this report with Zeldin in, in April 2025.

Now are you telling us that you did not coordinate the preparation and release of this with the EPA? I answered the question. I said we coordinated and we're open about what we were doing across government, including EPA. I said I didn't remember some specific date he might have mentioned in April, some specific conversation. Very open about what we did on that, coordinating, communicating across it.

Proud of what we've done. And if, and if you've got disagreements with, with the paper, I'd love to hear them. Oh yeah, a large number of them. But, but, you know, the first line of defense is don't even discuss it, don't use it for policy until it has passed independent scientific peer review. And it's distressing interesting that you've decided to bypass that for the purposes of at least attempting to use it for policy.

Okay. Let's see, another thing that, you know, when the Genesis program was rolled out, it was, you know, labs and others were assured that there would not be a tax on the rest of the program for Genesis. And I've heard repeatedly that there is, in fact, a Genesis tax. You look at the budget, you look at the allocations and the suballocations all the way down, that the Genesis tax is real. Do you still maintain that there isn't— you're not taxing the rest of the research program for Genesys?

No, we're not taxing the rest. This is a tool that we're using across the fields, across the research program. It's— those monies are still in those departments. They're just called out as being used for AI. Those are from the department, from these departments themselves.

But that sort of dodges the question. You know, if you have a research program that has an independent and then all of a sudden you give it a new unfunded mandate called the Genesis thing, that is not a— that is a tax on that program. You know, I hear all the time from my Republican colleagues about unfunded mandates, and it seems this is a classic example. Gentleman's time has expired. All right.

Thank you. I yield back. Gentleman yields. I would like to recognize Mr. Hurd from Colorado. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good morning, Secretary Wright. As you know, I am privileged to represent about half of the geographic footprint of our home state, and I want to thank Thank you for your commitment to grid reliability, resource adequacy in the Rocky Mountain region, particularly with respect to the baseload coal-fired power plants in Colorado and beyond with respect to the 202C orders. And I appreciate that, that commitment to keeping energy costs low and keeping that grid reliable in the Rocky Mountain region. Big picture question for you: we're seeing forecasts for electricity demand expense increases that would have been implausible years ago. What do you see, Mr. Secretary, as the greatest risk going forward?

Is it underbuilding generation? Is it underbuilding transmission? Is it underestimating demand or something else? I mean, it's the whole system that matters. One of the first things, the greatest risk when we came in, we did a study of the electricity grid and projected out what we thought was demand, just one guess of what demand from reshoring manufacturing and AI was, and extrapolated ahead the policies of the Biden administration.

They left behind resource plans around the country of where it was going, and it, it was showing 100 times increase in blackout risk by 2030. In other words, train wreck. First thing we did was stop the closure of coal plants. We stopped stopped 17 gigawatts of coal plants from being closed last year. If we had not done that, hundreds of Americans would have died in that last week of January, that winter storm Fern that came down where we were on the ragged edge of the grid with those assets on and running full things.

So, you know, we want to build a mountain. The first thing to do is stop digging a hole. Now we need to build new generation, but that takes years. So we've also got activities, you know, to restart nuclear power plants. The first one will be restarted this summer in Michigan.

We'll have another one in Pennsylvania next year and another one in, in Iowa. We're upgrading coal plants, upgrading natural gas plants, upgrading nuclear plants, stopping the closure of hydro plants that the Democrats also wanted to tear down, dams. So basically restoring common sense and allowing capital to flow in and build new assets. Assets. So it is a race.

Things— the electricity grid moves slower than I like, but, um, we need to build quickly if we're going to reshore manufacturing and lead in artificial intelligence. And I think both of those are critical. I agree, Mr. Secretary. Can you talk about geothermal as well? And we're not going to be talking about heat pumps, but I'm talking about utility-scale geothermal.

I think this is one of the areas that we see agreement on both sides of the aisle. It's reliable, it's dispatchable, it has a relatively relatively small surface footprint for generation. What do you see as the biggest— and we just passed a great geothermal energy permitting reform bill out of the House earlier this month. Mr. Secretary, what do you see as the greatest constraint from advancing utility-scale geothermal? Is it the drilling economics?

Is it permitting? Is it transmission? Is it financing? What is it that's keeping preventing geothermal from really moving forward as, as a resource that will keep our grid stable in the decades to come? Historically, permitting has been hard.

Permitting is always wildly harder on federal lands than on private lands or state lands. And geothermal resources are dominated out west, so there's so much of them are on federal lands. That held back geothermal in the past. It— in my endeavors in geothermal right before taking this job, that was also an issue. Issue.

But if you've got state land or reasonable permitting forms, you know, there's a 500-megawatt plant under construction right now in western Utah. Could that happen in western Colorado? Absolutely. If you can get permitting from the state of Colorado to build these plants on, you know, somewhere in the western slope out in Colorado. But, you know, is the technology viable?

Could it happen? Absolutely. Great. So permitting, that's— I appreciate you flagging that bottleneck. One of the arguments for advanced geothermal is that we can leverage technology that was developed in the oil and gas industry.

What specific indicators would tell you, would tell us as Congress, that geothermal is experiencing the same learning curve improvements that transformed the shale revolution? Yeah, I mean, just the, you know, we look at the total cost per megawatt of installed capacity. And Representative Hurd, you said right off off, dispatchable. That's just the wild difference. There is no buyer, not a single buyer, for electricity some of the time, I don't know when, but most of the time, no.

That just has no value. But if you can— what we— to, to— for a grid, the most important thing is you have to meet demand at peak demand time. And as we saw in this tropical storm— I mean, winter storm Fern— that came in, solar was nowhere to be seen because it was in the winter and wind output plunged because a high-pressure system sat there. So it doesn't matter to me how much electricity wind and solar produce. I care how much they produce at peak demand time whenever it's arrived.

If they could deliver a lot there, they would be valuable members of the grid, but to date the record is not good. Geothermal can not only be there rain or shine, but it can increase its output when you're at peak demand time. You can draw— you can withdraw basically water water that's in this large underground reservoir, you can increase output when you need it. That's very valuable electricity. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, and thank you also for your commitment to bettering human lives.

I think that's what we're talking about here. With that, Mr. Chairman, my time has expired. Gentleman yields. Uh, I'd like to recognize the gentlelady from California, Ms. Rivas. Thank you, Mr.

Chair, for recognizing me. Um, Secretary Wright, I'm an engineer by training and have spent much of my career encouraging young people, to pursue careers in STEM. As co-chair of the STEM Education Caucus, I lead my colleagues in ensuring that America continues to lead in STEM education and research opportunities. However, those opportunities that are available to students depend on whether America continues investing in scientific research and innovation, and that is why I'm deeply concerned by the Trump administration's administration's DOE budget proposal. Uh, the president's fiscal year '27 budget propose— proposes more than $1 billion in cuts to the Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The cuts reflected in this budget paved the way for this administration's continued war on science. Uh, the Office of Science supports cutting-edge research, national laboratories, university partnerships, and the development of the next generation of American scientists scientists and engineers. Specifically, I'm extremely concerned about the proposed elimination of minority-serving institutions being eligible for the Reaching a New Energy Science Workforce Initiative. This initiative is a lifeline to securing the nation's scientific pipelines and the STEM workforce. These cuts will eliminate one of the very programs designed to help build the next generation of STEM and energy researchers.

Uh, my district in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley is home to thousands of students pursuing STEM careers as well as two minority-serving institutions. Our country can only continue to lead in science if there are resources available to students of all backgrounds bringing diverse perspectives to our world-class research institutions. Secretary Wright, if America needs more AI researchers, more engineers, more energy innovators, and more scientific talent, why is the administration eliminating the Office of Sciences, um, MSI, Reaching a New Energy Science Workforce Initiative, which was one of the programs designed to expand the STEM workforce? So I share your passion for STEM and for the next generation of STEM leaders. So first, a clarification: we didn't propose a cut in the budget for science.

It's just broken into two components. Components. One component is Genesis, which is the AI tools used for science. The other component is science. If you add those two together, we actually proposed a small increase in the scientific budget.

And I agree with you entirely. That is a central role of the federal government. We need to support basic science. We need to support the next generation as well. I've spent my life on bringing educational opportunities to disadvantaged kids.

So then this program, the MSI program that I mentioned, is not being cut. Cut because that's not what it says in the budget. That we are also passionate about taking gender and race and all that out of science. It's a meritocracy. It's for everyone, everywhere, and always.

But we don't believe in judging people by gender or diversity. You can attend MSIs. You don't, you know, you don't, you're not, you don't have to be a minority to attend an MSI. And you're saying that these programs are being cut from these institutions, large state schools, uh, and it's any student that attends that school that will not be able to participate in this program. We will support all sorts of institutions, just not based on gender or race.

Uh, well, I think, you know, that, you know, this— you're, you're definitely, uh, eliminating pathways to recruit and train students from underrepresented communities into these fields. We need everyone possible to enter STEM. We have a shortage of STEM researchers, and, and we need everyone that is an American to be trained. Otherwise, they're gonna go to other countries, and that's, that's what's happening right now. Lots of our scientific talent have nowhere to go here because of the cuts that are being made by the federal government.

They're being recruited by other countries. We're training people and they're moving to other countries. Countries instead. But has the DOE conducted any analysis of how harmful cutting these programs will be to our workforce? Again, our funding of science is— proposed budget of science is roughly flat.

We're not—. We're not talking about the STEM workforce programs, not, you know, what the programs that are being cut that are designed to encourage the next generation of STEM scientists. Maybe changes in specific programs or the criterion were just, just merit-based, but our, our desire to encourage young kids from all backgrounds to go into science and pursue careers in there is, is unchanged and is unwavering. Well, I believe that these choices will have rippling consequences for the energy sector, for science in our country. We've been a leader all of these years, and in the next few years we're going to see the consequences of cutting these programs.

Gentlewoman's time's expired. Thank you. I yield back. I'd like to recognize the gentlelady from New York, Miss Tinney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Secretary Wright.

This has been, uh, interesting to hear this whole meeting. I just want to ask— I, I— you've done a fantastic job, and, and thank you for your work. Uh, I come from probably the, uh, the, the most ill-guided state when it comes to energy, New York State. And I can't just— I know you've answered all these questions. I just want to ask you, so can we— can you answer this?

Because I think you've said it, but I want to give you a chance to clarify. You support an all-of-the-above smart energy policy. You just don't support extended subsidies on certain industries. Yes, and I support just doing the math. Doing the math.

Well, we— I really appreciate you saying that because this is what we need in New York is common sense. And I could cite all kinds of craziness I've listened to. Some, sadly, some Democrats on the other side of the aisle are going to go down the wrong path when they see how catastrophic it can be when your energy grid has been warned by the New York Independent System Operator, NYSERDA, our own government agencies, Democratic-run agencies in the state of New York have warned New York over and over and over again about the catastrophic, dangerous state of our energy grid because of policies put in place in 2019, particularly the Community Leadership—. Or Client Leadership and Community Protection Act, which actually over time bans fossil fuels and all of the above strategy. Yet New York State today, New York City specifically, is over 90% dependent on fossil fuels, specifically natural gas.

Gas, while the rest of us in upstate New York are only about 30%, and the entire energy grid in New York State is only about 47% fossil fuels. And yet here we are in upstate New York, you know, making up for New York City because they oppose pipelines, they oppose transmission lines, they use the utility companies to actually collect what they call delivery fees against— and so when they talk, I hear everyone complaining about the cost of energy. If you look at the change in our energy bills. It's delivery costs that have been imposed by the state of New York, our governor, on the utility companies to collect those to use for Democrat purposes, not necessarily to bring down the cost of energy. So I think you cited earlier the change in energy prices, and I, I don't know if you could quote that again, how much energy prices have gone up in the state of New York, uh, specifically or generally, if you know that.

Yeah, New York is one of the faster rising states together with California, Massachusetts, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Delaware, I think, have had the fastest rise. And one of the common things is they all produce less electricity today than they did 5 years ago. Right. And yet the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act mandated that we use less fossil fuels today than we were to— than we were to use in 2019. Yet our demand and use of fossil fuels is even greater.

And New York City uses even more than we do in upstate New York. I wanted to say, what could you tell New York State if you were to be able to to talk to our governor and our legislators. What could we do? What would you tell New York State to do to support our energy grid in an all-of-the-above strategy with less subsidies and lower pricing? I mean, just dive into the math and get out of the grandstanding.

You know, New York saying it's fighting climate change. New York is completely irrelevant for global greenhouse gas emissions. Nothing it could do will move needle. That needle will only be moved by new energy technologies competing economically and going into global scale. Nuclear's gonna play a role in that.

Fusion could play a role in that. Geothermal could play a role in that. But New York policies, all they do is make energy more expensive for New Yorkers today. These efforts to push electrification of heating, that is a guaranteed way to increase heating costs at least double and maybe 3 or 4 times increase the cost cost of heating for citizens of New York. Why would you do that?

You sit right next to Pennsylvania, the mother of all shale gases, incredibly cheap energy. Wait, we are the mother of all shale gases, but we're the only state in the country they can't touch our abundant, rich natural resources. Exactly right underneath the state of New York. Wealth, jobs, biggest source of decarbonization. If New York really wanted to champion greenhouse gas emissions reductions, natural gas by far the biggest needle mover there.

You have a resource right under your feet. So New York could do so many— they shouldn't have closed Indian Point regulator. They shouldn't make up these stupid goals or objectives. I was glad to see the governor of New York back up on the next one, but these are just arbitrary things made up by activists. They're not made up by people that do math and care about the citizens of New York.

Thank you for fighting for what you're doing. The New Yorkers need you. No, thank you, and I appreciate you talking about the nuclear and also some helping us get this nuclear back on track. Track. All of the nuclear power plants that are operational in the entire state of New York are in my district, New York 24, and we are doing everything we can to get them upgraded.

We appreciate the work you've done, the work that obviously Lee Zeldin, who we wish he was our governor, but boy am I glad he is where he is. He's doing a phenomenal job as our EPA administrator. Thank you so much for—. You have run out of time, but appreciate your work. Thanks so much.

I yield back. Thank you, Representative. Gentlewoman yields, and I'd like to recognize The gentleman from California, Ms. Friedman. Thank you, Chair Babin. Secretary Wright, you had mentioned that last Friday you traveled to Santa Barbara to defend your order to overturn the will of the people of California and restart the Stable Offshore Corporation's Santa Inez Unit offshore oil project in California, invoking the Defense Production Act on national security grounds.

This project has not been operated for nearly a decade because of serious safety shortcomings and concerns. So I have a question for you that I would really like a yes or no answer to so that we get the out, you know, the straight truth from you. Are you familiar with the fact that the facility you visited in Santa Barbara was shut down after the very same pipeline caused a catastrophic oil spill in 2015, the Refugio State Beach oil spill, which leaked 143,000 gallons of crude oil and devastated coastal communities, marine ecosystems, and local economies? Yes, you must, you must maintain and monitor pipelines. Hey, got it.

So this raises a serious question. And by the way, they've had, as you know, Santa Barbara has had hundreds of oil wells over the years and are still dealing with the impacts of all of those pipelines on the beaches of Santa Barbara. This is something that happens all the time, and this particular spill was absolutely catastrophic for that area, which relies on tourism, fisheries, and everything else. So this raises a serious question whether your action's actually about national security or about advancing a project that has a documented history of catastrophic failure and is still facing unresolved safety concerns, and which is hugely unpopular to the people who are impacted by that project in Santa Barbara. So just to be clear, Secretary You decided to restart a pipeline shutdown after a major spill, which California regulators have determined is not ready to restart, because President Trump started a war of choice that's already cost Americans $750 per household.

How much more will it cost Californians if you spill another 143,000 gallons or more of oil on our beaches? And how much more are you willing to cost the American public in pursuit of this war of choice choice, a war which appears to have no end in sight and which is directly putting pressure on these kinds of actions and pushing the administration to make the people of Santa Barbara pay for Trump's choice to start this war and drive up worldwide oil prices. So, uh, yes, it's unfortunate that California prevented the repair of that pipeline until we used authorities to get the pipeline repaired so it could safely operate. To be clear, there have been hundreds pipelines off the coast of California, and we have had hundreds of oil spills and spills that continue. So it's not that there's one bad actor, but that the people of California know that this offline drilling has led to oil spills the same way as it has in Texas.

There— you have yet to create any situation where these pipelines are immune to spills and other accidents. It happens constantly. We keep hearing promises that it's not going to happen again, And yet it happens over and over. So clearly this is risky, and you're willing to risk the beaches and livelihood of Californians and a precious, precious ecosystem to make sure that we have some balance with Trump's war of choice. And that's what this is really about.

So— Can I make one comment? The question is not whether or not we need energy security. We know we need energy security. The question is whether restarting a pipeline with a record of catastrophic catastrophic failure, actually advances that energy security, and will actually save Californians money. What would save us money is not to have started this war of choice and not to have it spiral out of control when the president promised initially that it will be over in a matter of weeks.

And here we are months later with an escalation as of this week and absolutely no end in sight. Bringing Sable particularly back to market is not going to meaningfully offset global supply disruptions of this war. It's a drop in the bucket, as you know, but what it does do is it risks California and other taxpayer money having to be spent on another costly cleanup, not to mention the irreplacable beaches and the damage that these spills do. This isn't like you just pick this up off the road. When these spills happen, they lead to catastrophic costs for years.

I grew up in South Florida. When I was a kid, I was a kid, we had pristine beaches, and now there's oil all over those beaches to the point where people think it's natural that you have to wash your feet off, to wash the gasoline and the tar off your feet. When I was a kid, there was actually fish off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. I remember swimming with fish. There's no— almost no fish anymore.

That's because of these kinds of policies. Instead of being forward-looking, they're about making communities bear the risk, and in this case, it's completely because of what Donald Trump has done. With that, I thank you and I yield back. Gentlelady yields. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. Issa.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don't know about Fort Lauderdale, but I do know that if you went to the University of California, Santa Barbara in the '60s and '50s, you, or for that matter, if you're a Native American hundreds of years ago, you had to figure out how to clean your feet for the natural outflow that comes out of the oil just offshore in Santa Barbara. 7,000 Gallons a day is the rate of the seep that's right offshore Santa Barbara. That the vast majority of all the oil that has ever been on the Santa Barbara or that Southern California coastline, the vast, vast majority is all underground seepage that's been going on for thousands of years. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

You're exactly right. And I have 21 Indian tribes in my district and they all traded in their— with their ancestors, all traded needed for that outflow to use the tar and the oil. But look, they're entitled to their opinions, just not their facts. And I want to get into a couple of it. Earlier on, you were berated by another Californian because somehow you said that the total cost of solar wasn't just the, quote, ticket cost of how much it produces per hour when the sun's shining.

If you had to look at the 24-hour cost at shifting, storing, and putting it back. If you had to look at the production cost, the loss of, loss of land, and the, uh, the price of dealing with the solar collectors in, uh, at the end of a life, does it compare favorably to all other forms of energy? Several times more expensive. So not 20% more expensive, it's like 2, 3, 400% more expensive to deliver firm electricity from solar. Okay.

So one of the things about solar, and I just want to make this point for everyone, I know you can do it better. If in fact solar is part of a program recognizing that nighttime production comes from a different source than solar, is solar a reasonable part of the grid resiliency? Yeah, I think, I think in the long run solar will— unsubsidized solar will play a role in electricity grids and in places like with great resources like California, it should play some role. And I agree. And as, as geothermal, 24-hour energy and others all are being supported by you.

I have one small area that may have fallen through the cracks early in the administration. Under the Biden administration, as you know, they wanted to kill anything that supported fossil fuels and they tried to kill the the, the energy, EIEF, the Energy Forum International, I'm sorry, International Energy Forum. They failed because one person at State cared enough about the blanket of fuels including natural gas, and so they moved it over to State and they hid it there. Now that state consolidated away from duplication of you, that entity has no longer been funded. We're one of the founding members of the International Energy Forum.

Would you mind looking into whether or not we should and could rejoin? It's a relatively de minimis amount, but there's over 70 countries. I'm a big fan of their bringing all of you together. We are going to rejoin. Thank you for reminding me of that.

I heard from some overseas friends and international— hey, you should rejoin this forum. I wasn't aware of it, but we will rejoin that forum. Representative Issa, thanks for the reminder. Thank you. And as often happens, something is damaged by your predecessor and it— but the tree falls during your time.

So thank you for picking that back up.

The— look, you've been accused. I want to give you an opportunity to get back on this. You've been accused of basically race and gender discrimination because you want to promote merit-based solutions. Do you want to finish your comment on why merit-based makes more sense regardless of who happens to get those allotment and training? Exactly.

Look, Martin Luther King was a longtime hero of mine, and I love his words that he dreamed of a day where his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I believe passionately in that. Gender, sexual preference, color, race, background. Those shouldn't matter. America is about a meritocracy.

I have spent a lot of my personal efforts in low-income areas, independent of, you know, gender, race, whatever. Of course, we should help people, low-income that grew up in places with schools not as good and not quite as good of an effort. And you may have— about a meritocracy. Thank you. You may have to answer some of this for the record, but briefly, if you could tell us us with the abundance of natural gas, but much of it located in places that don't necessarily need all of the electricity.

As you're balancing, or asking us to balance, pipelines, uh, leading to liquefaction in the future and other, uh, uses versus power lines, is there in fact for data centers and others a reason to locate where the natural gas is naturally there with little or no distribution cost. Sure. I mean, if you, if you locate in West Texas or Southeast New Mexico, you can get natural gas for free. But the cost of natural gas is only one component of the cost of electricity. So even natural gas delivered a pipeline a long ways away, it's still so cheap.

It's still 2, 3 cents a kilowatt hour for the cost of the gas. So it's a little cheaper somewhere else, but almost anywhere, if you've got a power plant, natural gas electricity, with in the United States is very cheap. Thank you. Thank you for your indulgence, Chairman. I yield back.

Gentleman's time's expired. Thank you very much. Now I'd like to recognize Ms. Sykes from Ohio. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Uh, thank you to the witness for being here. I, I will say, uh, your expertise is energy, and I would hope that you would not invoke the words of Dr. Martin Luther King without adequate context, because quite frankly, that is not your expertise. But since you want to talk about people unqualified in meritocracies, let's talk about President Trump. Do you feel like your positions and policy statements are in line with President Trump? Yes, I hope so.

Do you love inflation?

Uh, I love ending Iran's ability to have a nuclear weapon. Weapon. I think that's existential for our people. That was not my question. Do you love inflation?

Yes or no? I love ending Iran's—. That is not my question. Do you love inflation? Yes or no?

No, I would prefer lower inflation. You would prefer low inflation. Do you know that your boss, essentially President Trump, just stated that he loved inflation?

He's an entertaining, hyperbolic guy who's done tremendous leadership. And unbalance is driving inflation down. So it sounds like you're unaware that President Trump just mentioned that he loved un-inflation. And I certainly don't want to get you in trouble with your boss, but it sounds like you don't love inflation, but he does. But let me ask you this other question.

Are you aware that the United States was taking millions of barrels of gasoline from Iran in the Strait of Hormuz? We are preventing the flow of Iranian oil through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the question that I just asked you. Were you aware You've heard that the United States has been taking millions of gallons of oil from the Strait of Hormuz. Just not sure taking is the right word.

We're preventing the flow of it. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair. If I may, can I play some audio from some comments that President Trump made in the Oval Office?

Okay. The numbers were great. I don't think we've heard this. I love the inflation. You know what?

Because as soon as this war is over, you know, I can say it now, something you didn't know. Do you know we've been taking out— let's suspend, uh, let's suspend that. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn't know about it? Iran.

Until right now. Mr. Secretary, it seems like you didn't know about this either. So why would the United States be taking out millions of barrels of oil from Iran? Well, it's essential that we prevent to prevent oil sales from generating revenue for Iran to spend to develop nuclear weapons and oppress people. Mr. Secretary, I understand this might be an uncomfortable line of questioning and you don't want to do it, but you are not answering my question.

So I'm going to ask you again, and I'm going to hope that you will answer it honestly. Did you know that the United States was taking millions of gallons of oil from Iran? I'm unaware. So do you think that the president is lying based on the audio that you just heard? And I will send it to you in case you say you didn't hear it.

Oh, no, I do not think the president's lying. I think the president's talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil. Do you think that war is casual? Do you think that it is appropriate to talk casual— casually about war? I think you talk to all different audiences and you talk in all different styles.

But I don't— I don't have any serious objection to what he said. You don't have any serious objection for someone talking about war casually? Casually. Do you have that objection? There are 13 service people who are dead.

There are hundreds more that are injured. But we should be talking about war casually. He treats this war deadly serious, and he has worked tirelessly on this war monitoring. You just said that he was a— he was speaking casually about this. He was—.

It is 20 hours a day. He speaks 20 hours a day in different styles for different audiences. He is the president of the United States of America. He is the commander of chief who is responsible for 13 service members who have died and hundreds more who are injured. So you mean to say to me, testifying in front of this committee in the United States House of Representatives, that it is appropriate for the commander of chief to talk about war casually?

He speaks candidly, openly, and honestly. I think all of America benefits from that. Well, I appreciate your attempt to protect your your boss and to keep your job. But let me be very clear with you, it is not appropriate to talk about war casually. He is clearly keeping you in the dark about what he is doing in Iran.

And now you are sitting here in this committee unaware that the president just made an announcement about millions of barrels that they have taken from Iran and stated in that very, very clearly— people don't know, but now we get to know it. But unfortunately, he sent you here and you didn't know it. What is your response to that? I'm very proud to serve with President Trump. He's been tremendous leadership in a time of great stress right now.

I'm proud of what he's doing, proud to be part of the team. Well, I would not be proud if my boss sent me up, uh, Schitt's Creek and left me here in a committee without adequate information and speaking casually about war. That is a horrible place to be. And I'm so sorry that you have to defend that. That is beneath your honor.

And a woman's time has expired. I'd also I would also remind the gentlewoman that there was 13— exactly 13 U.S. service members killed at Abbey Gate in the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan. Who's next? I would like to recognize Mr. Baird from Indiana. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to say too, add to your comments, one of those individuals, 13 individuals from our district in Indiana. So we have strong feelings about that. Anyway, uh, uh, Mr. Secretary, we really appreciate you being here. I want to compliment you and, uh, the EPA administrator for coming to Indiana. You did a great job.

The people that you visited with talked about some of the rules and regulations affecting the trucking industry, and we appreciated that very much, and they appreciated you being there. It's my honor. You know, I guess I want to start with the fact that Purdue University is a national leader in nuclear science and engineering, and as you know, houses the nation's first and only fully digital instrumented nuclear reactor. It's a fully digital instrumented nuclear reactor. Jeez, I can't pronounce that, can I?

Anyway, let's go on. Purdue is also a leader in advanced manufacturing. One of the gaps in the U.S. nuclear supply chain is manufacturing medium to large-scale components, such as reactor vessels. So last year, Congress encouraged DOE to establish a university-led advanced nuclear manufacturing consortium to address this critical gap. So do you— I just want to get a sense from you, do you feel this initiative Do you believe is warranted and necessary?

And can you describe how this would benefit the United States? It's very warranted and necessary. The United States was the manufacturing powerhouse of the globe for a century. And then the last 20 years, we admitted China to the World Trade Organization and gave them most favored nation status. We made regulations difficult in the United States, and we stopped building big things here, except except on the Gulf Coast.

And we exported so much of our industry. Our nuclear industry's been stagnant for decades. It is an enormous source of energy, not just electricity, but process heat. It's gonna be a huge part of our future. We need to get the nuclear industry outta neutral and in powerful gear.

And we need to be able to build those large-scale components and industrial processes back here in the United States. United States. Indiana was a heartland of American industry, heavy industry, and I believe it will be again. Purdue's a tremendous university. There's great engineering talent in, in Indiana, great technical talent in Indiana, and an industrial legacy.

That industrial legacy needs to come back. America needs to be once again a large-scale industrial powerhouse. We can and we shall do it again, and Indiana will be central to that effort. I thank you for those comments. I really appreciate it.

You know, I'm going to change over to another little area just to get your opinion on. You know, this Congress I introduced H.R. 2813, The Small Modular Reactor Commercialization Act, which would establish a federal working group focused on commercialization and industrialization of SMRs. So would you feel that a coordinated effort among DOE, NRC, The industry and other stakeholders would help accelerate deployment and strengthen America's position against our competitors like China and Russia. Absolutely, absolutely.

One of the key things of the Trump administration is all the departments work together. We don't have petty territorial politics or fighting among it. The NRC has performed tremendously under Chairman Honney. They, they are are focused on safety, but they're innovating, they're moving fast. And yes, between the Department of Energy, our technical capabilities and commercial focus, NRC safety focus, we should be working with companies and industries about how, how quickly we can stand up the industrial supply chain for nuclear in our country again.

Yes. I really, I really appreciate your comments in that area because I think it's, it's extremely important with AI and some of the new technologies coming along. That we utilize that to stay ahead of China and Russia and some of our adversaries. So I thank you, sir, for being here, and I yield back. Gentleman yields back.

I'd like to recognize Ms. McClain Delaney from Maryland. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Secretary Wright, for joining us today. I want to dial down the drama and just pragmatically address some issues. I represent I represent the 6th District of Maryland, and my home state is proud to be one of the most educated, skilled, and dedicated workforces in the nation.

And our federal employees and researchers are at its core. They are scientists, engineers, and public servants who make America innovation possible. And I do have to lift up our agencies like NIST, NIH, National Institute of Cancer, Fort Detrick, and some of the DOE centers. And any conversation about the Department of Energy's budget it must become begin with re— really recognizing their indispensable role and the investment in research. But as you know, electricity demand is ever-growing.

AI data centers, advanced manufacturing, and industrial facilities increasingly want reliable power. At the same time, China is aggressively deploying advanced nuclear technologies and positioning itself to lead the global market for next next-gen reactors. Maryland, my state, is leading by example. In addition to obtaining 38% of our state's power from nuclear technologies, Gaithersburg and Frederick in my district are home to X-Energy, a next-generation nuclear energy company, a national leader in advanced nuclear technology. I toured their facility recently and met their leadership and was very impressed by the innovation.

X-Energy didn't come to Maryland Ireland by accident. They came because of our world-class innovation companies. They came because of a world-class, highly skilled workforce anchored by exceptional researchers and scientists, and also, I have to say, by some of our greatest agencies. Many nuclear advanced reactor designs offer capabilities beyond electricity generation, including high-temperature process heat for industrial applications and more flexible string sitting options because they require significantly less water than traditional nuclear plants. So, Secretary Wright, I have two questions for you.

As we look towards the future, what role do you believe advanced nuclear technologies will play in meeting America's growing energy industrial needs? You spoke a little bit about it before, but can you again clarify the actions necessary to ensure that the U.S. and not China leads in the deployment and export of these technologies. So thank you, love all of those words. You talked about the growth of electricity demand in the United States and you listed all the main drivers of it. Absolutely, we got to bring more electricity to the game.

China's been rapidly growing their electricity production over the last 20 years and we have not. Um, we can. And is nuclear a great technology for that? Absolutely. Absolutely.

And one other thing I'd love to say is that you mentioned industrial. We were talking about reindustrializing our country. The biggest use of energy is industry, is building things. And the biggest source of energy for heavy industry is high temperature process heat. That's like, nobody talks about it.

This is the most important energy source on the planet. Today, all of the nuclear energy is just in the electricity grid. But what's so great about nuclear, it can also provide high temperature process heat, and your very own X-Energy, I believe, will be the first ever nuclear supply of process heat in a plant in Texas. And I couldn't be more excited about it. It's a great company, but it is headquartered in Maryland.

Fantastic. And you deserve credit for that. And on that issue though, I understand that OMB has yet to allocate more than the $3 billion appropriated for your department's Advanced Reactor Demonstration, and I believe the government should be a reliable partner partner to the private sector. And I have to say, in all aspects, whether it's for our farmers or solar and/or geothermal, as Mr. Hurd, you know, raised up. And I appreciate that the Department of Energy has advocated for this funding, but it seems that OMB has been the bottleneck.

Where is the $3 billion that Congress appropriated for the ADRP in fiscal 2026? And will you commit to pushing OMB to release those funds.

Yes, it's coming. It's coming. I thought that was the case. I had to check with my smarter team behind me. Thank you for raising that issue.

Very passionate about that program. Very passionate about the company based in your state. You have a lot to be proud of. Thank you. I do have a quick one on solar and wind technologies, and I probably won't get to it, but I just want to say that I am an all-of-the-above supporter when it comes to energy production.

And I really think that in all ways we need to look for reliable, affordable power. And so I will be submitting for the record on some of the solar and wind technologies and how we need to support them, building on what I was in the Biden administration, building on that, but going forward together because they're very important and in all of the above strategy. Thank you, and I yield back. Thank you, The gentleman yields. I'd like to recognize the gentleman from New York, Mr. Riley.

Thank you, Chairman, and thank you, Secretary. I represent 11 counties across rural upstate New York, and when I'm out in the community, I always ask folks about the conversations they're having at their kitchen table. And I know around here, this idea of kitchen table issues, it's become kind of a political cliché. For me, it actually means something real. When I was growing up, my parents would literally sit at the kitchen table every week to balance the budget.

And the way they would do it is they had these envelopes and they would write on the envelope, you know, mortgage or utilities or school clothes. If there was something left over, there was— my favorite envelope was for the Binghamton Whalers tickets. And I remember those conversations getting a lot harder when the factory was closing down, where my dad worked. And, uh, there's a bunch of big corporations and out-of-touch politicians from both political parties, uh, got us into terrible trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. And you could literally see with those envelopes at the kitchen table the sacrifices that my family was making every week to make sure my sister and me could go to school.

Uh, so I asked folks at home about those conversations because I want to hear what they're talking about at the kitchen table. And, you know, You know what they tell me now over and over again? They can't afford the utility bills. They cannot afford the utility bills. They're stretched past the breaking point, making impossible choices between groceries and medicine and rent.

And then the utility bill hits the table. And now today they're making tough decisions about whether they can even go on the summer vacation they had planned with gas prices as high as they are. So when I got here last year, first thing I did was launched an investigation into the utility companies to try to get to the bottom of why these bills are so high. And there's a lot of reasons for it. And I know you've discussed some of those today, but one of the most alarming things I found is that each of the 3 major utility companies serving upstate New York is owned by a foreign corporation.

And so my question for you is, why Why in the world is the United States federal government allowing foreign corporations to own American utility companies? Yeah, certainly not my area of expertise or regulation there. We do like to see, you know, free flow of capital, at least among our allies and friends. I don't know which— Well, that just sounds like the same old tired arguments we've had for 30 years about the benefits of globalization that I know the elite economists and the out-of-touch politicians and big corporations want to shove down our throats because it makes them more profitable. In communities like upstate New York, that has hurt with the working class.

And when we see our utility bills hit the table every week and then see a bunch of that money being shipped overseas, it's the same old story of greed and corruption that we've dealt with for decades. We should not— upstate New Yorkers should not be forced to shell out money every month to the utility company and see it shipped to a foreign corporation overseas. Central Hudson is one of the utility companies in our district. They're owned by Fortis, a foreign corporation. Last year, Fortis reported $331 million in quarterly profits.

And you know what they did the very next day? They turned around and demanded another rate hike of $20 to $30 a month for upstate New Yorkers. Nice NICEG, owned by Iberdrola, Spanish corporation. Last February, NICEG shipped a $450 million dividend to Spain, turned around 6 months later and asked us for a $500 million rate hike to foot the bill for it. These are, these are seniors on fixed incomes who are literally cutting their medicine in half, public school teachers I've talked to who are picking up second jobs because of the NICEG bill.

There was a— there was a— I'll never forget this conversation. A woman in the union whose husband had worked her entire— his entire life, finally got to retirement and wanted nothing else but to spend his time with his grandkids. He worked his whole life to earn that time with his grandkids. And you know what he's doing right now? He had to go get another job to pay the NYSEG bill.

And that money he's putting out every month is going to a corporate boardroom in Spain to a bunch of people people sitting in a boardroom in Madrid taking money out of the pockets of folks in Oneonta, in Whitney Point. This has got to stop. This, this, this corporate greed and money going out of my community to these boardrooms halfway around the world, it's got to stop. You actually do have, uh, authority over this. Uh, you oversee FERC, correct?

Uh, it's an independent regulatory body. Independent regulatory body. But you have multiple times during your tenure used your authority under the DOE Organization Act to require FERC to propose new rules, correct? Correct. Okay, you have that authority and you can use it to get FERC to issue regulations to stop foreign corporations from owning American utility companies.

My time's expiring, but my question for you is this: will you commit to look into this issue and using your authority to get foreign corporations to stop owning American utility companies. I will look into that issue. Okay, thank you.

Gentlemen, yields back. I thank the witness for your very, very valuable testimony and the members of this committee for their questions. The record will remain open for 10 days for additional comments, and written questions from the members will be, will be introduced. This hearing is now adjourned. Thank you.

Thank you.