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 twenty twenty seven budget request. I'd like to recognize myself for five minutes for an opening statement. Thank you for joining us here today. An overview of the Department of Energy's fiscal year twenty twenty seven 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 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 recogniti- 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 Under Secretary of Science and Under Secretary 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 Combating 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 and sectors ranging from critical minerals to solar panels wind turbines and batteries over and over again the US 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 base load power generation. And in effort to surpass us, and dominate emerging technologies, the CCP races to add as much power as possible to its grid, including approximately seventy-eight 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 thirteen 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 Admin- 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 were 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 to before our committee and I will yield my time back. And now I'd like to recognize the ranking member of the full committee, uh, Miss Lofgren.

Uh, good morning and thank you, uh, Chairman Babin for holding this hearing today. Uh, Secretary Wright, it's been over sixteen 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, uh, this committee has sold jurisdiction in the House of Representatives over the authorization of all of DOE's non-military science and energy research, development, demonstration, and commercialization, uh programs that you have said you care deeply about. In fact, this is the first time I've even speaking with you, I expect, uh, 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 f- court has found these terminations concentrated in so-called blue states per the unhinged public boasting of OMB Director Russell, uh, uh, Boyd, to be blatantly illegal. These politically motivated cuts include well over a billion dollars, uh, in support for vital next generation energy projects throughout my home state of California. Now, I'll note three 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 forty 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 slap-dash process that has proven to be illegal in a court of law, so much for restoring gold standard uh 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 accel- 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 uh in this job. And with that, Mr. Chairman, uh I yield back.

Gentlelady yields back. Thank you. Uh, today I want to recognize uh our witness, uh Secretary Chris Wright. He's the seventeenth Secretary of the United States Department of Energy. And now I'd like to recognize Secretary Wright for five minutes of your testimony. You're recognized, sir.

Thank you, Chairman Babbitt, ranking member Lofgren, it is an honor to appear in the courtroom today.

Yes, so so you wanna put on your mic.

Thank you, first mistake already. It is an honor to appear before you today as Secretary of Energy to discuss the President's fiscal year twenty twenty seven budget and 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 seventeen 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 twenty-six 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, three reactors critical, by our nation's two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Today, I am proud to say the first new non-light-water reactor in over four decades reached criticality on June fourth. 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 eight hundred institutions applied, spanning industry, national labs, and academia. American science showed up. We are doubling down on quantum. We renewed the five 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 twenty twenty-five 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 twenty twenty eight. 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 road map, a national strategy to develop and commercialize fusion energy. DOE's ARPA-E office has committed one hundred and thirty-five million to further fusion technologies over the next eighteen 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 twenty twenty six, ARPA-E has already committed one hundred and seventy 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 disc- We are seeing progress that shrinks experimentation from months to days. And with that, I will conclude my remarks. Just stay on time.

Thank you very much. Secretary Wright, uh, for your testimony, and now we will move on to our questions, and the chair would like to recognize himself, uh, for five 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 four years ago, the national average for gas was at five dollars 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 not just gas prices but energy prices writ large for the American taxpayer?

I that's a long dialogue, but I I I would love to have it. You know, a- as you know, gasoline prices in inflation-adjusted terms were about as low as they had ever been before this conflict under three dollars a gallon in in today's nominal dollars. Um, 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. Um, but we, but I am very proud of President Trump's cour- 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 cuz they're empowered by nuclear weapons. So he has leaned in to test prevent that from happening. I supported a hundred percent. Yes, it's moved gasoline prices up by a little more than a dollar a gallon, from just under three dollars to a little over four dollars. I'll note that gas prices in the midst of a 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, um changing regulations on gas formulations this summer.

Sorry.

I could go on with seven other a- actions, but th- 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 a an era of lower energy prices,

Absolutely.

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 pr- uh 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

Well, the story is actually a little different. They produced a report and completed it in October of twenty twenty three 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 three months later saying they were gonna 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 on a 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 thirty percent if you looked over a thirty year time frame. So, yeah, that uh the the abuse of science and and f- 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 can 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.

Uh, 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 twenty twenty-five 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 and D in wind, solar, hydrogen, buildings, vehicles, and other energy technologies to your own uh favorite industries is unambiguously illegal. A GAO concluded in, this is a quote, " DOE is required to obligate and expend its FY twenty twenty-five appropriations in accordance with the reference congressional control point amounts in the FY twenty-twenty-four explanatory statement." Now if DOE implemented the FY twenty-twenty-five spend pl- uh spend plan, the department would be in clear violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. Uh GAO clearly states and again I quote, to the extent that DOE obligated or expended FY twenty twenty-five funds in excess of appropriate amounts, that is the FY twenty-twenty-four 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 thirty-one, section thirteen fifty of the US 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.

Uh, I'd just like to note in April this year, the Wall Street Journal uh reported that uh the president uh said, quote, " I'll pardon everyone who's come within two hundred 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 I've heard no such offer. And of course we take uh our mission and the law and and the rule of Congress quite seriously. Um, uh, y- y- despite your implication that we're flipping about it and violating the law, I think that's a mischaracterization.

Uh, Secretary White, I I'm concerned about decision making at the DOE uh of in awards that undermine the competitive market and the department's own processes to ensure integrity. In late October uh you announced that DOE would build nine new super computers with five companies at the cost of one billion dollars 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. Um, 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 uh for selecting these awards and how you ensure integrity uh in your deal-making?

So we put out a solicitation for d- 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 D- the Department of Energy national labs, and we wanna increase our scientific computing capacity as rapidly and as cost-effectively as we can." And what we, and, and we had overwhelming response. So what the, 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 c- 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 d- drive energy challenges um 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, uh 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. Uh, now I'd like to recognize the gentleman from Texas. Uh, Mr. Weber.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for coming to our district. over the LNG plants is two or three weeks ago we appreciated that I wanna go back to a 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 the the Iranian regime is an apocalyptic government that wants to destroy they they say they want nuclear energy but people don't build nuclear plants down in the mountains, right? They usually build them up with their 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 g- the president is extremely on track with that. Once that happens, then when the hor- when the home restraints are opened up, and ships are flowing and the energy is flowing again, the gas prices will come down. And I want to remind our s- uh, committee here that there was eight 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 seven or eight presidents that could have done something about this, which we wouldn't be experiencing these high energy prices today.

Yeah.

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 uh apocalyptic dis- discussion about the Iranians. Secretary Wright, thanks for your testimony, I want to take the opportunity to talk about the ongoing S- SPR, as you probably remember from our discussion. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is sixty percent in my district, so that we have a lot in the there on the Texas Gulf Coast. What's the current status and timeline of the emergency exchange ranges made in coordination with the IEIE, International Energy Agency. How many barrels do you think we can expect to be returned? And how soon?

So, thank you for that que- question, Representative Weber. And, and as you just said, those barrels that are exchanged, that's the dramatic difference. The Biden administration, uh, four years ago sold two hundred million barrels of oil from our strategic petroleum reserve to drive down gasoline prices before an election. Yeah, 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 purposes and they sold those barrels. Um, we, we have not, as you pointed out, we have 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 one point two eight barrels for every barrel we release. So ultimately we will release a hundred and seventy two million barrels, and we will get well over two hundred million barrels of oil back, that'll start coming back early next year. So we'll end out with a strategic petroleum reserve more full than we started this conflict, while still mitigating the price uh impacts of this conflict and the flow and 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 wanna jump over to our Congress district building maritime sector,

Yes, indeed.

uh, things here there on the Gulf Coast. In March, President Trump issued a six-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, it, it, it has been used enormously, I think close to a hundred ships. already have used that Jones Axe waiver. And the main route that is used is that that allows your region, the Gulf Coast, where most of American refined products uh 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 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 three hundred and forty 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 sixty percent 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 I don't see anything green about that. But now they're getting those products uh from the states of Texas and Louisiana, American sources, cleaner and lower cost.

Well, we appreciate that, but we do, we wanna make sure that our m- great maritime industry, we get the Weber, the Jones Act back in place quickly as we can. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you.

Amen.

Thank you.

Gentlemen uh Now I'd like to recognize the uh gentlewoman from uh Oregon, Miss Bonamici.

Uh thank you, Mister 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 five dollars a gallon, diesel is nearly six, and last fall you terminated nineteen awards in Oregon on political grounds, depriving the state of nearly four hundred and five million dollars to modernize our strain 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, the 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 hydro power keep Oregonians' residential electricity rates about twenty-five percent 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 OSED, the Office of Clean Energy, demonstrations because the department had a poor track record of managing large-scale demonstration projects. The GAO found that OSED lost eighty-five percent of its staff last year, including all independent assessment staff. And I'll note that OSED previously managed the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub. So how many people currently work in OSED, and what projects do they oversee?

So that, O- OSED 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 they're, you're, what you're saying is that there's no staff at OSED.

No, I said they're overseeing all the project. There's several dozen people working for OSED in overseeing those projects.

How many? Several dozen?

Yes.

OK. 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, that the department would develop a plan to do so by March. Well, this is June, uh, 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 w- w- we are managing all of those projects. The the the Department of Energy may have less employees now than it did eighteen 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.

Yeah, I and I appreciate that, but did you submit any sort of plan for how you would manage these projects? Have you given that to Congress? Have you s- released a plan showing how you were gonna manage these projects?

I'd I'd have to ask ask my staff a staff behind me.

Okay.

We have been incredibly transparent.

Please follow.

In anyone who calls me from the house, from the center, from anywhere gets a return phone call and a dialogue about whatever they wanna talk about.

We we will follow up on that. Well, I just wanna note that the budget, ha- as I read it, um, 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 in ch- 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. Um, Oregonians don't want LNG. They've refused to ad- to, uh, permit two large LNG plants for reasons that they don't wanna contribute uh to the fossil fuel economy. We had a lot of concerns about locating those plants on the coast where there's a cascadous abduction zone and risk a tsunami so we've rejected LNG in Oregon. Uh in the meantime China's 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 and contributing rather than stopping climate change. Americans deserve better. And I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Gentlewoman yields, I'd like to uh recognize uh Mr. Webster from Florida. Five minutes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, appreciate it. Uh, Secretary Wright, the President prioritized the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, EDF, and uh 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 um is totally funded by local uh by uh private funding not local not state not federal monies uh to supplement existing funding tools to address infrastructure needs would this new approach in your opinion help uh the EDF address the inf- 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. Um, 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 uh to Americans across the 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 uh hopefully at a future date I'll I'll be- maybe with another congressman I'll get to engage on that dialogue but I'll but I appreciate your interest on how can we use and you're right

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 - 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 credit-worthy, investment-grade borrowers, so that we don't put the American taxpayer, uh, at risk. as the previous administration rushed out eighty-five billion dollars in the seventy-six 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 uh permitting and regulatory reform help with the all of above ent- energy strategy?

It it is a big issue. It is a big issue. The, it's just so easy to stop something from being built in the United States. Um, 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, I am passionately committed to the issue of permitting reform, have been working with, uh, 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 and a reasonable time frame and they grant permits they can build their projects.

Awesome. OK, the Department of Energy's na- uh national laboratories generate an enormous uh volumes of engineering, modeling, simulation, scientific data, all of that. Uh what steps has DOE

Uh, g- great question, great question. We're we're calling it the American scientific cloud, so we're connecting and putting in a in an accessible format all the data sets, you know, from this particle accelerator and from this light source to g- gather the world's largest and most exquisite scientific data set. Because that A A AI doesn't have its it doesn't make up its things on itself, it just learns from existing data. So we are creating an an ability to access all these data sets. 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 data sets that will allow AI to rapidly increase the rate of scientific progress we will have breathtaking energy and medical breakthroughs um in in the next in the next year or two. I could not be more excited.

OK. Well, I got one more question, but I'll submit it through the other process. Jo Beck.

Gentlemen yields, and now I'd like to represent uh, excuse me, recognize uh Representative Ross from North Carolina. Five minutes.

Thank you, Mister 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 pro- process which allegedly reviewed more than twenty-two, hundred 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 seven or eight people. Your staff since admitted to this committee and to the committee's 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 long-standing 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 h- taxpayer money funds these projects. The GAO 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 sys- signal. If you wanna 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 that American people deserve an explanation. So could you tell us the names of the people who did the portfolio review?

Um, I I will not I will 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?

hostile words.

They have oversight over your department. You are not fully in charge.

We're very happy to walk through what we did. If you'd had any real interest, pick up the phone and call me. I would walk you through all that. Your assertion,

I will get your,

your assertion that these were political and unscientific is wrong.

I will get your cell phone number, sor- sor- So you are attacking me, it is Oh. And you are just obf- obfuscating the situation for your own political benefit. Clean energy is an entire sector that has benefited this country. It is weaned us off of fossil fuel, and it has created jobs. This administration has declared war on clean, it is my time.

It has done neither.

You only speak when I ask you a question. It is declared war on clean energy, it is cost jobs, it is risking our environment. I have not taken any, 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, Mister Obernolte.

Thank you, Mister Chairman, Secretary Reitz, nice to see you again.

Good to see you.

Uh, appreciated your testimony and particularly appreciated your emphasis on the Genesis mission. Uh, you and I have had several conversations about this, uh, as Chairman of the House AI Task Force in the last Congress and as Chairman of the House Fusion uh, energy caucus in this Congress, I am particularly interested in those parts of the Genesis mission. I find it uh tremendously exciting that uh the DOE is helping to lead that effort. Uh, we last month sent a letter to you uh expressing our support for the Genesis mission and asking some specific questions uh about what the administration's priorities were uh the Under-Secretary 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. Uh, first of all, we in that letter called for a dedicated genesis title in legislation this year that's 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 with science in general that you, that you and I share. Um, we have r- r- I don't know if you, you probably got an advanced copy of what we've got, our road map 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 uh 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 here.

Uh, so how about how about talking about fusion uh uh how do you feel about a demonstration phase for the fusion milestone program?

Uh, absolutely. Absolutely. We've gotta figure out what the, yeah, what the right uh, and of course there's different approaches to fusion, but I I like that idea.

Yeah, well, it's, 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, uh, your budget request has a little over three quarters of a billion dollars, seven hundred and fifty-five million for fusion. Uh, can you give us a breakdown of, uh, how much of that is focused on commercialization, and how much remains focused on the basic science?

Um, I don't ha- I don't have those numbers in front of me, but my bet is that more than half of that is probably still on the basic science, uh but again in partnership with with commercial companies of what are the issues that are ultimately gonna 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 I think it's tremendously exciting that we're seeing such huge, private investment in fusion commercialization. Uh, I mean this is the virtuous cycle that happens when we do our jobs in investing in federal research into basic science, uh, and then when uh, 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 uh, is an indication that, that this is a process that works. Um, talking about the, uh, the, the goals of the Genesis mission, uh, one of the stated goals in the executive order was to double the productivity of American research by, uh, by giving people access to these high-quality data sets and leveraging artificial intelligence. Uh, that is an audacious goal. Uh, yeah, and I welcome it. I think it's it's great that we're thinking in those terms. But the, uh, 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? Uh, you know, how are we going to figure out what progress we're making towards that goal?

It is a challenge, but w- we're gonna, you know, it's gonna be specific. You know, we're trying to develop this drug to address this issue. It used to take, uh, three 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 gonna have new tools or new advancements to every aspect of scientific productivity. But I think it's a r- I think it's a reasonable estimate of what could be achievable. And it means we s- the United States spends a trillion dollars a year on basic research. What we're hoping is, if we can get the equivalent of two trillion dollars a year of research advancement, with spending only one trillion dollars, we can drive innovation much faster.

Oh, 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.

Uh, you're back.

Gentlemen's time's expired. I'd like to recognize Representative Fuchsie, excuse me, Salinas from Oregon.

Uh, thank you, Mister 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. I wanna review um 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 three dollars a gallon. On the campaign trail he said he would bring the price of gas to under two dollars a gallon. What is the price of gasoline today?

It's different in all different districts and in all different gas stations.

It's in the US on average, on average.

The the average price of gasoline in the US today is about four dollars and fifteen cents.

That's right, it's up over thirty-three percent, or a dollar a gallon. Um, that is well over the three dollars per gallon. It's gone way up, not down. So what's happened since President um 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 uh processes, and the Biden administration would not allow the construction of any reliable economic energy sources. So of course,

OK, reclaiming my time. Do you

Mm.

OK, reclaiming my time. Um, you work for the Trump administration. I asked a simple question. The answer is that electricity prices have gone up ten percent under President Trump, and much more than the rate of inflation, and certainly more than my constituents, my farmers, my hard-working Oregonians can afford right now. So let's get this straight. President Trump said he would bring down the price of gas to under two dollars 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 wanna look at why. Did you warn President Trump that going to war with Iran would drive up gas prices for American families?

Uh, the Trump, uh, I I 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 an, this regime in Iran with nuclear weapons?

OK, I do not want Iran to have OK,

I'm I'm gu- I'm guessing not. So

reclaiming my time, I do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. So you knew ahead of time that this would cost American

Great.

families and President Trump still went to war, and has not achieved any kind of of being able to get the, his arms around the nuclear um 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 state 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 fund- 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 fifty percent 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 nav- national average including Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada and Washington. We know what ha-

Legacy Hydro states there's a reason for that. It's not because of your wind and solar.

But it is still low.

And the fifty percent is true. It's an average.

Reclaiming my ti-

You can always find exceptions.

Reclaiming my time.

Just trying to stay with accuracy here.

We know 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 in 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.

Young lady yields back. I'd like to recognize Representative Self from the great state of Texas.

Uh, thank you, Mister Chairman. Mister 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, uh I wanna go through a litany of what you inherited. Uh, I wanna 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, three hundred and eighty-five billion dollars in green energy loan authority. Your own, the the DOE IG themselves found that they had conflicts of interest in three hundred and eighty-five billion dollars of loan. We also had the DOE IG found a billion dollars in potential savings and recoveries in programs that had fraud, waste and abuse risk, extreme fraud-based and uh u- and uh abuse risk. The clean energy demonstrations office had twenty-seven billion dollars 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 five point eight billion. Uh, again, they didn't have the environmental controls ready to control the the program. And then probably my favor- well, now I've got one more, the micro-vast grant reversal, two hundred million dollars to a Chinese-based company. Thankfully we caught that and reversed that. Then we had the Strategic Petroleum Reserve sale to a, you guessed it, a Chinese-based company. I say it again. We sold our strategic petroleum base uh tr- uh reserve to a Chinese-based company. Um which by the way, took our SBR down to its lowest level in in years. And then my favorite, twelve days twelve days before Biden left office, they tried to rush twenty-three billion dollars out the door for Green News scam grants. So with that historic perspective, uh, Mister Secretary, I'll change, I'll just let you co- in fact, uh, why don't you comment on that because that's what you inherited, that's the environment you inherited.

Th- thank you, Congressman Self. When we came in, yeah, Eighty five billion dollars had been committed from the loan program office, from the Biden administration losing the election and the President Trump's inauguration, eighty five billion dollars, more than had been committed by that office in its twenty 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 we're we're we're uh narrowly focused on fossil fuels. Wind, solar and batteries are are just under three and point five percent of American energy. Three point five percent. The Biden administration spent all of their money focused on this three point five percent. You know, they moved it from two and three quarter percent to a little over three percent. They ignored where we get ninety seven percent of American energy. In fact, the expenditures out of the DOE now are still disproportionately as a percent of the energy they produced 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. Gi- giving money so people can make something to make energy more expensive. Um, so the the the the the 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, Mister 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 twenty seconds.

Fastest growing American export, there is, is, is liquefied natural gas. You know, this is a giant global primary. And for the Democrats who are in theory concerned about climate change, it's the largest source of 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,

So.

and I could have mentioned the Biden era, uh, Paul's own LNG exports. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

Gentleman yields back, being from the great state of Texas, was it illegal to export LNG up until President Trump? Now I'd like to recognize the gentlewoman from North Carolina, Miss Foushee.

Thank you, Mister Chairman and ranking member for holding this bipartisan committee hearing today. And thank you also, um, Secretary Wright, for your testimony and for appearing before us this morning. It is long overdue. I wanna ask you some questions about the climate working group and its July twenty twenty five report entitled "A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse

Uh, you know, I I raised this idea early on in the administration sort of widely, so EPA would have would have would have known about it, uh, and 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 w- try and uh I'm very passionate about having that. I wanna 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 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 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 a a 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 twenty twenty five, did you personally discuss the deadline for the climate working groups 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. Yeah, it's certainly possible. My goal when I called the authors was how quick can we do it? You know, and of course I 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 uh, who was coordinating with the authors of the report and probably with any other interested parties. So, yeah, w- would we have been open in communicating about that? I, I suspect we would have been. Sure.

Let me just say, I wanna tell you directly that the Trump administration's approach to policy making has been a disaster for the people in my district, North Carolina's fourth. It was bad enough when secretary Lutnik and the Commerce Department arbitrarily terminated a two hundred and eighty-five bil- million dollar contract for the Smart USA Institute in Durham. Even though Smart USA had met all of its performance targets, so that the money could be redirected to some uh 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 felt miserable. 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 four dollars a gallon in my district. The White House announced its so-called rate payer 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 eighteen percent over the next two years, and a lot of that is because of new data centers. Three of the four 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 a ball when it comes to data centers. Why should the people of North Carolina's fourth district believe that this administration has a plan to protect them from data center injury costs? when your first plan has failed so miserably. And with that, Mr. Chair, I yield back.

Gentleman's time's expired. I'd like to recognize the gentleman, uh, Doctor McCormick from Georgia.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, I appreciate you and appreciate you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today on this, a 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 echos 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, twenty eight fi- two hundred and eighty-five million dollars for a program that basically buys into what China has said is global climate change while they produce the coal, while they pollute the 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 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

Absolutely. Hundred percent. Yeah.

Pretty simple. I think we have so many different things outside the box thinking, uh, we're not gonna power our data centers with solar panels, if we don't produce data centers we will 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. Uh, this is a generational time of choosing. Uh, one of the things that I came up with, uh, when I was in the, uh, armed services, I was a Navy guy on Navy vessels, I was also a Marine on nuclear-powered vessels. Uh, when we retired those va- those those ships. One of the things I was like, we have a nuclear module reactor, which we've never had an accident with, which is going to be retired. You have to strip it out of the ship and then scuttle the ship or put it in moth balls. 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, contained, double-holed. I think it's a great idea. What are we doing to do something like that?

Now, i- it is a great idea. The performance of those re reactors that power our submarines and aircraft carriers, I agree with you, is 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, um, than that, but yes, they, 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.

Uh 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 they 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's trying to corner the market on alloys uh on whether it be lithium cobalt uh other rare earth minerals, But we have alternative uh sources and we have resources right here in America that we've been hamstrung to get to uh which could put us at a tremendous disadvantage. I was down at Georgia Tech recently looking at their development of battery uh 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's trying to corner the market in rear uh earth alloys.

So we, you know, we started, well, and part of our reorg of the DOE, we created 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, u- munitions that take, that need antimony, which we're gonna re- start mining again in the United States as well. I'm glad w-

Yeah, I'm glad we're getting back to science and not just uh the religion of global climate change which actually is 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, as time has expired I'd like to recognize uh Representative Amo from Rhode Island.

Thanks so much.

Thank you, Chair Babin, for holding today's hearing and thank you, Secretary Wright uh for testifying. In August twenty twenty four, Donald Trump made a promise. He said quote, " I will rapidly drive down

uh, prices and we will make America affordable again. We're gonna get your energy prices down by fifty percent. Secretary, right. Has Donald Trump fulfilled his promise?

He, he sets ambitious targets and he is all in on driving in that direction, and the, the, 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.

OK, so that, the answer is, i- is no. And, and, and you know

We are on a project drive. Not yet.

Well, you can waft all you want, but the American people know the truth. Uh, 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 two hundred and eighty-eight dollars on heating oil, and an extra three hundred and fifty dollars at the gas pump since Trump la- 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 six hundred and thirty-eight Trump's surcharge to heat their homes and to drive their cars. So Secretary, right, 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, uh, we should agree on and should be, uh, a matter of practice, uh, because no matter how people voted, your job is lower cost for everyone. Unfortunately, your actions tell a different story, as is the case with Trump and folks like you who answer to them. In October you canceled more than three hundred projects in so-called blue states, including fourteen million dollars for three grants in Rhode Island. You claimed 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 fall. But the announcement never came. And by your own admission, uh, the review process is done. So now we're left with troubling statistics. Of the twenty-two hundred projects you say you reviewed, ninety-five percent projects and Republican leading states, leaning states were retained, while ninety-five percent of the projects and Democratic leaning states that you terminated in October remained canceled. That doesn't sound unbiased to me. Seven awardees sued DOE over their partisan award terminations, and in the litigation you said, quote, " A primary reason for the selection of of which DOE grant termination decisions were included in the October, twenty twenty-five notice tranche was whether the grantee was lo- located in a blue state." That is a direct quote. I ask unanimous consent to enter this document into the record.

So, Arden?

The court rightfully found that you violated the constitution. The only meaningful difference between the seven projects that won in court and the hundreds of others you terminated is that those plaintiffs sued. 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, we did, did,

Explain ninety five percent, secretary.

did, did not. You also were creative. You, you talked about two different ninety five percent. We did not involve politics in the decisions. What the court ruling,

Wha- what about the outcomes, Mr. Secretary?

the court ruling you read was a d- 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, so

It's bullshit. We're gonna say it a million times.

But, Mister Secretary

It's not true.

I've got, I've got a point of parliamentary procedure.

Actually, false.

What is it?

Can you, oh, are we permitting language like that from witnesses?

Uh, watch your language there, Mister Secretary, but uh, let's keep this,

Will do, sir.

please.

Mister Secretary, y- 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 wanna use language like that, act out of hand, behave uh uh 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 wanna pick at at 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 is rapidly expiring. When will you restore these grants?

We work every day for, we've gone overboard for New England, for California, for blue states,

That's not an answer.

all three hundred forty-eight.

I'm reclaiming my cl- uh uh uh,

Your your assertions are incorrect.

Mr. Secretary, 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,

They shouldn't and they weren't. Mister Secretary, this hearing started with Trump's promise to lower energy costs.

Middleman's time's expired.

Instead you've bloviated.

Middleman's time's expired.

We've gotta end this nonsense and yield back.

I can recognize uh the uh gentlelady from South Carolina, Miss 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 um 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 weapons um in Iran nothing else matters.

Mm.

But um 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 seventeen labs, um, 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 inva- 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. Um, Secretary Wright, can you tell us the importance of this Savannah River site to the energy security and national security of the United States?

Savannah River National Lab, an ab- 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 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 yes, Savannah River National Labs um is and and reprocessing of fuel, so many of the things that we did fifty 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 New Care Renaissance going if not for Savannah River National Labs. My only disappointment with Savannah River National Labs is the fantastic director there Johnny Green and I are both Denver Nuggets fans and we thought we were going to the championship this year and, 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, cuz 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 twenty or thirty 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 Tur- Trump administration has dr- driven enormous progress there. I don't, my opening statement in June fourth, we had the first non-light-water reactor go critical, the first reactor in over forty years in the United States. We'll probably have two more of those before July four. 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 eighty years of safe record, we should believe in those technologies and we should lean in on them. Um, support for the National Lab, support for the Genesis mission, that's gonna allow us to drive nuclear costs down and build pla- plants faster and cheaper. Um, Continue doing what you're doing is so helpful, and it will matter for all Americans for our energy future.

Thank you so much, and I yield back.

Thank you.

Good morning. Yields like to recognize Representative McBride, Delaware.

Thank you, Mister Chairman, and thank you to you and Ranking Member Lofgren for holding this hearing, and thank you, Mister Secretary, for joining us. In the last few months, President Trump has given the world a master class on what energy insecurity looks like. President Trump's war in 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. 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?

Uh, we haven't looked.

You you haven't looked. Well, it seems like the the president apparently has explored all three point six million square miles of China and apparently declared at Davos that China isn't using any wind turbines uh as I mentioned the president said that uh stupid people buy them uh you've articulated increasing the um energy supply here in the United States, and our energy exports Uh, I assume that includes wind from your perspective, yes?

Um, 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?

Um, 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? Uh, I I suspect there are. Um, we just wanted 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 those.

So, so, I'll take that as you believe that wind should be part of our portfolio.

Again, it's about the, we, we've only seen wind where it was subsidized and it was mandated. So we've forced a lot, a lot of wind power to be built in the United States. Um, its net impact has been upward on electricity prices cuz 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?

Um, um, for growing American industry and businesses, but you, you're, you're talking a lot about wind. Let's just give the numbers real quick. Wind is one point five percent 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.

Uh, well, the, 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.

OK, well, unfortunately, your actions, the actions of this administration are undermining our capacity to compete with Ch- with China in this marketplace. You've not only cut hundreds of of of clean energy projects, you've also eliminated the very incentives that helped 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.

So you said remove the incentives. So thirty four years of subsidy for wind weren't enough to get an infant industry off its feet and going? The thirty four years to me, if you can't compete without subsidies after thirty four years, your industry doesn't work.

Uh, let 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

It

Our our government has gotten a ton of

it does not. Ple- please tell me what those subsidies are. I'm not aware of them.

They 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 in in uh 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, you are fine, that is

Th- it's actually not true.

Th- that is absolutely true.

Th- tell me what they are. Tell me what they are.

There are absolutely tru- you uh,

What are they?

you are the one a- 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 and 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

False.

Time's expired. Time's expired.

The statement's false.

Oh, I'd like to recognize

I'm happy to d- we should discuss it l- further together. We get to discuss that one-on-one.

I'd like to recognize uh 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. fast-growing state of mind 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 sixty percent of global rare earth mining production and ninety-two percent 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 is the department taking to accelerate domestic mining, processing, and permitting efforts in 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. To gi- 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 twenty-nine years.

Total nonsense.

Just, no wonder we ceded all critical minerals production and processing to China. Um, 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, uh, we thought, 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 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 and get critical minerals out of them, restart for example this Stibnite gold antimony mine in Idaho, say other ideas in Utah. We're working with companies that wanna build processing of rare earth elements here, fabrication of the systems that use these things, it is probably our single biggest focused effort, with 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 wanna thank you for your vision on nuclear life cycle innovation in the campus, to support the research, development and demonstration activities that are related to the nuclear life cycle. Utah's applied to host this campus in Tooele County, and I believe Utah's ideally suited for this, given the research institutions that are th- 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 a nuclear life cycle innovation campus?

Yes, the the the quick background, the US made a commitment that the federal government would take spent fuel from reactors and we were supposed to have done this almost thirty years ago. Um, and we did it I think in the wrong way by imposing it on the state of Nevada, for example. We're, it's gonna be here. You have to accept that. As, as you know, we've, we've got a very different direction. It said who wants to host this full fuel cycle, nuclear life cycle innovation campuses? Twenty-eight states responded. That just warms my heart. Like, this is a win. The nuclear renaissance is real. There's a lot of jobs and technology that are coming from it. Um. It it the it's a process going on. I think we already did leak that Utah's application was particularly outstanding.

We hope so.

Um, Le- U- 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 see if we can finalize an agreement to work together for one of these nuclear life cycle innovation campuses but and i again so i don't know what's gonna happen with that but i can say with without reservation nuclear w 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 a energy powerhouse

we're within all those levels the state and state legislative and governor of the bodies are very invested in that my

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

Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Gentlemen, time is expired.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much. Uh, like to repres- uh, recognize uh gentlemen from Virginia, uh, Mr. Sup- Supermanon.

Uh, thank you, uh, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Secretary, for joining us today. I appreciate the time. Uh, so I'm gonna bring up a little bit of old news. Um, but um, you tweeted in March that uh, the US Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to insure oil remains flowing to the global markets. Was that true?

No, that w- 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,

So it was

what did you say to the team that, that they misunderstood?

I gave a talk and, and, uh, uh, 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 sense. Honest mistake. Uh, but the reason I bring is because yesterday you just said that the Strait of Hormuz traffic was rising very meaningfully uh is that true and what does meaningfully mean to you?

Uh that that is true um we are we are uh not talking overly about it but this is using the US military to increase flows of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz and uh things are going well.

I I'd like to talk a little bit more detail though, at least more than the word meaningfully, like what what do you what would you consider meaningful? Like, are we talking about many ships? Are we talking about one ship? Um, cuz the " I'm a port watch" seems to indicate that it hasn't actually increased meaningfully.

That that would be incorrect. That data would be incorrect.

OK, so you have a 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 uh the gl- 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 uh what meaningfully means. Is that correct?

That's correct.

OK. And then you also said that um gas under three dollars 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 predic- or predictions of any prices in the future.

But, but you did, OK, yeah.

But this trade of hormones will reopen and energy flows will grow, and prices will come down.

Right, I guess, but you know, a lot of people wanna know when um that's gonna happen, right? And y- I think you said it yourself that under three dollars would probably happen next year, not this year. And so I just w- again wanna know uh what y- what you think. Do you still stand by a statement like that?

Again, again, not not not gonna not gonna engage in those predictions, I I will say the policies of this administration on balance are gonna drive the price of energy down and the previous administration their policies unbalanced drove the prices of energy up. So we're at least, we we have the, 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, that, to achieve that mission has caused short-term disruption.

So would you agree that to get gas under three dollars, we need to end the Iran war?

We need to get, we need to get the flow of oil fully restored through this trade of Hormuz.

So yes, is that, yes, you would agree that the end of the Iran war would be

The the the they're uh what we what you need is fully f- to have flows, un- uninhibited, not meaningfully inhibited flows of energy from the Strait of Hormuz. That is a necessary condition.

OK, I'm gonna move on to a different topic. So you also said that uh data centers lower utility bills, not raise them. Do you still stand by that statement?

Yes, on balance. They 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?

Um, I uh I would uh g- th- they've been developing data centers in your area for a long time, so but it but were data centers the driver of a doubling in the real cost of energy?

Yes.

I would say that that I would say that's false.

And and it's gonna continue to actually increase our energy costs. I can show you my utility bill. Uh, anywhere from twenty-five percent to two hundred percent increases in our utility bills. Only because of data centers, and so we're not taking into consideration other uh increases in data center, uh and energy costs because of other things.

The the Trump administration has been in power for sixteen months. The Repair Protection Pledge and all the deals we have done with data centers are going to put downward pressure on electricity prices. Data centers built five years ago or twenty years ago.

But isn't the repair protection pledge is is that voluntary though? So they don't actually have to protect rate payers 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 rate payers, 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 do you agree that uh diesel

I agree with that.

generators are a solution to our electricity shortage?

Uh, 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. Uh, w- when, when you need them, you, you should run them.

They're very noisy and they're very, uh, cause a lot of pollution and people hate them in my district too. So I'll yield back. Thank you.

Gentlemen yields like to recognize, uh, gentleman from Tennessee, Mister Van Ips.

Thank you, Mister 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. Cold, natural gas, and hydro-powered 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. 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 US national security, and reducing US dependence on foreign supply chains. Instead of shuffling taxpayer dollars toward unreliable intermittent energy projects, this administration is prioritizing the protection of our energy infrastructure as we face sustained cyber security threats from foreign adversaries, like China and Iran. The President's FY twenty-seven 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 systems. 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. The bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security, in co- 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, dr- 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- returning on of a legacy oil field that California in crazily foolishly had stopped producing for twelve years. It's in federal waters. It's producing oil and the processing facilities right on shore 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 thresh- th- 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 wanna work with you and across the agencies about, hey the world's changed, how are we gonna change our policies, how how how are we gonna stop this growing threat?

Right.

Thank you, sir. I I was glad to see that the DOE reorganization result in the creation of Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innova- 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?

Guys, I mean the ro- 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 US 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 pine 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? Um, we're, we're working with others to reopen existing mines, critical as well as processing. You, you know, when, 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 uh with, with that as well to develop processing of that in the United States. Mind 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 re-shore these industries to our country.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

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

Gentlemen, yields like to recognize the Representative Gillen from New York.

Thank you, Chairman.

Five minutes, yes ma'am.

Uh, 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 thirty-two percent 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 twenty percent 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 NSSI pi- 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 NESE pipeline last last I heard, Representative Gillen, I think it will be ready uh not in time for this winter, but it will be ready for next winter, the winter of twenty seven, twenty eight. Um number one, as as you know, and I look, I share 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 gonna have better lives. They're gonna have more job opportunities and they're gonna do it. The Nassau pipeline's 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 uh one of our original thirteen 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 fifteen hundred dollars a year savings.

Mm.

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 fifty 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 I'm here for all three hundred and forty 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. Um, 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. Mister 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 householder households lower their energy costs and saves them twenty percent a year in New York. Secretary, how does the Department of Energy plan to bring down utility bills and help families save on household energy costs?

Yes, uh, again, lots of mechanisms. One of the things we're working on, you mentioned the NESE pipeline, uh, we're also very passionate 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 gas, and as you probably also know that the the local uh oversight board in New York has rated its its the the the capacity as critical, meaning very close to blackouts And it which also limits job opportunities and growth in New York. So we wanna bring more energy into New York. We wanna see nuclear power get going in New York. I'd love to restart the Indian Point uh nuclear facility that was closed, not too far from your 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 gotta electrify your heating. That electricity is coming from natural gas at a power plant. It's much more expensive to do heating electrically than it is straight combustion, particularly of low-cost natural gas.

Mm-hmm.

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. Uh, I yield back.

General, I yield. Uh, I'd like to recognize uh, Mr. Fong from California.

Uh, thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today. I'm I'm encouraged by your work to strengthen America's scientific leadership, energy security, and technological competitiveness. I also wanna thank you for uh for coming to California last week uh to meet with uh our local leaders and energy producers. Uh, your visit underscores the importance of ensuring America and California uh has reliable, affordable, domestically produced energy. And as you know, you started your career uh in uh in Kern County, uh the Central Valley is over seventy percent 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. Uh, 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 forty percent of America's oil. Today it produces two percent and imports sixty percent of its oil from overseas. Uh, during your visit you clearly saw firsthand how state policies have discouraged domestic energy production. uh while increasing reliance on imported uh foreign sources of oil, creating serious energy and national security concerns for our state that is home to thirty military installations and serves as our nation's gateway to the Pacific. Um two questions, uh from DOE's perspective, what are the national security risk associated with increased increased reliance on imported oil uh 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 gas production in California.

Thank you, Representative Fong, as a pro-energy and an energy knowledgeable representative, um, in a s- in a state that's sort of lost its way in energy policy, you play a valuable role, a very valuable role in the United States's most populous state. Not only is California the most populous state, but we have more military installations in than anywhere else. We have something like thirty military installations, of course, served by great Californians that are there to defend our country. But yet the energy that comes to those m- military bases, as you said, over sixty percent of it is oil imported from overseas. Again, only a tiny percent is 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, uh, God bless, we never go to war, 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. 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 thirty 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 Bergen worked through the National Energy Dominance Council to advance policies and projects that increase domestic oil and gas production and expand reliable base load power generation, what steps is the Department of Energy taking today or to ensure the necessary support infrastructure uh is in place? Specifically, how is uh uh 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 we are in dialogue with many businesses in California. Our energy d- dominance financing office, a loan program, it is there to provide capital for people that are gonna build energy infrastructure, that are increased supply and lower prices and increased security. So th- again, that's a all fifty states will do that anywhere and everywhere. Unfortunately, as you know, the business climate to build real infrastructure in California is very, is very difficult. And boy, I I often wonder the net result of that. Think, I I lived in nineteen years in the state of California, just spectacular 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. Um, and with that, I yield back.

Gentlemen, you yields like to recognize Mister Whitesides from California for five minutes. Thank you.

Thank you, uh, Mister 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

Um, so, I, the devil's in the details on the policy, so I probably should be cautious on that but I 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 so I agree with you

Great.

a hundred percent that's that's that's a good investment in energy infrastructure.

Okay, I wanna turn to, great, and I, we've got a bill on that, look forward to working with you on that. Um, 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. In my politically diverse district, uh, California's twenty-seventh, 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 r- results at scale. For example, you're investing in early-stage geothermal and new forms of nuclear, which I bo- 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, well, 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.

Yeah.

So it's essentially, it's a bigger battery.

I know. Okay, you got thirty seconds for your answer.

Um.

So just like whatever, whatever the highlight is, is is the key part for me.

Um. So, the problem of 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.

Wh- which is the cheapest form of energy now, technically. Sunshine, daylight sunshine is the cheapest form of energy available to humans, a word that you like using a lot today. And that is an incontrovertible fact, Mr. Secretary.

I- i- i-

Is it a fact?

It i- it it is, it is not a fact.

It is true. You are an engineer.

It is, it is, 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 math, but I

No, it doesn't depend. It is true.

It it is not.

Are the secretary of energy

The the the the utilization is too low for it.

That is true.

You can't deploy capital and only have twenty four percent utilization factor solar.

What? 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.

It isn't any rational way to measure it and the answer is no.

It is true. Mister Secretary, let's look at the structural reality.

The answer is no.

current conflict in Iran and I'm really disappointed with your answer because that is not true and I I depend on you for facts and you are a factual person.

You have to define the question.

The the it's my time. It is the war in Iran has achieved two devastating own goals against American interests number one it's weaponized global energy prices against American citizens driving up inflation to four point two percent as of this morning and costing Americans somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty billion dollars but second equally important it's handed China a strategic advantage. This crisis has proved China can aggressively reduce its reliance on foreign petroleum, cutting imports by three to four million barrels a day. Here's the point I wanna make. If our strategy traps us in the energy system of the last century, 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.

Gentlemen, yields I'd like to recognize, gentleman from uh Florida, Mister Herodopolis. Thank you.

Thank you, Mister Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here today. And I'm always interested in the politics of this place. Uh Playing politics with energy is never the smart thing to do, because as we recall, during the Biden years, they actually took forty percent of our strategic oil reserves, uh, in an attempt to lower prices because their policies were failing. And I'll just remind people of some of the failed policies, LNG delay, Keystone pipeline destroyed. They, 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 DC games, and it's frustrating because our goal is to reduce the cost of energy and as you know throughout twenty twenty five gas prices were coming down. That was the good news. Yes. The only reason they're up right now is because we have a global threat where a grape 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 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 wanna make sure the electricity actually comes on and it's reliable. Um, so with that, what is the Department of Energy ensuring, doing to ensure that we have dependable, twenty-four seven, not just daylight energy generation, and, and sources like natural gas and nuclear to keep up with the demands on the energy grid?

Yes, uh, thank you, Representative Herodotopoulos, uh, 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 made 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 fifteen 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 twenty percent more electricity than California does. Just common sense. K, g- Florida gets seventy-five percent of its electricity from natural gas. If you're gonna build from scratch today, just 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 wanna stop and reverse.

I, and I think your point, I mean, what we have taken is the, is not one s- one, it's all in energy solutions work, and, and depending of course what part of the country. Second of course, I represent Kennedy Space Center, a congressman of the white sides and I actually worked a lot together on space issues. And uh 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 w- 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'll be operating in space and for, you know, americium to get, you know, short-term uh Um, I got a blanket on the term of these sort of nuclear batteries before we go to reactors.

Mm-hmm.

But you're right, exploring, being a leader in space, being a leader on not just in Earth orbit but in far space, not only great for American science innovation and American spirit, but it'll matter for national defense as well. Na- na- NASA i- 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.

Well, I I couldn't agree with you more, Mr. 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 gonna be things that power us on the moon, and will be there in just a few short years. Uh, Mister Chairman, I do have a couple of uh, additions that I'm gonna add uh, for the secretary can answer a little bit later f- on the record, uh, talking about some issues that are important to our community. And I'll just also mention that again, it's the politics there, it's always interesting. I I I brought up on our last meeting, Mister Chairman, twenty seven billion dollars to the quote greenhouse gas reduction fund. And if you look through who got the money, that's a pretty political situation. I I hope people can look more closely at that so we can get some of those dollars back to actually transform our grid in a positive way. And with that, Mister Chairman, I yield back.

Thank you very much. Gentlemen yields, I'd like to recognize Mr. Menifee from Texas.

Thank you very much, Mister Chairman, and thank you, Mister 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 dims allege. I know that you've accused multiple members of this committee of being untruthful, so I wanna make sure today that we're dealing in facts when we have this conversation. Do you remember in twenty twenty five 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, Mister Secretary?

Uh, uh, I'm sure I did.

OK, 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 of an Atlantic hurricanes in twenty twenty four. Climate change made Hurricane Milton hit as a category three instead of a category two. I'm from Houston, Texas, And I can walk you through where we've had five hundred year storm after storm after storm in the past seven 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.

Th- th- they 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 a hundred and twenty-five 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. Th- th- these are things that could happen. Yes, the sea temperatures

I w- I - I wanna extend a personal invite to you to come down to Houston, Texas, and to tell the families of the folks who are 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. Uh, Mister Secretary, I believe you said before, you testified uh earlier this year that "One of the things I do not

Absolutely.

Houston has flooded catastrophically, repeatedly. Hurricane Harvey in twenty seventeen killed thirty-six people in Harris County, my county, but more than a hundred across the Gulf Coast, and it caused a hundred and twenty-five billion dollars in damage. So that would make it one of the most expensive storms in American history. Uh, 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 f- that funds the science that models how storm systems intensify and 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 twenty twenty-seven budget cuts that department by fifty-four percent from eight hundred and fifty-four million to three hundred and ninety-six million that's about four hundred and fifty million gone. So you believe, and you have stated publicly and testified, that you wanna fund this research and we should not be cutting this research because only governments can do that. But BAR is exactly that kind of long-term investment. So how does cutting it by more than half align with that commitment?

Our 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 of ours. Genesis mission, we're gonna get massively improved ability to track further ahead, where hurricanes are going, where weather systems are going. We have enormous uh money and research going in to get better at understanding these disasters.

Mister 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 B R funding by fifty-four percent?

It does. I mentioned that.

OK.

I said our total investment in science. Well, you, you have to prioritize where to allocate dollars.

I,

I explained why.

I'd like to invite you to Houston and explain to people in the Houston area how a supercomputer um can ensure that a family in Houston is protected from the next hurricane, Harvey. Let's move on. Um, this is not abstract. The House Appropriations Committee already rejected your BER cut, and they funded it at eight hundred million dollars. So that's four hundred and four million more than what your agency requested. So Congress is telling you that this cut is wrong. You say you wanna work with Congress on these budget levels. Will you commit today to supporting the house appropriations level for BER?

Absolutely.

Fantastic. I wanna talk a little bit about grid security. Uh, 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 twenty twenty one, winter storm Uri killed at least two hundred and forty five people in Texas, and caused an estimated a hundred and ninety billion dollars in damage. Now I know that ERCOT is a se- a separate grid 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 twenty twenty seven budget cuts the office of cyber security, energy, security, and emergency response, CESAR, by thirty million dollars. The House Appropriations Committee again rejected your cut and said CESAR should stay flat at a hundred and ninety million dollars.

Gentlemen, his time has expired.

Thank you, mister Speaker, I yield back.

OK. Uh, I'd like to recognize the gentleman from North Carolina, Mister Harrigan.

Well, thank you, Mister Chairman, and uh, Mister 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, ITC's and QPE's? How important are those for the development of new nuclear power?

I I think they will be very important for the development of new nuclear power. I've been I've been a lifelong fan of nuclear, came out of the gates in the nineteen fifty strong, we built a lot of nuclear in the United States, had good economics, you know, and then we just b- didn't build any reactors for several decades, the supply chain is atrophied, um 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, um, 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 thirty-four years like wind power has done. We need, we need five to ten years to get that nuclear ball rolling.

Absolutely. I totally agree with you. And, you know, when utilities 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, the investments in them are, 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

Uh, I very much appreciate both of those answers, and I I agree.

Mm.

I think both facets of that as it relates to nuclear power are absolutely 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 rate payers. It's absolutely mission critical for our country, the future of our market economy, the future of our nation's defense. And I'm I'm very glad to hear you say that today. And just taking a moment of kind of personal explanation, uh, this is exactly why I introduced the Nuclear Rate Stabilization Act. And it's bipartisan legislation. uh, 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 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, uh, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you.

Gentlemen, yields, and I'd like to recognize the, uh, gentleman from Illinois, Mister Foster.

Uh, thank you, Mister Chair, and and to our witness. Um, let's uh, I'd just like to try to clear a few things up. Um, uh, earlier you um expressed enthusiasm for the concept of repurposing naval reactors past their end of life uh for the purpose of, commercial power generation. Uh, this sort of startles me because these things are not designed to be refueled. They're, you know, sub-reactors are in the range of fifty 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, uh, for the record, provide a rough estimate of the dollars per kilowatt hour, levelized cost of electricity for reusing, um, reactors? You don't have to respond, just yes, would you commit to doing that? You don't have to put a lot, don't put a lot.

I've I've never looked at the issue before,

Okay,

but it sure we could.

don't put a lot of work into it, but I think you would rapid,

I know where you're going.

you would rapid, you could rapidly conclude this is not a sensible concept. Um, let's see, you've also eliminated a large fraction of your scientific advisory committees. So how do you, how do you um decide, for example, how to split your investment between, say, inertial confinement fusion and magnetic confinement fusion, without that um expertise? People have spent their careers doing this. getting together in committees and actually looking at the hard issues for each of these technologies. Um, how do you sensibly spend the taxpayers' money after having eliminated that expertise from your advisory councils?

Um, I'm I'm I'm I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to there. We we engage with the fusion expertise with in our administration.

Oh, you know, BSEC, BSEC, HEPAP, you know, all of the advisory councils are some of them that were eliminated, you know, as a part of a general um rejection of 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 gonna work, either commercially or even scientifically, you're wasting taxpayer money. And and what source of expertise do you go different than the advisory committees that used to exist?

W- we get input on fusion energy from the fusion scientists across our labs in academia in the commercial world within the department.

Uh, yeah, yeah, no process that I perceive. I, it just seems like it's all, you know, you get, you announce a bunch of projects without, um, the sort of, uh, independent set of eyes on this. Uh, related to that, you know, it's my understanding that one of the core tenets of gold standard science is scientific peer review. Is that, am I correct in that?

Yep.

Yep, OK. So do you intend to submit your uh climate working group report to independent peer review?

Absolutely, w- we we did. You know, we published the report, we had we had peer review from an interior group.

Wh- which journal, which journal? Yeah, which journal did you submit it to?

We we we got we got a suit from an environmental group that didn't want to have this dialogue. So that process had

But no, no, which I you said yes, what what journal did you

We have not submitted it to a journal yet, that's what I was just explaining.

Uh, do you intend to?

We we we put it out. publicly, it's gotten ten thousand comments.

That is not, so that is not independent peer review. You know, you would submit an article for peer review, it gets rejected cuz 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, I did not say I, we did not intend. We have not done it yet. It's five outstanding scientists. We'd love to submit that and will eventually submit that. It's out there.

Yeah,

And you, and

meanwhile, meanwhile you're using it for, you know, it's my you you were you were in your conversations with uh Representative Foshee, yeah um you said you didn't remember uh that you had conversations on this report with uh Zeldin in in April twenty twenty five. 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 were open about what we were doing across the 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, pr- proud of what we've done and if and if you've got disagreements with with the paper I I'd love to hear them.

Oh, 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 is passed. It's independent scientific peer review and it's distressing that you've decided to bypass that for the purposes of at least attempting to use it for policy. Um, OK, let's see, the another thing that, you know, when the Genesis progress program was rolled out, uh 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 sub-allocations 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 genesis?

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 go- as being used for AI. Those are from the depo- from these departments themselves.

Yeah. Yeah, but that that that sort of dodges the question. You know, if you have a research program that has an independent merit, 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 I hear all the time from my Republican colleagues that, uh, about unfunded mandates, and it seems this is a classic example of it.

Bill Mitch times expired.

All right. Thank you, and you'll be okay.

Gentlemen yields, uh I'd like to recognize uh Mr. Herb from uh 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 you uh for your commitment to grid reliability, resource adequacy in the Rocky Mountain region, particularly with respect to the baseload coal-fired power plants in uh Colorado and and beyond with respect to the two O two C orders and I appreciate that, that commitment to keeping energy costs uh low and keeping that grid reliable in the Rocky Mountain region. Big picture question for you. We're seeing uh forecast for electricity demands uh increases that would have been implausible years ago. What do you see, Mister Secretary, as the the greatest risk going forward? Is it underbuilding generation? Is it underbuilding transmission? Is it underestimating demand? Or something else?

I mean, this

It's the whole system that matters. One of the 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 a hundred times increase in blackout risk. by twenty thirty. In other words, train wreck. First thing we did was stop the closure of coal plants. We stopped seventeen gigawatts of coal plants from being closed last year. Um, 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 wanna 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. So it is a race, things in the electricity grid move slower than I like, but um we need to build quickly if we're gonna reshore manufacturing and lead in artificial intelligence, and I think both of those are critical.

I I agree, Mr. Secretary. Can you talk about a geothermal as well? And and we're not gonna 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. Um, it has a relatively small uh surface footprint for generation. What do you see as the biggest, and we just passed a great uh geothermal energy permitting reform bill uh out of the house earlier uh this month. Mr. Secretary, what do you see as the greatest uh constraint from uh advancing utility scale geothermal? Is it the drilling economics? Is it permitting? Is it transmission? Is it financing? What is it that's keeping 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 my endeavors in geothermal right before taking this job that was also an issue but if you've got state land or or or reasonable permitting forms. Um, you know, there's five hundred 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, um, to build these plants on, you know, somewhere in the western slope out in Colorado.

Great.

But, you know, is the technology viable? Could it happen? Absolutely.

Great. So permitting, that's, that's uh, I appreciate you flagging that bottleneck. One of the arguments for advanced geothermal is that we can, leveraged 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, uh, that transformed the shale revolution?

Yeah, I mean, just the, you know, we look at the total cost per megawatt of installed capacity. And, and, and Representative Hurd, you said right 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, wind, but most of the time, no. That just has no value. But if you can, what we, tis t- t- 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 cuz it was in the winter, and wind output plunged, cuz a high pressure system sat there. So, g- uh, 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 that's in this large underground reservoir. You can increase output when you need it. That's very valuable electricity.

Thank you, Mister Secretary, and thank you also for your commitment to bettering human lives. I think that's what we're With that, Mr. Chairman, my time has expired.

Gentlemen Yields, uh,

Thank you.

I'd like to recognize the uh, gentlelady from California, Miss Rivas.

Thank you, Mister Chair, for recognizing me, um, Secretary Wright, I'm an engineer by training and have spent much of my career encouraging young people, uh, 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 DOE budget proposal. Uh, the president's fiscal year twenty-seven budget proposal proposes more than one 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 and engineers. Uh, 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 en- 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 Science's 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 c- propose a cut in the budget for science. It's just broken into two components. One component is genesis, which is the AI tools used for science. The other component is science. If you add those two togethers, 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,

So

the MSI program that I mentioned is not being cut? Because that's not what it says in the budget.

The w- we 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 or immutable genetics.

Diverse students attend MSIs? you don't you know you don't you're not you don't have to be a minority to attend at 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 um possible to enter STEM. We have a shortage of STEM uh researchers and and we need everyone that is an American um to be trained. Otherwise, they're gonna go to other countries. Uh and that's that's what's happening right now. Uh lots of our scientific talent have nowhere to go here because of 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 instead, but has the DOE conducted any analysis of how harmful cutting these programs will be to our workforce?

Again, our our funding of science is is proposed budget of science is roughly flat. We're not we're not proposing

I'm 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.

Ye- ye- there may be changes in specific programs or the criterion, we're just m- just merit-based. But our our desire to encourage young kids from all backgrounds to go into

Mm.

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 s- science in our country. We've been a leader all of these years, and in the next few years we're gonna see the consequences of cutting these programs.

Gentlewoman's time has expired.

Thank you. I yield back.

I'd like to recognize the gentlelady from New York, Miss Tinney.

Thank you, Mister Chairman, and thank you, Secretary Wright. This has been uh interesting to hear this whole meeting. I just wanna 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 uh, can I just, I know you've answered all these questions, I just wanna ask you, so can we, can you answer uh this, cuz I think you've said it but I wanna 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 and and I support just doing the math, doing the math.

Mm-hmm. Well we I really appreciate you saying that because this is what we need in New York, is common sense. And uh I I could cite all kinds of craziness. I've see listened to some some sadly some Democrats on the other side of the aisle are gonna 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, uh 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 twenty nineteen, 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 ninety percent dependent on fossil fuels, specifically natural gas, while the rest of us in upstate New York are only about thirty percent, and the entire energy grid in New York State is only about forty-seven percent 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, uh they use uh the utility companies to actually collect what they call delivery fees against and and so when they ta- 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, uh, Maryland and Delaware, I think, have had the fastest rise. And and one of the common things is they all produce less electricity today

Right, and yet the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act mandated

So.

that we use less fossil fuels today than we were to uh than we were to use in twenty nineteen. 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. Um, I wanted to say, what could you tell New York State if you were to be able 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 in a, in an all of the above strategy with less subsidies and and lower pricing?

I mean, just dive into the math and get out of the 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 that needle. That needle will only be moved by new energy technologies competing economically and going into global scale. Nuclear is 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 three or four times increase the 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 that 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 a- 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 the some helping us get this nuclear back on track. All of the nuclear power plants that are operational in the entire state of New York are in my district New York twenty four. And we are doing everything we can to get them upgraded. And we appreciate the work you've done, uh, the work, uh, that, uh, 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 uh appreciate your work. Thanks so much. I yield back.

Thank you, Representative.

Gentlewoman uh yields, and I'd like to recognize the uh gentleman from California, Miss Friedman.

Thank you, Chair Babin. Um, 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 Santa Ynez uh unit offshore oil project in California. invoking the Defense Production Act on national security grounds. Uh, 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 uh oil spill in the uh Refugio State Beach oil spill, which leaked a hundred and forty-three thousand gallons of crude oil and devastated coastal communities, marine ecosystems, and local economies. You're aware of that?

Yes, you must, you must maintain and monitor pipelines.

K, got it. So this raises a serious question. And by the way, they've had, as you know, Santa Barbara's 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 seven hundred and fifty dollars per household. How much more will it cost Californians if you spill another hundred and forty-three thousand 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, 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 oil, worldwide oil prices.

So, uh, yes, it's unfortunate that California pert- prevented the repair of that pipeline until we used authorities to get the pipeline

To be clear, there have been hundreds of 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 off-line 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 gonna 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, to make sure that we have some balance with Trump's war of choice. And that's what this is really about. So,

Can, can I make one small comment?

the question is not whether or not we need energy security. We know we need energy security. The question is res- whether restarting a pipeline with a record of catastrophic failure actually advances that energy security and will actually save, 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 would 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 it, what it does do is it risks California and other taxpayer money having to be spent on another costly clean up. Not to mention the irrepr- irreplaceable dam- the b- beaches and the damage that these spills do. This isn't like you just picked this up off the road. When these spills happen, they lead to catastrophic, um, costs for years. I grew up in South Florida. When 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 uh uh 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 uh 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.

Gentleman like to recognize gentleman from California, Mister.

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 sixties and fifties, you uh, or if for that matter if you were 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 uh the oil just offshore in Santa Barbara.

Seven thousand gallons a day is the rate of the seep if that's right offshore Santa Barbara. That the vast majority of all the oil that has ever been on the Santa Barbara, 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 uh uh I have twenty-one Indian tribes in my district and they all traded in their, with their their ancestors, all traded for that outflow to to use the tar and uh and the oil. Um but look, they're entitled to their opinions, just not their facts. And I wanna get into a couple of it. Earlier on, they, you were berated by another Californian, because somehow you, you said that the total cost of solar wasn't uh, just the quote ticket cost of wha- how much it produces per hour when the sun's shining. If you had to look at the twenty-four hour cost at shifting, storing, and putting it back. If you had to look at the production cost, the lost of, loss of land, and the uh, the price of dealing with the uh solar collectors in uh at the end of a a life, does it compare favorably to all other forms of energy?

Several times more expensive, so not twenty percent more expensive, it's like two, three, four hundred percent more expensive to deliver firm electricity from solar.

OK, so one of the things about solar, and I just wanna 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 I think I think in the long run solar will unsubsidized solar will play a role in electricity grids and in and in places like with great resources like California, it should play some role.

And I agree, and uh as as geothermal or twenty-four hour energy and others uh all, being supported by you. I have one small area that may have fallen through the cracks early in the administration. Um, under the Biden administration, as you know, they wanted to kill anything that supported fossil fuels. Um, and they tried to kill, uh, the, uh, uh, the, um, the, uh, energy, uh, E- E- EIF, the energy forum, uh International, I'm sorry, International Energy Forum. They failed because one person at State cared enough about uh uh 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 uh rejoin. It's a relatively de minimis amount, but there's over seventy countries uh, 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 you know overseas friends and international you should rejoin this forum. I wasn't aware of it, but we will rejoin that forum.

Right.

Representative, I said thanks for the reminder.

Thank you. It, 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. Um, the uh, look you've been accused, I wanna give you an opportunity to get back on this, you've been accused of uh basically race and gender discrimination because you prom- wanna promote merit-based solutions. Do you wanna uh finish your comment on - on why merit-based makes more sense, regardless of who happens to get those allotment and training?

E- exactly. Like Martin Luther King was a long time hero of mine and I love his words that he dreamed of a day where And you may have to about a meritocracy.

Thank you. You may have to answer some of this for the record, but briefly, if you could tell 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 a liquification in the future and other d- uh, 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

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 two, three 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.

Gentlemen's time's expired. Thank you very much. Uh now I'd like to recognize Miss 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 Doctor Martin Luther King without adequate context, because quite frankly that is not your expertise, but since you wanna talk about people unqualified and 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, n- I love ending Iran's ability to have a nuclear weapon. I think that's existential for our future.

Do you love, thank you, that was not my question. Do you love inflation, yes or no?

I love ending Iran's

That is not my question.

ability to get a nuclear weapon.

Do you love inflation, yes or no?

No, I would prefer lower inflation.

You would prefer low inflation. Do you know uh that your boss, essentially President Trump, just stated that he loved inflation?

He's a entertaining, hyperbolic guy who's done tremendous leadership, and on balance is driving inflation down.

So it sounds like you were unaware that President Trump just mentioned that he loved uninflation 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 ga- or gasoline uh from Iran in the Strait of Hormuz?

Uh, 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 that the United States has been taking millions of gallons of oil from the Strait of Hormuz?

Just not sure taking's the right word. We're preventing the flow of it.

Absolutely. Well, thank you. Um, Mister Chair, if I may, can I play some audio from some comments that President Trump made in the Oval Office? Okay?

Oh, I love it.

Oh, and the numbers were great.

I love the inflation. I don't think we've we've heard this before.

You know what I realize, I love the inflation. Do you know why? 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 just spend, uh, let's just spend that, please.

billions and barrels of oil Nobody knows it. You know who doesn't know about it? Iran until right now. No.

Uh, Mister 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 oil sales from generating revenue for Iran to f- to spend to develop nuclear weapons and oppress their people.

Mister 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 gonna ask

Um, 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 and we are stopping those tankers from flying.

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, I, 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. Do you have that objection? There are thirteen service people who are dead. There are hundreds more that are injured. But you, we should be talking about war casually.

He treats this war deadly serious, and he has worked tirelessly on this war,

Mister Secretary, you just said that he was a.

monitoring and caring about it.

He was speaking casually about this. He was, it is in context of war.

He speaks twenty hours a day. He speaks twenty hours a day in different styles for different audiences.

But he is a, but he is also, he is the President of the United States of America. He is the Commander of Chief who is responsible for thirteen 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.

Well, I appreciate your attempt to protect your boss and to keep your job. But let me be very clear with you. It is not appropriate to talk about work 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. 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 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.

And a long, rich time's expired.

That is beneath your honor.

Gentlewoman's time has expired. I'd also uh remind the gentleman that uh uh there was thirteen exactly thirteen US service members killed at Abbey Gate in the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan. Who's next? Would like to uh recognize Mister Baird from Indiana.

Thank you, Mister Chairman. I'd like to say too, to add to your comments, uh one of those individuals, thirteen individuals from our district in Indiana. So we have strong feelings about that. Anyway, uh uh, Mister Secretary, we really appreciate you being here. I wanna compliment you and uh the EPA Administrator for coming to Indiana. He 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.

This is my honor.

You know, uh, I guess I guess I wanna start uh with the the fact that Purdue University is a national leader in nuclear science and engineering and as you know houses the nation's first and and only fully digital instrument in instrumented uh nuclear reactor. It's a fully digital digitally Geez, 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 US 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 y- I just I just wanna get a sense from you. Do you feel this initiative is uh uh warranted and necessary? And can you describe how this would benefit uh, 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 twenty years we we admitted China to 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 on the 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 out of neutral and in s- and in powerful gear. And we need to be able to build those large-scale components, uh, components and industrial processes back here in the 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 an in 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 gonna change over to another little area just to get your opinion on Uh, you know, this Congress, I introduced H R twenty eight thirteen, the small modular reactor commercialization act, which would establish a federal working group focused on commercialization and industrialization of SMRs. So would you would you um feel that a 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 we don't have petty uh territorial politics or fighting among it. The NRC has performed tremendously. We, under Chairman Hone, they they 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 uh 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.

Gentlemen yields back.

Thank you.

I'd like to uh recognize Miss McClain Delaney. From Maryland.

Uh, thank you, Mister Chair, and thank you, Secretary Wright, for joining us today. Um, I wanna dial down the drama and just pragmatically address some issues. I represent the sixth 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 our 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 must b- 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, ambitioning itself to lead the global market for next-gen reactors. Maryland, my state, is leading by example. In addition to obtaining thirty-eight percent of our state's power from nuclear technologies, Gaithersburg and Frederick in my district are home to Xenergy, a next-generation nuclear energy company and national leader in advanced nuclear technology. I toured their facility recently. and met their leadership and was very impressed by the innovation. Xenergy didn't come to Maryland by accident. They be- 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 gotta bring more electricity to the game. China's been rapidly growing their electricity production over the last twenty years and we have not. Um, we can. And is nuclear a great technology for that? Absolutely. And one other thing I'd love to say is that you've mentioned Industrial, what we were talking about re-industrializing 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 six.

Fantastic.

OK,

And you deserve credit for that.

and on and on that issue, though, I understand that OMB has yet to allocate more than the three billion appropriated for your department's advanced a- reactor demonstration, and I believe the government should be a reliable partner to the pri- private sector. And I have to say in all aspects, whether it's for our farmers with solar and or geothermal, as Mister heard, um, you know, raised up. And I appreciate that the Department of Energy has advocated for this funding, but it seems that OO OMB has been the bottleneck. Where's the three billion that Congress appropriated for the ADRP in fiscal twenty twenty six and will you commit to pushing OMB to release those funds?

Yes, it's coming. It's coming. I 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 enerby energy production and I really think that in all ways we need to look for refi reliable, affordable power. And so I will be um submitting for the record on uh some of the solar and wind uh technologies and how we need to support them, um 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. Thank you, representative.

General Eddie Yields, like to recognize uh the gentleman from New York, Mr. Riley.

Uh, thank you, Chairman, and uh thank you, Secretary. Uh, I represent eleven counties across rural upstate New York, uh, and when I'm on the community I always ask folks about the conversations they're having at their kitchen table. Um, and I know around here, this idea of kitchen table issues, it's become kind of a political, uh, cliche. Uh, for me it actually, it means something real. Uh, when I was growing up, uh, 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. Uh, and they would write on the envelope, uh, you know, mortgage or utilities or school clothes. Uh, if there was something left over there was, my favorite envelope was for the Binghamton Whalers, uh, tickets. And, uh, I remember those conversations getting a lot harder, uh, 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 cause i wanna hear what they're talking about at the kitchen table and 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

uh-huh

choices between groceries and and 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, uh, last year, uh, first thing I did was launch 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, you know, I know you've discussed some of those today. But one of the most alarming things I found is that each of the three major utility company serving upstate New York is owned by a foreign corporation. And so my question for you is, 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 nation's doesn't

Well, that just sounds like the same old tired arguments we've had for thirty years about the of globalization that I know the elite economists and the out of touch politicians and big corporations wanna shove down our throats because it makes them more profitable. In communities like upstate New York, that has hurt with the working class.

Yep.

Uh, 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 three hundred and thirty-one million dollars in quarterly profits. And you know what they did the very next day? They turned around and demanded another rate hike of twenty to thirty bucks a month for upstate New Yorkers. Nice Egg, owned by Iberdrola. Spanish corporation. Last February, NYSEG shipped a four hundred and fifty million dollar dividend to Spain, turned around six months later, and asked us for a five hundred million dollar rate hike to put the bill forth. 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 NYSEG bill there was a there was a I'll never forget this conversation, a woman in the union, whose husband had worked her enti- 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 sitting in a boardroom in Madrid, taking money out of the pockets of folks in Oneana and Whitney Point. This has gotta stop. This, this, this, this, this corporate greed and money going out of my community to these boardrooms halfway around the world, it's gotta stop. You actually do have uh authority over this. Uh, you oversee FERC, correct?

Uh, it's an independent regulatory body, so.

It's an 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.

OK,

That's correct.

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.

OK. Thank you.

Gentlemen, years 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 ten days for additional comments and written, uh, questions from the members, uh, will be, uh, will be entertained. This hearing is now adjourned. Thank you.

Thank you.