US Energy Department unfairly criticized over spending

LONDON: The US Department of Energy has become a lightning rod for criticism in parts of the Republican Party and the fossil fuels industry unhappy about the Obama administration’s energy and climate policies.

US presidential candidate Rick Perry promised to abolish the Department of Energy along with the Departments of Commerce and Education during a debate in 2011.

Perry’s views on the department’s usefulness may evolve now he has been selected to lead it in a future Trump administration.

But Trump’s transition team has been waging its own war against the department sending it a detailed 74-item questionnaire about climate policies, forecasting and the work of career civil servants and officials.

Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has described the questionnaire as disconcerting and troubling.

Cantwell warned the transition team “may be preparing to take arbitrary action against civil servants and government contractors” for doing their jobs and implementing the policies of the Obama administration.

“The questions even challenge the independent data analysis functions performed by the Energy Information Administration,” she wrote in a letter to the outgoing secretary of energy.

The transition team has subsequently said in a statement the memo was not authorized as part of its standard protocol and the author has been properly counselled.

But while the incoming administration may have backed away from the questionnaire, the skepticism and hostility to the Department of Energy and its mission in some quarters remains very real.

Much of the criticism is based on a misunderstanding about what the department actually does and the policies for which it is responsible. clean up of past nuclear activities.

Congress appropriated $27.4 billion from the Treasury for expenditure by the Department of Energy in fiscal 2015.

Appropriations for “atomic energy defense activities” accounted for $17.1 billion, or nearly two-thirds of the total.

Congress appropriated $8.2 billion for weapons activities, $1.6 billion for nonproliferation programs and $1.2 billion for naval reactors.

Congress also appropriated almost $5 billion to clean up sites contaminated during the Manhattan Project and Cold War atomic weapons research and manufacturing programs.

None of this atomic-related spending is controversial. So the political disagreements center on the $10 billion per year the department spends on other energy programs.

Of that sub-total, the department spends $5 billion per year on science including advanced computing ($540 million), basic energy research ($1.7 billion), high energy physics ($766 million) and nuclear physics ($596 million).

The politically contentious Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy (APRA-E) received an appropriation of just $280 million in fiscal 2015.

Most of the controversy centers on the fossil energy, renewables, and energy conservation programs and other small items which amounted to around $5 billion in total.

The contentious elements of Department spending amount to less than 0.2 percent of all money spent by the federal government.

Even that overstates the controversy because many programs, including electric reliability, are not seriously disputed.

The Energy Information Administration received funding of just $117 million in fiscal 2015.