Chris Wright Had a Very Busy First Week as Trump’s Energy Secretary
Making American Gas Affordable….while allowing DOGE to look under the hood at his department.
The last time we checked on Chris Wright, President Donald Trump had tapped the CEO of an innovative fracking company to be the new Secretary of Energy.
Wright’s appointment was on-brand for Trump’s new template for candidates: innovative, open to new energy development approaches, and unconnected to the Deep State.
And while the press was focused on the collapse of the USAID slush fund, Wright got to work on enacting Trump’s ambitious energy agenda.
In a wide-ranging departmental order late Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright called energy “the essential ingredient that enables everything we do” and ordered changes to how the agency will approach home appliances, nuclear power, gas exports and more.
“A highly energized society can bring health, wealth and opportunity for all,” Wright said in the order, obtained by Fox News Digital.
…Wright crafted a mantra of “Advance Energy Addition – Not Subratction” and noted how “great attention has been paid to the pursuing of a zero-carbon future.”
“Net Zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of the energy system and undermine our energy and national security,” he said, signaling he would dispatch with such ‘green’ initiatives.
His to-do list includes refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was drained by the Biden administration.
As President Trump has stated, the SPR is a national asset that protects our security in times of crisis. It must be refilled. Unfortunately, the SPR is currently at historically low levels. We will not permit this to become a new status quo. Moreover, the Department will review SPR infrastructure and develop appropriate plans to safeguard this important strategic asset.
Completely ending Biden’s War on Appliances and assuring Americans have a full range of market-based choices will also be part of the agenda.
The DOE’s order also outlines a plan to begin a comprehensive review of the agency’s Appliance Standards Program to make home appliances and products more affordable for Americans and promote consumer choice for appliances. The Biden-Harris administration led a push toward regulating the use of certain gas appliances, including introducing several stringent efficiency rules for gas stoves and some water heaters.
Making American Gas Affordable may be an apt motto for the Energy Department under Wright.
We’ve had four years of an administration that’s done everything it could to raise the cost to produce a barrel of oil. There’s been a lot of nonsense.
The agenda of this administration, this president, is to bring back common sense.
We've had four years of an administration that's done everything it could to raise the cost to produce a barrel of oil. There's been a lot of nonsense.
The agenda of this administration, this president, is to bring back common sense. pic.twitter.com/NJ1mvDEeNt
— Secretary Chris Wright (@SecretaryWright) February 8, 2025
All of this is happening as Department of Government Efficiency staff begin their work at the Energy Department..
There appears to be less drama there than at other agencies… so far.
DOGE staffers who are working at the Department of Energy do not have access to U.S. nuclear secrets, Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC in an interview Friday.
“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” Wright told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan in an exclusive interview. One of the core responsibilities of the department is maintaining and modernizing the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The secretary said three staffers from the Elon Musk-led advisory team that the Trump administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency are working in the Energy Department’s offices.
“I know exactly who they are,” the secretary said. “They run through, checked by our security, and they have access to look around, talk to people and give us some good feedback on how things are going.”
Finally, for those complaining about the brave, young men of DOGE reviewing government operations, I will note that they appear far more sane, trustworthy, and reliable than those appointed by Biden… especially the one who was in charge of our nuclear waste.
Democrats made this person deputy assistant secretary for spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste for the Department of Energy.
I'll take my chances with any 23-year-old DOGE hires. https://t.co/Fg6Y83ocb3 pic.twitter.com/jxbzXyD2UE
— Adam Johnston (@ConquestTheory) February 7, 2025
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Comments
Ban electric cars and allow for coal conversions like in ww2. I’d love to see Prius, moon bats freak out stuck behind a Tahoe belching coal smoke and towing a hitch of refueling, charcoal behind it.
One of the DOGE developers wrote software that picked out a couple hundred characters from a scroll flash-burnt into carbon 1960 years ago; I suspect if he wanted to figure out nuclear “secrets” he could do it on his own.
Yup. Every time I hear one of the guilty (if they had nothing to hide, they wouldn’t be shrieking, right?) whine about the “children” of DOGE, I want to dare them to put up their resumes against the kids’. I doubt I’d have any takers.
Good move to let the market decide. It’s downright cruel to force appliance manufacturers to make things like water heaters, stoves, refrigerators, and HVAC equipment that ordinary people can’t afford to buy.
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Sam Brinton was awesome ! The quintessential Biden appointee. It was non binary , incompetent and completely media hungry. Also Sam proved that intersectionality never works out the way progressives think . As all Sam wanted was to steal the clothing of African fashion models at airports. Yup any change from that clown is a step up.
He had a top secret clearance, having passed a deep background check, and worked in the Office of Nuclear Energy having access to all kinds of computers and top secret data—yet Republicans never took him to court to revoke his access.
Yep. Sam having a Q clearance and the position he held condemns the DOE as a clown outfit. The whole thing needs to be abolished with the exception of the NNSA which can be spun off as an agency like the old AEC. Keep the EIA too which provides data to the public.
Wright has a lot of reforming to do. DOE might actually be the worst of the departments. They hide behind all encompassing classification SRD (secret restricted data) and its variants. Note in particular the doctrine of “born classified,” where anyone’s work can be rendered classified. You need not have signed anything, had clearance, or used any kind of classified material.
The DOGE team needs to have a Q clearance with a high sigma level. They should investigate the National Ignition Facility (NIF) which has never ignited, gone on for decades, and at times been way over budget. Potential whistle blowers fear for their lives. The CIA does assassinate people, and not just foreigners. Read “Target Patton” by Wilcox. The OSS, which morphed into the CIA, used Douglas deWitt Bazata as a professional hit man. Wilcox interviewed Bazata, and presents a mountain of evidence about Patton’s assassination. Lots of critics have attacked the book because the material is inflammatory, and makes FDR and the Democrats look bad.
I am uninformed so I had to look it up:
“A Q Clearance is equivalent to a U.S. Department of Defense Top Secret clearance. According to the Department of Energy, “Q access authorization corresponds to the background investigation and administrative determination similar to what is completed by other agencies for a Top Secret National Security Information access clearance.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_clearance
Yes, but every holder of a Q clearance has a sigma level, which determines what the holder has access to. All it takes is approval from an appropriate manager to increase or decrease the sigma level. An SRD document carries a classification level that applies to the whole document. One classified word and the whole document is SRD. Compare and contrast to DOD documents where every paragraph has a classification label like “[S]” or “[C].” The whole business is very tricky. Two emails, each unclassified, become classified. A newspaper article can get stamped with a classified label depending on context. Someone from the outside can give a talk which becomes classified. Then we have the old “PRD.” Protect as restricted data. Neither fish nor fowl. Wen Ho Lee was in solitary confinement for 9 months for downloading PRD. Eventually the judge wrote a public letter of apology to Lee stating that “the prosecutor lied to me.” or words to that effect. There is much more than what Wikipedia tells you.
Its clear that the classification of documents is highly implicated in hiding and burying wrong-doing within these agencies.
The only solution appears to be white hats from outside the beltway universe being given access to what are no doubt mountains of pointless and pointlessly classified data.
What an American Spring would be possible if we could free ourselves from this vampire Leviathan of a government.
Sam Brinton in a red dress is also a confirmed thief.
It has been a long time since an actual energy expert headed the DOE. This is a welcome change. I have been reading Chris Wright and reports about Chris Wright at Powerline Blog for a number of years.