Project 2025 on Energy (just a start, remember)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 23, 2024

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 covers federal energy policy in some detail. The agenda is largely free market, and the subtle politicization of means and ends under the Biden/Harris Administration is identified for reform.

This document is congruent with the very brief Republican Party energy platform, “Make America the Dominant Energy Producer in the World, by Far”. But it falls short of true classical liberalism, as exemplified by my general approach to free market energy; the call by the Cato Institute to “zero out” the U.S. Department of Energy (2011); and end all preferential energy taxation (in 2013); and IER’s American Energy Act (2011).

The energy sections of Project 2025 follow verbatim. I offer a final comment on some of the missing initiatives.

A conservative President must be committed to unleashing all of America’s energy resources and making the energy economy serve the American people, not special interests. This means that the next conservative Administration should:

• Promote American energy security by ensuring access to abundant, reliable, and affordable energy.
• Affirm an “all of the above” energy policy through which the best attributes of every resource can be harnessed for the benefit of the American people.
• Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which established new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs.
• Unleash private-sector energy innovation by ending government interference in energy decisions.
• Stop the war on oil and natural gas.
• Allow individuals, families, and business to use the energy resources they want to use and that will best serve their needs.
• Secure and protect energy infrastructure from cyber and physical attacks.
• Refocus the Department of Energy on energy security, accelerated remediation, and advanced science.
• Promote U.S. energy resources as a means to assist our allies and diminish our strategic adversaries
• Refocus FERC on ensuring that customers have affordable and reliable electricity, natural gas, and oil and no longer allow it to favor special interests and progressive causes.
• Ensure that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission facilitates rather than hampers private-sector nuclear energy innovation and deployment.

Mission Statement for a Reformed Department of Energy

• The Department of Energy should be renamed and refocused as the Department of Energy Security and Advanced Science (DESAS). DESAS would refocus on DOE’s five existing core missions: Providing leadership and coordination on energy security and related national security issues,
• Promoting U.S. energy economic interests abroad,
• Leading the nation and the world in cutting-edge fundamental advanced science,
• Remediating former Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear material sites, and
• Developing new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors

Eliminate special-interest funding programs. Many DOE energy funding programs are not targeted on fundamental science and technology; instead, they focus more on commercialization and act as subsidies to the Department of Energy and Related Commissions private sector for government-favored resources. The DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED); Office of State and Community Energy
Programs; ARPA-E; Office of Grid Deployment (OGD); and DOE Loan Program should be eliminated or reformed. If they continue to exist, FECM, NE, OE, and EERE should focus on fundamental science and technology issues, particularly in relation to cyber and physical threats to energy security, rather than subsidizing and commercializing energy resources.

Eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. In addition, Congress should reform the Natural Gas Act to expand required approvals from
merely nations with free trade agreements to all of our allies, such as NATO countries.

Focus the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) on ensuring that government buildings and operations have reliable and cost-effective energy. FEMP should stop using taxpayer dollars to force the
purchase of more expensive and less reliable energy resources in the name of combating climate change.

Ensure that information provided by the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), a data and statistical organization, is data-neutral.

Focus FERC on its statutory obligation to ensure access to reliable energy at just, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory rates. FERC is a five-member commission created under the DOE Organization Act that
regulates the wholesale sales and transmission of electricity, promotes electric reliability through standards, permits natural gas pipelines and LNG export facilities, sets natural gas pipeline shipping rates, and sets oil pipeline shipping rates. It is an economic regulator and should not make itself a climate regulator.

Streamline the nuclear regulatory requirements and licensing process. Such changes would help to lower costs and accelerate the development and deployment of civilian nuclear, such as advanced nuclear reactors (including small modular nuclear reactors). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is commission tasked with the licensing of civilian nuclear reactors and power plants and regulating other uses of nuclear materials, such as nuclear medicine. Although it is not a DOE agency, its jurisdiction over nuclear reactor, fuel, safety, and trade issues often relates to or impinges on DOE’s jurisdiction.

Focus on energy and science issues, not politicized social programs.

The next Administration should stop using energy policy to advance politicized social agendas. Programs that sound innocuous, such as “energy justice,” Justice40, and DEI, can be transformed to promote politicized agendas. DOE should focus on providing all Americans with access to abundant, affordable, reliable, and secure energy, and DOE should manage its employees so that everyone is treated fairly based on his or her talent, skills, and hard work.

Analysis

A better, more thorough-going free market energy agenda would correct or add the following:

• Replace “‘all of the above’ energy policy” with consumer-driven, taxpayer-neutral “energy policy, through which the best attributes of every resource can be harnessed for the benefit of the American people.”
• Eliminate the civilian programs of the U.S. Department of Energy rather than “Refocus [DOE] … on energy security, accelerated remediation, and advanced science.”
• End all government subsidies to nuclear power.
• Abolish the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rather than reform it, which would require repealing enabling legislation such as the Federal Power Act of 1935 and Natural Gas Act of 1938.
• Privatize the energy assets of the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, and other energy agencies,

Numerous other federal laws should be repealed, including the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Public Utility Regulatory Practices Act of 1978, and the Energy Policy Act (various years).

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[1] The Cato Institute’s Handbook for Policymakers does not include a chapter on energy, and it ducks the whole issue of climate change in the environmental chapter. Peter van Doren is the culprit here.