“The luster is long gone on DOE’s silver anniversary,” says Schatz

(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) took the occasion of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 25^th birthday on Tuesday to call for the bureaucratic behemoth’s elimination.

“On its silver anniversary, the Dept. of Energy is no longer shining, not that it ever did,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said.  “As with most commodities, markets do a better job providing energy than government ever will.  After a quarter century of federal and state government meddling, are we closer to energy independence than we were in 1977?  As current oil prices and the recent electricity crises indicate, no we are not.  Today the energy industry is over-taxed, over-regulated, and government has made a complete hash of national energy policy.”

“The Energy Department was created in 1977 as a temporary response to the energy crisis,” Schatz continued.  “But as Ronald Reagan used to say, the closest thing to immortality on this Earth is a temporary government program.  Eliminate the DOE, and move its essential role, control of the nation’s nuclear programs, to the Department of Defense.” 

“To the extent that energy prices have spiked and dipped over the last two and a half decades, it is much more tied to regulatory impediments, abusive tax policies, and inflationary/deflationary spikes, than to any failure of the market,” Schatz continued.  “Besides being a make-work program for 20,000 federal workers and 150,000 contractors, DOE’s core accomplishment has been to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars, year after year, to corporate welfare and goofy alternative energy schemes.  Shouldn’t my car run on sunshine and my house have a windmill by now?”

The DOE has grown to a bloated $21 billion budget per year, with multiple missions and questionable priorities.  Its SynFuels program spent half a billion dollars on alternative fuel research before being abandoned.  Since its inception, the DOE has been plagued with controversy and management problems.  Report after report from the General Accounting Office over the years has blasted the agency for mismanagement, yet reform remains elusive.  CAGW supports Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) in his on-going effort to eliminate the Energy Department.

“We don’t have a federal Department of Shoes to give us footwear,” Schatz concluded.  “We don’t need a Department of Energy to give us power.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.