Congress' Energy Crisis Solution: Bring Back an Office That Funded Women's Empowerment Initiatives Overseas
· Reason
The Trump administration's illegal and undeclared war in Iran has added an estimated $20 billion to customers' spending on gas since late February. Given the proposed "fixes" offered up by Congress, these prices seem likely to escalate into summer.
This week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold a vote on the bipartisan DOMINANCE Act. The bill aims to break China's global grip on critical minerals and secure America's energy infrastructure supply chain through different diplomatic initiatives and new programs. One of these programs is the Bureau for Energy Security and Diplomacy at the State Department, which will closely resemble the agency's Bureau of Energy Resources, reports E&E News. Before being axed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last year, this office oversaw American energy exports and facilitated deals between the private sector and emerging markets.
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This legislation is not the only vehicle that lawmakers are using to reinstate the defunct office. In April, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging him to "reverse the closure of the Department of State's Bureau of Energy Resources" and hire back its workers.
"We need energy expertise to lessen damage from this poorly thought through war and to help navigate its effects on the global energy supply chain," the lawmakers wrote. Without the office, "the U.S. will continue to stumble like a bull in a china shop in geopolitical energy conversations as the situation evolves in the [Middle] East and the Strait of Hormuz. Reinstating the Bureau and its experts is the best course forward for mitigating damage and helping prevent further market shocks that poor planning has done thus far."
These lawmakers are certainly right that the administration's poorly planned war is causing global energy price shocks. However, increasing the size of the federal labyrinth—and rekindling this particular office—hardly seems like the best approach to fix the problem, especially given the historic use of taxpayer money. On top of allocating over $40 million for greenhouse gas emissions reduction efforts in the United States—which were already being generously subsidized by other parts of the federal government—the office directed millions of dollars toward decarbonization efforts in Kazakhstan, clean energy development in the Caribbean, and women-in-the-workplace initiatives in Latin America.
The bureau's absence hasn't hurt American energy production—the U.S. produced a record amount of energy last year, according to the Energy Information Administration. It also hasn't impacted geopolitics, despite what supporters of the office might say.
Weeks after the Iran War began, NOTUS reported on the DOGE-induced cuts to the Bureau of Energy Resources. The argument that several fired workers made to the outlet was that without the office, the administration was ill-prepared to handle or understand the ramifications of its war with Iran on global energy prices. This assumes that President Donald Trump would consult with experts before doing something that he wanted to do anyway. That's a bold assumption, considering this is the same president who didn't listen to economists before implementing an illegal tariff regime that has left the economy and American businesses and consumers worse off.
Even if Trump did listen to the experts on this one, it'd still be concerning that he would need a fully staffed federal office to tell him that bombing Iran and cutting off access to the waterway that transports 20 percent of the world's oil and natural gas is a bad idea and would raise energy prices for everyone.
Congress blaming a lack of experts for this quagmire is another attempt at misdirection to hide the fact that it hasn't been doing its job for years. Congress has had several chances to rein in Trump's war in Iran, but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have repeatedly refused to do so. Instead, they have proposed temporary fixes to deliver relief to consumers at the pump, including carveouts for special interests and suspending certain taxes.
Just like those efforts, resurrecting a federal office is unlikely to stop the rising costs of the war. Until Congress decides to do its constitutionally mandated duty and hold the president accountable, Trump will continue to do whatever he wants, and Americans will suffer. No amount of new federal bureaucracy will change that.
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