Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) unveiled a sweeping reorganization aimed at “strengthening efficiency and unleashing American energy dominance.” While these ambitions sound bold — accelerating technology, expanding energy production, and cutting bureaucracy — the structural changes inspire more questions than confidence. The new alignment signals a clear shift in priorities: offices dedicated to clean energy and energy efficiency have been renamed, consolidated, or eliminated, while new divisions elevate hydrocarbons, fusion, and a combined Office of AI & Quantum. In total, eight offices with mission-critical responsibilities have been dismantled as part of the restructuring, implementing much of the restructuring proposal outlined in Project 2025 and fundamentally reshaping the agency’s role in advancing clean energy and innovation.
This realignment comes on the heels of nearly a year of capacity cuts that have already strained the agency. Several thousand members of the DOE workforce have departed amid this administration’s DOGE-driven efforts, leaving critical functions understaffed, institutional knowledge depleted, and staff morale undermined. The erosion of large-scale demonstration and deployment capacity, and the structures that supported it, raises serious concerns about DOE’s ability to drive energy innovation at scale and implement real-world infrastructure upgrades. At the same time, sectors that rely on DOE’s support are witnessing a general loss of capacity at the agency, eroding trust in government and its ability to deliver on its stated mission.
Looking ahead, this reorganization poses important long-term questions: how would one rebuild the structures necessary for large-scale demonstration and deployment? How can DOE rapidly respond to growing domestic energy challenges amid reduced capacity? And how can the agency restore staff morale, retain institutional knowledge, and rebuild trust with the sectors that rely on its leadership? Far from delivering efficiency or strength, this reorganization risks institutionalizing the losses and instability at DOE that have already been set in motion.
Exacerbating Staff Losses and Project Cancellations
The reorganization has been marked by limited communication with DOE staff, leaving many employees uncertain about how their roles and teams will be affected. Concerns about potential reductions in force have heightened anxiety among DOE staff, and a poor transition to the new organizational structure could drive additional staff to depart of their own accord. Either or both would compound the effects of previous layoffs, the Deferred Resignation Program, and other aggressive staffing actions already undertaken by the administration on DOE’s workforce capacity.
While some turnover in staff is to be expected at the start of a new administration, this administration has pursued an unprecedented and aggressive series of actions to reduce the federal workforce. Early on, DOE leadership laid off probationary employees en masse—sources range between 555 to up to 2,000—and placed 25 staffers from the Office of Energy Justice and Equity on leave.
The biggest impact on career staff has been the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), which incentivized employees to voluntarily resign with pay and benefits through the end of FY25, or risk losing their jobs in future reductions in force. DOE staff data obtained by FAS show that 3,051 federal employees took the DOGE-sponsored DRP offer. (FAS will soon release a report with more analysis of this data.) Given this significant attrition, it is imperative that DOE leaders determine how to best transition staff into their new roles, to maintain as much certainty as possible as the agency navigates ongoing capacity challenges within a new structure.
Lost capacity will also impact DOE’s awards. Nearly 350 projects across multiple DOE offices have received cancellation notices, issued either in May or October. Awardees — many tied to offices now eliminated under the reorganization — have reported slow or nonexistent communication from DOE even before the restructuring took effect. As DOE’s political leadership moves forward with mass termination actions, recipients are left attempting to navigate informal dispute processes or pursue mutually acceptable resolutions with limited guidance or transparency. Reversing independently vetted, merit-based technical awards at this scale is highly unusual and has already brought about significant dysfunction, raising serious concerns as the reorganization proceeds.
The broader instability created by this upheaval will likely make it harder for the hundreds of businesses and state and local governments that are seeking to contest their grant terminations, as well as the thousands of other organizations that administer DOE-funded projects in service of the American people.
Clean Energy Innovation & Deployment Impacts
The reorganization also dramatically reshapes offices responsible for clean energy innovation and deployment. At a time when electricity prices are rising, demand growth is outpacing new supply, and grid infrastructure is aging, stepping away from applied innovation and deployment programs is a costly mistake that threatens affordability and reliability.
Most notably, the reorganization creates a new Office of Critical Minerals & Energy Innovation, with significant breadth and responsibility and a direct line of report to the Secretary. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), which among other things manages DOE’s work to make it easier to build new renewable energy projects and improve U.S. industry, will now mostly be consolidated under this office. The new office’s name signals a potential deprioritization of energy innovation behind critical minerals priorities. It also raises questions: how will renewable energy, manufacturing, industrial, and built environment programs — all essential to energy affordability — be integrated and staffed? How will existing programs under EERE and other offices be reorganized within this sprawling new structure? Will applied innovation and deployment functions, like supporting states with improved siting and permitting of new power plants, continue to exist?
For critical minerals, consolidating work previously scattered across FE, EERE, and MESC may improve program coordination and definitely elevates this important issue. The office reports directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary, reflecting a top-down, highly centralized approach to managing critical minerals programs. However, there is no dedicated funding line for critical minerals, raising questions about how funding will be pieced together for this office and long-term program sustainability.
This new restructure also eliminates the offices of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), Grid Deployment (GDO), Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), Fossil Energy (FE), and State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP). While elements of these offices and their programs may wind up in the large new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, shuttering these offices emphasizes a de-prioritization of their functions and missions by DOE leadership.
Additionally, to meet our urgent energy infrastructure challenges and ensure that innovations translate into real world impact, the US needs to be building large-scale demonstrations of the newest energy technologies domestically. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) did just that. It supported first-of-a-kind or next-generation projects to de-risk technologies to enable quicker commercialization. This new organizational structure nearly fully guts any remaining demonstration and deployment apparatuses at DOE.
For critical minerals, consolidating work previously scattered across FE, EERE, and MESC may improve efficiency and elevate this important issue. The office reports directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary, reflecting a top-down, highly centralized approach to managing critical minerals programs. However, several details remain unclear: there is no dedicated funding line for critical minerals, raising questions about long-term program sustainability.
On another technology front, consolidation of geothermal and fossil programs could be a good outcome for geothermal innovation. The reorg creates a new Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Office, which merges the Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) with the Fossil Energy Office (FE). Previously, both GTO and FE were housed under the Office of the Under Secretary for Science and Innovation (S4); the new combined office will now report to the Office of the new Under Secretary for Energy (S3). One way to conceptualize this merger is as an “Office of Underground Resources,” which could be a logical alignment given the technical and operational overlap between geothermal and fossil energy programs. The restructuring may also provide an opportunity for geothermal to access additional funding streams that were previously less available.
Impacts on Basic Science
The DOE reorganization introduces major shifts with significant implications for the agency’s basic science mission, particularly in fusion and quantum research.
One notable change is the creation of a dedicated Fusion office under S4, a move long advocated by industry. Pulling fusion out of the Office of Science (SC) may make sense at this stage: the field is transitioning into applied programs that require outcome-oriented management. Still, critical basic research needs remain — particularly around plasma-facing components like the blanket — which demand the scientific rigor and oversight traditionally provided by a science-focused office. Separating fusion from the broader SC could help reconcile the tension between applied and basic work, but execution will be key, particularly in light of DOE’s ongoing workforce reductions. Industry perspectives have been overwhelmingly positive, and former Fusion Energy Science staff reportedly also view the change favorably. Under the Office of Science, fusion increasingly had to compete with more fundamental research projects that push the boundaries of human knowledge, as opposed to energy technology.
By contrast, the creation of a combined Office of AI & Quantum raises deep concerns about both scientific coherence and organizational capacity. Quantum information science (QIS) is still largely in a foundational research phase, relying on robust support from the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Basic Energy Sciences (BES), High Energy Physics (HEP), and other programs in the Office of Science to build knowledge to eventually transfer technology into industry. If quantum information science and technology programs are pulled out of the Office of Science, it could risk destabilizing established programs that benefit from their close interaction with fundamental research activities while prematurely advancing commercial quantum solutions.
Grouping quantum with AI — a technology already widely deployed and primarily application-driven — conflates fundamentally different stages of development, obscuring programmatic priorities and scientific needs. These structural choices are particularly risky given DOE’s (and particularly the Office of Science’s) massively depleted workforce, not to mention the enormous costs and operational challenges associated with large-scale federal reorganizations. Lost productivity and gaps in institutional knowledge could delay critical research, compromise collaboration across DOE-operated laboratories, and weaken the nation’s basic science enterprise at a moment when long-term investment in emerging technologies is most urgent.
Additional structural alignment concerns extend to offices like the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC, formerly OTT), which spans both applied and basic domains but is more appropriately aligned with applied energy offices rather than SC. Conversely, the creation of OSTR is an interesting development: previously, functions such as liftoff reports and AI/data center analyses were handled in-house by specific program offices, and centralizing these functions could improve coordination if implemented effectively, but they could also limit the expertise and detail that made these reports valuable in the past. Similar challenges exist as a result of the Department’s reorganization of its scientific advisory committees into a single entity earlier this year.
Questions Remain
The DOE reorganization leaves several critical questions unanswered, raising concerns about the agency’s ability to deliver on its stated mission:
- Budgeting and appropriations: How does this new structure align with existing appropriations accounts, and will it make budgeting even more complicated for Congress, DOE leadership, and program offices?
- Workforce capacity: With DOE’s workforce already reduced by nearly a third over the past year, can the agency realistically execute such sweeping changes without undermining mission-critical programs, basic research, and demonstration and deployment efforts?
- Mission alignment: How does the reorganization of energy innovation and deployment offices advance the administration’s goal of “delivering affordable, reliable, and secure energy for the American people” – or does it risk leaving a critical gap in execution? Also, what are the actual missions of these new offices and where have programs under previous offices been moved?
- Product value: Does the consolidation of responsibilities into coordinating functions improve efficiency, or does it water down the products produced and released by the Department? The volume of earlier products produced by the Department may have been difficult to track, but the domain-sensitive expertise built into recommendations generally represented a gold standard of policy analysis and mission-orientation.
These remaining questions highlight the tension between ambitious structural change and the practical limits of an understaffed, under-resourced agency. This large-scale agency reorganization threatens DOE’s ability to sustain scientific leadership, advance clean energy deployment, and address the nation’s energy affordability crisis.
