On May 2, the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent a document to the Chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations outlining the White House’s recommendations on discretionary funding levels for fiscal year (FY) 2026.

The document contained recommendations dozens of programs from all Departments in the U.S. Government, some suggesting increases in spending, others suggesting decreases in spending.

The section for the Department of Energy delineated seven programs, and recommended cuts for all of them.

1 – The document recommended completely cancelling the $15,247,000 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), referring to it as a “Green New Scam” originally designed to commit to “build unreliable renewable energy, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and other costly technologies burdensome to ratepayers and consumers.” The OMB also recommended ending “taxpayer handouts” to electric vehicle and battery makers and cancelling the Carbon Dioxide Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, a program created by the previous administration “of so little interest that not a single dollar has been awarded to date.” As such, according to the OMB, “this amount consists of unplanned and unobligated balances, meaning the cancellation would not impact any currently awarded projects.

2 – The OMB also recommended shashing the $2,572,000 Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), which was set up to create stage research and development programming. The OMB added that the EERE “has also been responsible for a slew of unpopular regulations, harmful to Americans in their day-to-day lives, such as banning gas stoves and incandescent light bulbs. This proposal would support technologies that promote firm baseload power and other priorities established in relevant Executive Orders, such as bioenergy.”

3 – The OMB also recommended reducing funding for the Office of Science’s climate change and “Green New Scam research” by $1,148,000. “The Budget maintains U.S. competitiveness in priority areas such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, quantum information science, fusion, and critical minerals,” said the OMB.

4 – The OMB also recommended reducing funding for the Environmental Management (EM) program, which performs activities at 14 active cleanup sites and operates a geologic disposal facility (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico). “The EM topline is being reduced by $389 million, which reflects a reduction of about $178 million for the transfer of responsibility from the EM program to the National Nuclear Security Administration for the Savannah River site in South Carolina, where plutonium pit production capabilities would be developed,” said the OMB. “The Budget maintains the Hanford site in Washington at the 2025 enacted level but reduces funding for various cleanup activities at other sites.”

5 – The OMB also recommended reducing funding for the Advanced Research Project Agency‒Energy (ARPA-E) by $260,000, which it believes is a fiscally responsible level for high risk, high reward research advancing reliable energy technologies and other critical and emerging technologies. “Green New Scam technologies are not supported. Examples of previous ARPA-E projects include $4 million for a ‘wearable thermal regulatory’ system to regulate body temperatures to reduce use of air conditioning units and heaters, and $2 million for virtual reality experiences to eliminate the need for travel on the claim that every roundtrip trans-Atlantic flight emits enough carbon dioxide to melt 30 square feet of Arctic ice,” said the OMB. “ARPA-E also spent more than $55 million on ‘Plants Engineered to Replace Oil,’ a program to eliminate the use of food crops in the production of transportation fuels.”

6 – The OMB also recommended reducing funding for the Office of Nuclear Energy by $408,000, which it claims would reduce funding for non-essential research on nuclear energy to focus on what is truly needed to achieve national dominance in nuclear technology. This includes developing innovative concepts for nuclear reactors, researching advanced nuclear fuels, and maintaining the capabilities of the Idaho National Laboratory.”

7 – Finally, the OMB recommended reducing the budget of the Office of Fossil Energy by $270,000, but restore the function of the Office of Fossil Energy to its original purpose, which is funding for the research of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals.