Trump’s Energy Department Just Killed Jobs In 19 States
It’s a lot easier to kill jobs than to create them. It is much easier to kill innovation than to create it. Trump’s Department of Energy, led by former Texas governor Rick Perry, seems to be taking the easy route.
As reported in the journal Science this week (and first reported by Politico Pro), DOE has halted its process to award $70 million in new grants that its research agency, ARPA-E, had announced this past December. ARPA-E is the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, created to fund high-risk, high-reward new ideas about energy.
Even more alarming is that DOE has imposed a gag order on the program managers, so that scientists have no idea why their funding is being delayed, or it if will ever arrive. According to the Science story:
The resulting uncertainty is having a devastating impact on research teams, scientists say, and even threatens the viability of small companies for whom these major awards are so important.
The move, which came with no warning, leaves many scientists, including young Ph.D.s just starting new jobs, suddenly without jobs. Bloomberg BNA was able to extract this tiny bit of explanation from an Energy Department spokesman:
As with any transition from administration to administration, we have undertaken a full review of all department programs, policies and taxpayer-funded grants.
I’m sure that makes the unemployed scientists and struggling energy technology companies feel much better.
Cutting funding that has already been awarded–and which used money that was already appropriated by Congress–is especially disruptive. How can anyone hire new scientific staff when the federal agency might yank away a grant that it had already announced? The Science story described a young Ph.D. plant biologist from Penn State, Molly Hanlon, who was due to start work next week on one of the new ARPA-e projects, but now she might not have any job at all.
The 26 projects, all of them now on hold, were originally announced by DOE in December. Here are the states that are homes to the threatened projects:
California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia
15 of the 26 projects are led by companies, most of them small companies trying to creative innovative new technologies. The other 11 are housed at universities, including Energy Sec. Rick Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M (so at least we can’t blame Perry for bias). And nine of these 19 states voted for Trump last November.
This isn’t even the whole story. Eight more projects under a different ARPA-E program, ENLITENED, were told in mid-March that they would be funded, Science reports. Just a week later, though, the press conference to announce the awards was cancelled, and the program now appears to be in danger of cancellation.
Read full article at Forbes
