New Energy secretary visits New Mexico

LOS ALAMOS — Energy Secretary Chris Wright toured Los Alamos National Laboratory Monday and said the two national labs in New Mexico will see no immediate impacts from federal layoffs and budget cuts.

The visit fulfills a promise Wright made to Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., during his confirmation hearing to visit Los Alamos and Sandia national labs. Wright is scheduled to speak about his Sandia National Lab visit on Tuesday morning. Increasing oil production was one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises, while at least one renewable energy source — wind energy — has been the subject of his ire. The country will need increased energy production, according to Wright, because of the boom in artificial intelligence.

“AI is the next Manhattan Project,” Wright said. “This is an incredibly fast-moving science and pace, and it’s critical that we win this race as well. It’s equally harrowing if we end out second and behind in AI. It’s hard to overstate the importance and the impact AI will have in defense, in economics, in science.”

Wright is a fossil fuel executive with expertise in fracking, who also invested in a geothermal energy company and has a degree from MIT in mechanical engineering. Wright plans to divest from his companies, he said during his confirmation hearing. On Monday, the new Energy secretary said he’s wanted to visit Los Alamos since he was 15 and joked that if a job opens at the lab, he’d be in line to apply.

“As a kid in high school, I was very fascinated in nuclear physics and astronomy and the Manhattan Project, as this incredible coming together, engineering effort,” Wright said.

Wright’s first Secretarial Order, signed Feb. 5, included a command to modernize the country’s nuclear arsenal, which includes work at Los Alamos and Sandia to produce new plutonium pits. Wright said he’s pleased with the progress he saw on plutonium pit production during his tour of Los Alamos. Wright received briefings from top LANL officials and had the opportunity to visit the plutonium pit facility, the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility and the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

That order also included strengthening the country’s electric grid, including the transmission system.

“There will be aggressive efforts from the DOE and across our government to grow electricity production, technologies to make our grid more robust and technologies to make our grid smarter,” Wright said.

Wright did not address how the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate the Department of Energy Grid Deployment Office, which is meant to “catalyze the development of new and upgraded electric infrastructure,” according to its DOE website, aligns with strengthening the electric grid.

Although Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk have been working to radically reduce the size of the federal workforce and promised significant cuts to federal spending, Wright said those cuts are unlikely to impact the national labs in New Mexico.

“I think you will see if there’s an impact, it would be incredibly modest, but likely zero impact,” Wright said.

Both labs are managed by contractors, so many of the employees are not directly employed by the federal government. Despite this, some members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation have been concerned about potential cuts to federal employees involved in the work the national labs are doing.

“The federal employees are like the heartbeat that keep these programs running,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., in a recent interview. “All those external contracts don’t run if you don’t have federal employees running them.”

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency made headlines recently for laying off some National Nuclear Security Administration employees, the DOE agency that oversees nuclear weapons and the labs, then quickly rescinding some of those layoffs.

Wright said no DOGE employees have been given clearance to access sensitive data about the national labs, and he does not foresee that happening.