What Is It?

It has a birth date of 8-4-77. No, it is not the date of my son and his bride’s anniversary; they were married 8-4-84.

It has an employee count of 16,000 plus over a 100,000 contractual personnel. I was tempted to write “workers” instead of “employees.”

It has an annual budget of $24,200,000,000.00. This does not include the government pension drawn by those persons who retired after 20-25 years.

It is a branch of the United States government.

It is called the Department of Energy. Believe it or not, it had an established purpose at its inception. Do you remember what the reason was for starting this new governmental department? Come on now. You know that State exists to manage international relations. You know that the Department of the Treasury is all about money. You are more than well acquainted with the Defense Department’s role in maintaining the armed forces.

This department, signed into existence by then president James Earl Carter, was created to “reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” With those 116,000 employees and a total outlay approaching a trillion dollars what exactly has been the reward for our investment? I’ll help you with this—next to nothing.

Thanks to the barriers raised by this department, we do not have sufficient nuclear plants generating energy. They have saddled domestic oil producers with regulatory mandates which have nearly crippled the industry. They have suckered into almost every cockamamie scheme offered by the enviro-nuts for highly subsidized wind and solar power scams (Sorry Boone Pickens; I don’t buy it.) which are not sustainable. They have attacked domestic coal from every possible angle. They are actively engaged in the prohibition of access to rich sources of crude on our sea shores. Somehow, they imagine that this is consistent with their mission statement to “reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

Their entire posture is geared to do just the opposite. If they had the scientific know how, they would probably be working on a plan to cool down the geo-thermal energy which is available in the bowels of the earth. I certainly don’t hear of any grandiose plans to exploit this invaluable resource.

We have a relative who is retired from this department, who I have queried about some of the responsibilities he had while actively employed there. He condescendingly informed me that most of his work was “hush-hush”—classified information which he couldn’t share. I can certainly appreciate why he was reluctant to talk about it. Most people who are part of an out and out scam are reluctant to share details of how it works.

It is just one more example of a bureaucracy gone mad with “make work” to hamstring a vital segment of our economy. I have come to the conclusion that there are an alarming number of people who absolutely despise this nation. The disappointment comes with the realization that they are my fellow citizens. They are not Mexican drug warlords, radical Islamic terrorists, or fascistic jealous euro-centrics who fear the power of the dollar and the American military: they are an enemy within. Some arrived at this point with false information spread in our colleges and universities. Some have other unidentified beefs with a system which somehow let them down. Other couldn’t keep up in the chaos of a free market society. Whatever their personal take on life in the land of the free, they abhor it and want to tear it down. God help us.

In His abiding love,

Cecil Moon