Marcus spent nineteen years at the Energy Information Administration in Washington. His specific work was liquid fuels forecasting — modeling what happens to domestic supply, price, and distribution when something disrupts the flow of oil through a particular chokepoint. He knew the Strait of Hormuz the way a doctor knows an organ. He knew its daily throughput, its historical disruption patterns, the response curves of different refinery configurations to different supply scenarios.

He took the buyout offer in February. Several of his colleagues did not get the offer. They were simply told, by email, that their positions had been eliminated.

In March, the Iran war started. Gas prices rose above four dollars a gallon nationally within two weeks. Diesel topped eight dollars in San Francisco. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve began releasing barrels. Someone at the department was asked to model the supply scenarios. It is not clear, from the outside, who that someone now is.

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The Department of Energy is not primarily what its name suggests. It does not generate energy. It does not operate power plants or drill wells. What it does, at its core, is three things: it maintains the United States nuclear weapons stockpile through the National Nuclear Security Administration; it funds and oversees the national laboratory system that conducts research from basic physics to energy technology; and it produces and analyzes the data, intelligence, and forecasting that the government, the private sector, and financial markets rely on to understand the energy system.

That third function — the analytical and intelligence work — is the part most Americans have never heard of and the part that DOGE cut most extensively.

The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the department, produces the data series that underlie virtually every energy market analysis in the country: weekly petroleum inventory reports, natural gas storage figures, electricity generation statistics, long-range supply and demand forecasts. It is the authoritative source for the numbers that traders, utilities, refiners, pipeline operators, and policymakers use when they make decisions. The EIA lost significant staff. The Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, which tracks foreign energy developments and advises on geopolitical supply risks, lost personnel. The Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, which monitors threats to the electrical grid and coordinates responses to energy infrastructure attacks, lost staff.

The cuts were presented as a reduction in federal bloat — positions that could be eliminated without affecting core government functions.