Net Worth: $170 Million (Bloomberg)
Who is Chris Wright?
- Chris Wright is Trump’s centimillionaire Secretary of Energy. He made his money as CEO of Liberty Energy, an oil and gas company.
- Wright donated over $225,000 to Trump’s joint inaugural committee in 2024.
- Liberty Energy and its subsidiaries have been repeatedly fined for health and safety violations. The company was fined over $14,000 in March 2022 for an OSHA violation that killed an employee at an Exxon worksite. Just a bit earlier in the year, it had been fined $35,000 for an OSHA violation that led to an employee breaking their bones after being struck by a crane and falling 13 feet. In 2023, the company was fined a total of $14,000 for two OSHA violations, including a failure to protect employees from chemical hazards.
- Liberty was initially fined $15,625 for each violation in 2023, the maximum penalty for a serious violation at the time. The fines were lowered to $7,000 each through a formal settlement.
- Before joining the administration, Wright was on the board of small modular nuclear reactor company Oklo, which has received grants from the Department of Energy and depends on DoE permit approvals for its business plan, potentially constituting a conflict of interest. Shares of the company jumped 15% following the news that Wright had been selected as Secretary of Energy.
- Wright has publicly downplayed the climate crisis. He once compared climate science to eugenics, and he drank fracking fluid on video to undermine the idea that fracking poses public health risks. He has said that “there is no climate crisis” and called climate change “the new North Star of leftism” after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
How is Wright advancing Trump’s pro-corporate, right-wing agenda?
- Wright has been leading the administration’s roll back renewable energy funding. As Energy Secretary, Wright canceled $7.5 billion in clean energy grants, halting over 220 projects for everything from improvements to electric grids to reductions of toxic methane leaks. In January, a federal judge ruled that several of the cuts were unlawful because they intentionally targeted states led by Democrats in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
- Wright took a leading role in the US’ commandeering of Venezuelan oil after the administration captured former President Nicolas Maduro. After the operation and a month of US pressure, Wright visited Venezuela to tour its oil facilities with acting President Delcy Rodriguez. Wright and the DOE have been working to entice US oil companies to enter Venezuela and ramp up production in the country.
- Wright has also been a top administration spokesperson attempting to ease concerns about high gas prices resulting from the war in Iran. Shortly after the start of the war, Wright claimed that gas would fall below $3/gallon within a few weeks. By April, Wright revised his prediction saying it “could happen later this year […] but prices have likely peaked.”
- Under Wright’s leadership, the Department of Energy has also boosted nuclear energy, especially small modular reactor companies like Oklo, where Wright previously sat on the board. Oklo was selected for the DOE’s Advanced Nuclear Fuel Line Pilot Project and its Reactor Pilot Program, two programs that facilitate the fast tracking of participants’ permitting and development of reactor and nuclear fuel projects. Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte was also appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
- The DOE also created the Utility Power Reactor Incremental Scaling Effort (UPRISE) to incentivize utility companies to increase the capacity of their nuclear plants. The DOE will reportedly provide up to 80% of financing at “attractive interest rates” to program participants.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.