Wright, a former fossil-fuel executive, has run the Energy Department less as a scientific agency and more as an industry advocacy shop. A federal judge ruled that Wright and DOE violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by using a secret climate working group to shape policy — and the EPA overturned its own endangerment finding within weeks, based largely on that same working group’s recommendations. This year, the Trump administration admitted outright that clean energy grants had been canceled for political reasons, not merit — an admission that undercuts years of claims that funding decisions were purely technical. Wright’s department also greenlit the Saudi Arabia nuclear deal that skips the IAEA’s “gold standard” inspection protocol, positioning the U.S. to help expand a Gulf monarchy’s enrichment capacity without the oversight nonproliferation experts say is the entire point of such deals.