Congress eyes return of State Department energy bureau as lawmakers seek to address energy-price spike tied to Iran conflict

The vehicle for the effort is the bipartisan DOMINANCE Act—formally the Developing Overseas Mineral Investments and New Allied Networks for Critical Energies Act, designated H.R. 7037—sponsored by Representatives Young Kim, a California Republican, and Ami Bera, a California Democrat. On May 13, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the measure unanimously, by a vote of 45 to 0, sending it forward with more than two dozen bipartisan co-sponsors. The legislation was developed in coordination with the Trump administration and has drawn endorsements from a politically diverse roster of outside groups, including the Atlantic Council, the Bipartisan Policy Center Action, ClearPath Action, the Climate Leadership Council, the Progressive Policy Institute, Third Way, and SAFE's Center for Critical Minerals Strategy.
At the center of the bill is the creation of a new Bureau of Energy Security and Diplomacy at the State Department, led by a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary. The bureau would serve as a central hub for U.S. strategy on energy security, critical minerals, infrastructure, and supply-chain resilience, integrating functions that are currently scattered across regional and functional offices. The legislation would also establish an Office of Energy Security Compacts to coordinate energy and mineral agreements with allied nations, formalize U.S. participation in the Minerals Security Partnership—a multilateral initiative launched under the Biden administration—and direct the department to prioritize rehiring staff who lost their jobs when the predecessor office was eliminated. Rounding out the bill are workforce provisions: a new Fulbright-style fellowship and visiting-scholar programs aimed at training a pipeline of experts in mining engineering and critical minerals, enhanced Foreign Service Institute training, and encouragement to appoint a special presidential adviser for critical minerals and supply chains.
The proposed bureau would closely resemble the State Department's former Bureau of Energy Resources, which connected U.S. exporters of oil, gas, and renewable-energy technology to overseas buyers and managed sanctions tied to oil, gas, and other natural resources before it was dismantled in 2025 as part of the Department of Government Efficiency's federal reorganization. Its remaining functions were folded into an economics and business affairs section at State. Proponents of revival contend that rebuilding that institutional capacity would give the department the staff and expertise to negotiate energy deals, manage export initiatives, secure mineral supply chains, and engage foreign partners—tools they argue are essential to reducing reliance on strategic competitors, above all China, whose grip on the global critical-minerals supply chain lawmakers across both parties describe as a national-security threat.
The legislation is not the only push to restore the office. In April, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging him to reverse the bureau's closure and rehire its workers, arguing that energy expertise is needed to limit the damage from the war and to navigate its effects on the global energy supply chain. Without the office, the lawmakers warned, the United States would continue to stumble in geopolitical energy negotiations as the situation in the Middle East and around the Strait of Hormuz evolves, and would be less able to prevent further market shocks. Some of the staff fired in the DOGE cuts had voiced similar concerns: weeks after the war began, those former employees told the outlet NOTUS that the administration was poorly positioned to anticipate or understand the consequences of the conflict for global energy prices—warnings that supporters of reinstatement now cite as evidence of the bureau's value.
The backdrop to all of this is an acute and escalating energy crisis. The administration's military actions against Iran, and the resulting near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz—a waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil and natural gas passes—have driven fuel prices sharply higher since late February. By one estimate, the war has added some $20 billion to what American consumers have spent on gasoline, with prices widely expected to climb further into the summer. The disruption has rippled through the broader economy as well, contributing to a rise in inflation. It is against that pressure that lawmakers have reached for the energy bureau as a response.
Critics, however, question whether reviving the office would do anything to blunt the near-term price pressures driving consumer pain at the pump. They point to the bureau's past spending priorities as evidence that its mission drifted well beyond hard-nosed energy security: while active, the office allocated more than $40 million toward domestic greenhouse-gas emissions-reduction efforts—programs already being subsidized elsewhere in the federal government—and directed millions more toward decarbonization work in Kazakhstan, clean-energy development in the Caribbean, and women-in-the-workplace initiatives across Latin America. To skeptics, reconstituting such an office adds federal program spending and bureaucratic headcount while addressing only long-term diplomatic capacity, not the immediate problem.
Skeptics also argue that the bureau's absence has not measurably harmed American energy interests. U.S. energy production reached record levels last year even without the office, according to Energy Information Administration data, suggesting domestic supply was not curtailed by its elimination. And the deeper critique is one of accountability rather than capacity. The argument that the administration lacked the experts to foresee the consequences of its actions, critics contend, presumes the president would have heeded such advice—a doubtful assumption given his willingness to override economists on tariffs. By this view, it should not require a fully staffed federal office to recognize that striking Iran and choking off a waterway carrying a fifth of the world's oil would send energy prices higher.
That tension—between structural fixes and direct oversight—is what the DOMINANCE Act ultimately brings into focus. Its backers frame the bill as a durable investment in diplomatic expertise and supply-chain security that will pay dividends well beyond the current crisis. Its opponents argue that the immediate driver of higher prices is the administration's war itself, and that no new federal office can halt rising costs or substitute for Congress doing its constitutionally mandated job. Lawmakers have so far declined repeated opportunities to rein in the conflict, with members of both parties resisting votes to constrain it, while pursuing temporary palliatives instead—special-interest carveouts and proposals to suspend certain taxes, including talk of a federal gas-tax holiday. One avenue floated for advancing the bureau language is to attach it to the coming defense authorization bill; a parallel Senate effort from Senators Chris Coons and Pete Ricketts would establish a similar energy-security office. Whether a majority ultimately treats rebuilding diplomatic energy capacity as a serious response to the disruption, or as an inadequate stand-in for holding the administration accountable, remains the central question the debate leaves unresolved.