1 / 8 He doesn’t seem to understand what the DOE actually does.

“They’ve never created one bit of energy, the best I can tell,” Perry <a href="http://newhampshireprimary.blogspot.sg/2011/10/rick-perry-eliminate-department-of.html" target="_blank">said</a> during an October 2011 campaign stop in New Hampshire. “Our energy industry has to be freed up from the overregulations. We need to have a domestic energy policy that is for America to be independent on our own energy within eight years.”<br><br>But here’s the problem with Perry’s assumptions about the DOE: Only a tiny fraction of the department's work actually involves energy production. <br><br>That is “overwhelmingly a job for the private sector,” William Tobey, a former deputy administrator at the National Nuclear Security Administration, <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/15/a-lesson-for-rick-perry-the-department-of-energy-doesnt-produce-much-energy/" target="_blank">wrote in December 2016 in Foreign Policy</a>. <br><br>The DOE has two primary focuses: nuclear energy, security, weapons and cleanup, which accounts for some <a href="http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2016/12/13/13936210/rick-perry-energy-department-trump" target="_blank">60 percent of the department’s $30 billion budget</a>; and research and development relating to such things as finding cleaner ways to use and produce energy.<br><br>“The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/rick-perry-energy-secretary-trump.html" target="_blank">Rick Perry choice is so perplexing</a>,” former Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who for many years led the committee that oversees the Energy Department’s budget, told The New York Times last December. “I think very few people understand that the Energy Department, to a very substantial degree, is dealing with nuclear weapons. And Rick Perry suggested the agency should be abolished. That suggests he thinks it doesn’t have value.”

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP