Top image: The Herbert C. Hoover Building, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Commerce, in Washington, May 2024. Photo: Tony Webster / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In the final stretch before the midterm elections, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has put two cabinet secretaries on the clock. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San José has given Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright until 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6, to answer a backlog of oversight requests from committee Democrats, three days after Election Day.
Lofgren sent the letters on Friday, Oct. 16, and her office publicized them in a release on Oct. 19. Their language is unusually blunt for correspondence with cabinet secretaries.
“Rather than providing the requested information in a comprehensive and timely manner, DOC has failed to produce a single responsive document, communication, or record,” Lofgren wrote to Lutnick. “In fact, the Department has not even formally replied to any of my oversight requests in nearly two years, let alone provided responsive answers to my questions. This is unacceptable.”
To Wright, she wrote that the Energy Department’s “non-responsiveness to Committee oversight during the 119th Congress has been unacceptable,” adding that a lack of cooperation “will merely strengthen our commitment to employing all the tools at our disposal to hold the Department accountable.”
What she is asking for
The release links to the letters but does not summarize their contents. According to a detailed account by The Digital Free Press, each letter runs six pages and is copied to the committee’s Republican chairman, Rep. Brian Babin of Texas.
The Commerce letter, that account says, lists 10 outstanding requests. They include documents on reorganization and reduction-in-force plans first requested on March 11, 2025; information on at least 34 NOAA facility leases; contacts with SpaceX following personnel firings at the Office of Space Commerce; and the department’s $1.6 billion equity stake in USA Rare Earth, publicized in January 2026. The letter, as described, also asks about Cantor Fitzgerald’s role as an agent in the transaction and a meeting between Lutnick and a USA Rare Earth executive in November 2025.
The Energy letter lists 11 requests, according to The Digital Free Press. Among them: the one-page portfolio reviews behind grant terminations, including the May 30, 2025, cancellation of 24 Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations projects worth about $3.7 billion; the legal basis for folding that office into a broader departmental reorganization in November 2025; and the extended paid leave of an Energy Department official. The account says DOE missed an earlier Sept. 28 deadline and had previously responded on the personnel question that “as a matter of policy, DOE does not comment on personnel matters.”
The letters do not, by that account, threaten subpoenas, which the minority cannot issue on its own. Republicans control the committee.
The administration’s position
The Energy Department has defended the grant cancellations at the center of the DOE requests. Announcing the May 2025 terminations, Wright said “the Trump administration is doing our due diligence” on taxpayer-funded awards, according to the department’s release. The department said the 24 projects “failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable, and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” It noted that 16 of the 24 awards were signed between Election Day 2024 and Jan. 20, 2025, and estimated the savings at more than $3.6 billion.
The Commerce Department has not publicly responded to Lofgren’s letter, based on a review of its public statements.
Why it matters here
Lofgren represents a San José-based district at the center of the South Bay’s tech and research economy, and the agencies at issue touch it directly. Commerce houses NOAA and the Office of Space Commerce and runs the federal government’s technology-industry programs; DOE funds the national laboratories and the demonstration grants that clean-energy and industrial companies compete for. How those agencies are reorganized, and how they spend, shapes the federal science enterprise that Silicon Valley has relied on for decades.
The long view
Minority oversight letters rarely produce documents on their own. Their value is in building a record: a dated request, a documented non-response, and a public deadline that can be revisited if control of the House changes in January. That is the plainest reading of Lofgren’s timing. The Nov. 6 deadline falls three days after an election that will decide who chairs the Science Committee in the 120th Congress. If Democrats win the House, Lofgren would be in line to lead it, and these letters would become the opening exhibits of a far more powerful inquiry. If Republicans hold it, the letters remain a marker of questions the administration chose not to answer, or answered on its own terms, as Wright has on the grant cancellations.
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