By Arathy Somasekhar and Stephanie Kelly
HOUSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government’s energy statistics arm is set to lose dozens of employees after the Trump administration’s latest round of resignation offers, putting at risk some of the most closely watched energy reports globally, five sources told Reuters.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes weekly, monthly and annual data that includes figures on oil and gas output, crude and fuel inventories, and price forecasts – all of which are used by traders and energy companies as indicators for future supply and demand, and which can move prices.
One of the sources told Reuters that as many as one-third of the EIA’s roughly 300 to 350 employees had left or had accepted buyouts since the start of the year. Other sources, including three employees of the EIA, said the departures amounted to dozens.
“As far as continuing publication, it’s hard to say. I can’t envision how, over time, they’ll continue,” one of the sources said about the weekly energy data.
New project developments at the EIA have been put on hold or delayed, three of the sources said, without specifying what those projects involved.
The EIA did not respond to a request for comment.
The departures at EIA come as more than 2,600 U.S. Department of Energy staffers have opted to take resignation offers, with offices on power grid stability and loans for high-tech energy projects hit hard.
The DOE is conducting a department-wide review of its organizational structures, a DOE spokesperson said in response to a request for comment for this article.
“No final decisions have been made and multiple plans are still being considered,” the spokesperson said.
The EIA is perhaps the only government agency in the world to report such detailed statistics, so market participants closely track its publications to inform trading decisions.
It also puts out smaller write-ups for the general public, narrating trends in the energy sector and helping breakdown jargon. Industry analysts use EIA data to build their own models and or to corroborate their models.
The agency’s data, analyses, and forecasts are independent of approval by any other officer or employee of the U.S. government by law, according to its website, freeing it from bias.
“The EIA data contributed greatly to price discovery and it leveled the playing field. It would be very damaging to not have that data,” said John Kilduff, a partner with Again Capital who has looked at the data weekly and used it as an input for every model in more than 20 years.
“This is information that will be closely held by companies that I don’t think would be necessarily shared with the industry,” Kilduff added.
(Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston, Stephanie Kelly in New York, Valerie Volcovici in Washington D.C.; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
Comments