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As it turned out, Congress acted on that proposition first, approving it by lopsided margins. The DOE, as it is already being called in Washington, immediately became the tenth largest Cabinet department in number of employees (nearly 19,000) and seventh biggest in spending ($10.5 billion budgeted for fiscal 1978).
As one senior White House energy expert puts it: "The new department is a curious kind of hybrid." Among other things, it inherits the entire Federal Energy Administration, the Federal Power Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration and some 50 functions now performed by other agencies throughout the federal bureaucracy. It has a management responsibility, including the huge Bonneville dam project, a weapons research-and-development complex stemming from the old Atomic Energy Commission, and a huge research-and-development program that explores energy sources from wind to thermonuclear fusion. The new department will also create some new sections, notably an Energy Information Administration, which will develop reliable statistics about oil and gas output and reserves, and an Economic Regulatory Administration, which will audit and police the energy companies more closely.
There is no time to waste; very soon the new department will get its legislative mandate. The few changes that the House made in the energy package mostly involved expendable parts. The legislators scrapped Carter's plan to give tax rebates to buyers of small cars, because they feared that the plan would amount to a subsidy for imported autos, which have captured 18.7% of the U.S. market. But the House kept heavy taxes on buyers of big gas-guzzlers. Carter's recommendation for graduated increases in gasoline taxes, which could have totaled 50¢ per gal. within ten years, was dropped, and the House also defeated a substitute proposal to raise the 4¢ per gal. federal gas tax by 5¢. That setback was no great loss; there is a suspicion in Washington that the 500 proposal was planned in the first place as a throwaway to give Congress something to kill. Also the President could not sell the House on giving him power to order factories to switch from oil or natural gas to coal as fuel—but the House did enact a special tax on plants that fail to make the switch.
Otherwise the President's program remained intact. In a crucial vote last week, Carter's supporters in the House turned back a move to deregulate natural-gas prices completely and backed the President's proposal for continued controls —though permitting a price increase. On a few points, Congress has actually been moving to toughen Carter's bill. The President, for example, proposed setting higher energy-efficiency standards for seven types of appliances; the House increased the number to 13, including TV sets and washing machines. And the Senate energy committee voted last week not just to tax but to forbid outright, beginning with the 1980 models, the sale of autos that do not get at least 16 m.p.g. Pondering these results, some of Carter's energy planners now express an ironic regret: they wish that they had sent Congress a tougher package.