John Deutch was a young chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he joined President Jimmy Carter’s energy team shortly after the Georgia Democrat took office in January 1977. And for the next 3 years Deutch had a front-row seat to history as Carter, who died on 29 December 2024 at age 100, worked to make the country less dependent on imported oil and in the process reshaped the direction of federal energy research.
Within 6 months Deutch would become the founding director of the Office of Energy Research at the newly created Department of Energy (DOE), the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the short-lived Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). It was led by his political mentor, economist James Schlesinger, who had been secretary of defense under former President Gerald Ford and who had extensive Washington, D.C., experience in both foreign and domestic policy.
DOE was created “to take a broader approach to an important national issue, which was energy,” recalls Deutch, who spoke with Science shortly before Carter’s body was set to begin its journey from Georgia to Washington, D.C., for a 9 January funeral service.
Schlesinger wanted the Office of Energy Research, the forerunner of DOE’s current $8 billion Office of Science, to be organized “not by fuels, but by the pathway of innovation.” Deutch’s job was to oversee early discovery, he explains, whereas a second assistant secretary managed the development of new energy technologies. The two units would also coordinate programs to maximize their potential impact.
The structure recognized that the old saw that “scientists came up with new ideas and engineers applied them” was outdated, Deutch says. “That’s why I liked that it was called the Office of Energy Research, not the Office of Science.”
Meeting DOE’s mandate also meant launching programs outside the legacy energy sources, notably fossil fuels and nuclear power, that had been the mainstay of DOE research under its predecessor agencies. “We felt the new department needed to fund high-quality fundamental research in emerging areas like photovoltaics and geothermal, areas that had not been traditionally strong in the prior ERDA or AEC time,” Deutch says. “For example, one of the first things I did was create a bioenergy section.”
At the start, Deutch says he faced resistance from the network of DOE national laboratories, rooted in the wartime Manhattan Project to develop and deploy the atomic bomb, that were now funded by the new office.
“There was huge suspicion of somebody from outside the national laboratories becoming head of the research program,” he says, “and more importantly, someone who was a chemistry person, not a physicist. They believed that physicists knew better” how to manage energy research.
However, Deutch wasn’t fazed by those who questioned where the new agency was heading. “I had the complete support of the secretary,” Deutch explains, “and people knew that.”
Thanks to his close ties to Schlesinger, Deutch was given a broad portfolio that included U.S. efforts to block the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He also oversaw research on synthetic fuels, an area that became a priority for the Carter administration and spawned the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, an ill-fated attempt to wean the country from its dependence on foreign oil.
Deutch was also part of a U.S. delegation to China led by Frank Press, Carter’s science adviser, that scouted out possible areas of scientific collaboration with China after it emerged from the cultural revolution and reached out to the West. Energy research was high on their shopping list of technologies. And soon after the bilateral agreement between the United States and China was signed in July 1979, Deutch says, DOE began funding Chinese students to come to the U.S. to earn graduate science and engineering degrees. (Last month, despite the rising tensions between the superpowers, the two countries agreed to another 5-year extension of that original agreement.)
Although the Carter administration tried hard to get people in the U.S. to conserve energy and to find alternatives to foreign oil, including putting solar panels on the White House, climate change was not a significant part of OER’s portfolio under Deutch. He recalls getting $20 million one year to study the effects of rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “But there was really no competence in that area within the department at the time,” he says. “And its importance was not yet clearly recognized except among a very restricted set of environmentalists.”
Deutch says he was able to concentrate on energy policy writ large because the ERDA staff he inherited was “extremely capable, so I didn’t have to worry about the nuts and bolts.” But a big challenge was convincing national lab directors that the new department was a friend, not a foe.
“I was looking for people who had a vision of the future of energy research, beyond their prior emphasis on nuclear weapons,” he says. “Many of them were eager to participate in the new areas. But some of them wanted the labs to continue to be what they had been. So sometimes I had to pick up the phone. And I wasn’t subtle.”
Neither was his boss. Both men had well-earned reputations for wielding sharp elbows when pursuing what they wanted. Schlesinger used that bare-knuckled approach in getting his way on the choice of DOE’s future headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The original plan was for DOE to occupy ERDA’s current location near the city’s Union Station. “But Jim hated that building,” Deutch explains. “So one day we drove around Washington and he found the building that he wanted just off the National Mall.”
The building, named after the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, was then occupied by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other military units. But that didn’t stop Schlesinger, Deutch recalls.
“He went back to his White House office, which was just next door to Carter, dictated a two-line memo that said this building will be switched from the Department of Defense to the Department of Energy. And Carter signed it.”
Harold Brown, then defense secretary, “went crazy,” Deutch adds. “He didn’t like that Jim hadn’t given him a heads-up. But that was the point. It sent a signal that he, Schlesinger, had more influence with Carter than Brown.”
That influence eventually waned. Carter fired Schlesinger in August 1979 as part of a wholesale purge of his Cabinet. (Schlesinger died in 2014 at age 85.) Deutch rose to the fourth-ranking position at DOE under Carter and 2 decades later would return to Washington, D.C., as CIA director under former President Bill Clinton. Today, at age 86, he is emeritus professor at MIT after serving as chemistry department chair and provost.