Congressmen Move to Cut U.S. Funding for International Energy Agency

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A House committee has approved a bill that the U.S. withdraw its funding to the International Energy Agency as the Republican lawmakers consider that the IEA has strayed from its mission to safeguard energy security and has been pushing green energy policies instead.

The House Appropriation Committee said in a report this week that the IEA “has strayed from its core mission of ensuring global energy security.”

“The Committee finds that the Agency has abandoned objectivity in the critical energy-supply information it produces and, instead, has pursued politicized information to support climate policy advocacy,” according to the report.

“This well-documented shift by the Agency undermines decision-making by policymakers and threatens energy security and the economic interests of the United States. Accordingly, the Committee provides no funding in this Act for the International Energy Agency.”

The bill is included in the fiscal year 2026 legislative agenda, but it will need support from at least some Democrats in the Senate.
Earlier this month, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that the United States could abandon the IEA if the organization, created in the aftermath of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, doesn’t return to forecasting energy demand without strongly promoting green energy.

“We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” Wright told Bloomberg in an interview in the middle of July.

“My strong preference is to reform it,” Secretary Wright added.

The official echoes voices in the U.S. Republican party that the agency has become an advocate of the energy transition and is not objective in forecasting energy demand trends.

From ensuring security of supply after the 1970s embargo, the agency has shifted from this purpose in recent years to endorsing the net-zero by 2050 goal and is advocating for a major change in the global energy system to include more electric vehicles (EVs), renewable power supply, hydrogen, and all other low-carbon energy sources.

The IEA’s forecast that oil demand will peak this decade is “just total nonsense,” the U.S. official said, adding he has been talking to the IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol.

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