DOE Office of Science SC

The Atomic Energy Act of August 1, 1946, gave the new Atomic Energy Commission control of the laboratories built for the Manhattan Project and a mandate to pursue basic research. Those research programs passed to the Energy Department in 1977 as the Office of Energy Research, renamed the Office of Science in 1998. It is led by a Director and overseen by the Under Secretary for Science and Innovation.

The Office of Science funds research in high-energy and nuclear physics, fusion energy, materials and chemistry, biology and environmental science, and advanced computing, spending roughly $8 billion a year. It oversees ten of the seventeen national laboratories, including Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and SLAC, and builds and operates large user facilities such as particle accelerators, X-ray light sources, and supercomputers used by tens of thousands of researchers from universities and industry. Oak Ridge's Frontier became the world's first exascale supercomputer in 2022.

Its supercomputers and data have become central to national efforts in artificial intelligence and quantum information science, and it partners with technology companies on new machines. The administration's 2026 budget request proposed cutting its funding, and a 2025 Energy Department cap on overhead payments to universities was challenged in court. A federal court vacated the cap in June 2025, and the government dropped its appeal in March 2026. Supporters said the moves would focus spending and reduce administrative costs, while scientists and university groups warned they would slow research and cede ground to China.