Oil and the Department of Energy

This is one of several dozen statements in an e-letter entitled Walmart and the Morons that was forwarded to me: 

g.. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before.

We use oil whether radical environmentalists like it or not and we don't have to rely on foreign hostile countries for our needs.  We not only have enough for ourselves right here but enough to make us competitive on the world market.   The current price for gasoline in Saudi Arabia, according to the Internet,  is 22 cents a gallon.  In Kuwait it's 16 cernts.  The prosperity we would enjoy by using our own energy supplies of oil and natural gas would provide all the capital needed for research and development of renewable sources of energy.