Instead of the department of energy striving to promote energy conservation and sustainable, non-polluting electricity generation, it is feeding the LLM craze. New department motto: "burn, baby, burn".
Large compute projects such as an open language model aren't too far from their usual. You could easily argue the race to AGI is the closest thing to a modern Manhattan Project we've had in some time.
Whether that's a good allocation of resources is debatable, but from a national strategic perspective this makes sense, since private industry has pulled out of government contracts before in the LLM space (see Anthropic), this is just hedging their bets.