This will come as a shock, but the Department of Energy is one of the largest funders of basic and applied science in the US. Remember it owns and operates a number of the national labs, including Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Berekely, Argonne, SLAC, Fermilab, and Brookhaven. For historical reasons having to do with understanding radition effects it has alwasy funded a lot of work in the biological sciences as a consequence of which is has a large number of unique capabilities. Because of these, and the fact that DOE has lead the large scale high performance computing effort, it was largely responsible for the human genome sequencing effort.
Now, to be clear, DOE itself is just a sprawling federal bureaucracy of middling competence. But the laboratories it operates are first rate.
Thanks!