Energy Secretary Rick Perry last week called out a little-known energy technology incubator as one of the reasons the department “has had and is having such a profound impact on American lives.”

At the annual summit for the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy last Wednesday, Perry said the technology born in the nursery for energy startups is “impressive” and “simply a preview of our possibilities.” Based on that review of ARPA-E, who would think the Trump administration is trying to shut it down?

For two years in a row, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating ARPA-E, an agency tasked with promoting and funding breakthroughs in energy technology. (Its famous cousin DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, funds research for new weapons for the Pentagon.)

In its latest budget request to Congress, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said the private sector - not the government - should play the “primary role” in funding research into new ways of generating electricity and powering vehicles.

Yet both publicly and privately last week, political leaders at the Energy Department indicated they stand behind the program. (Continued below.)

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Congressional Democrats, along with several powerful Republicans, are keen to keep the agency funded. And Perry, himself a former appropriator when he served in the Texas House of Representatives, appears more receptive to lobbying from Democrats than some of the more adamant members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. The back-and-forth between him and lawmakers is a throwback to how budgets in Washington used to be written.

And ARPA-E has proven to be resilient in the face of the broad budget cuts sought by the OMB and its director, Mick Mulvaney, a small-government advocate who rode the tea-party wave into Congress in 2010. The agency was born out a bipartisan agreement in 2007 and funded as part of the economic stimulus in 2009.

“Despite the administration’s budget,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., told APRA-E summit attendees Wednesday, “we’ve been assured from the Department of Energy that the secretary fully supports this program.” Before the speech, a political appointee at the department briefed Bennet’s staff on Perry’s views on ARPA-E, the senator’s office said.

Perry was scheduled to deliver the remarks in person at the summit before he was called away to testify Wednesday before a Senate panel on Trump’s infrastructure plan.

Delivering his remarks remotely, Perry said: “I deeply regret I couldn’t join you in person. . . . However, while you’re here I hope you will enjoy the many high-potential, high-impact technologies ARPA-E has moved out of the lab and towards deployment.”

One day later, Perry was on Capitol Hill to defend the president’s proposed budget in front of a House Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water issues. Yet Perry reassured Democratic lawmakers he still values the work of some offices for which the Trump administration proposed to cut funding.

“This subcommittee is extremely interested in any proposed changes to ARPA-E,” said Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, the top Democrat on the energy appropriations subcommittee. “That’s kind of like the gold star. It’s where we invent the future.” Kaptur has privately lobbied DOE officials about ARPA-E, her office said, in addition to penning an editorial in the largest newspaper in her district, the Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

“Ms. Kaptur,” Perry responded, “you have my commitment that I’m going to work with this committee. . . . We’re going to honor and follow instructions.”

Perry added, “If it’s the will of this committee for ARPA-E to exist going forward in some form or fashion, I hope that you will have confidence that not only have I done this before as a governor, but that we’ll have good successes and that we can stand up together and say, this is how it’s supposed to work. This is a good return on investment for the American taxpayers’ dollars.”

Renewable-energy advocates took Perry’s words as a sign of encouragement.

Greg Wetstone, head of the lobbying group American Council on Renewable Energy, said Perry is “not obviously disowning the administration’s budget proposal but he’s certainly showing a willingness to go along with what clearly is going to be Congress’s intent.”

Wetstone continued, “There is an underlying theme here: Don’t take the administration’s budget request very seriously.”

The prospect that ARPA-E could survive the budget knives were grimmer a year ago.

Last May, Trump unveiled his budget proposal that called for killing ARPA-E. Funding was put on pause and, a month later, the House energy appropriations panel voted to advance a bill formally eliminating the agency.

Quickly, though, firms and land-grant universities receiving ARPA-E grants, many in red states, made noise about losing a source of funding. By July, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, chairman of the subcommittee, made a point of publicly supporting the program.

“I think ARPA-E is a good program myself, as I’ve said earlier, and I’ll say it again so that maybe it’s heard all the way down at the Forrestal Building,” Simpson said at a subcommittee hearing, referring to DOE’s headquarters.

That summer, ARPA-E was back to announcing new funding opportunities. In December, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, determined the Trump administration violated the law by withholding ARPA-E funds earlier that year.

Created by a law signed by former President George W. Bush in 2007 and first funded by former President Barack Obama two years later, ARPA-E is freestanding office within DOE designed to operate nimbly to fund breakthrough energy innovations.

Last year, a congressionally mandated National Academies of Sciences assessment concluded ARPA-E is a success story so far, one that is “making progress toward achieving its statutory mission and goals.”

Among the achievements so far according to the report: 581 scientific journal studies published, 74 patents granted and, perhaps most importantly for a businessman like Trump, 36 new companies founded, all based on ARPA-E funded research.