'Stop thinking about sleep and work' — ministry shaken by death of official

Government circles have been rattled after an official at the Ministry of Climate, Environment and Energy — one of the signature organizational overhauls of the Lee Jae-myung administration — died by suicide.

Since the ministry launched on Oct. 1 last year as a sprawling "mega-ministry" handling both climate and energy policy, concerns have persisted that merging the two portfolios was like trying to mix oil and water, with internal integration proving deeply difficult.

With organizational integration still incomplete, the ministry was handed the mission of driving the Lee administration's core policies — including the energy transition and major megaprojects — and the prevailing view in government circles is that what happened was a foreseeable outcome.

At a Cabinet meeting combined with an emergency economic review session on April 6, President Lee Jae-myung said: "If we wait until every other country has done it, we'll already be behind. We need to move half a step, even a third of a step, faster. The minister of climate and energy should not be thinking about sleep." He was urging the ministry to accelerate the shift to renewable energy.

According to government sources Sunday, official A, a mid-level administrator in their early 30s and in their second year of service at the ministry, was found dead at home on July 16. A had been handling work related to climate adaptation and energy policy.

The Sejong Nambu Police Station is investigating the circumstances of A's death, and the ministry's audit office has also launched a review. The audit office obtained materials from A's family indicating possible workplace bullying and is working to verify the facts. The ministry said it plans to consider disciplinary action and other follow-up measures once the cause of death is established through the police investigation.

Shortly after the incident, Climate Minister Kim Sung-hwan wrote to ministry staff saying he would examine whether anything in the ministry's work practices or organizational culture had left colleagues worn out or struggling. The ministry said it would form a task force centered on junior staff and hold a series of listening sessions.

The underlying causes being cited include cultural clashes between staff who came from the former Ministry of Environment and those from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, as well as chronic understaffing. South Korea had long emphasized integrating industrial and energy policy under a unified framework, but the Lee administration's decision to reorient energy policy around climate action led to the creation of the Ministry of Climate, Environment and Energy last October — a mega-ministry straddling both climate and energy portfolios.

Since its launch, the ministry has been inundated with major policy challenges — managing energy conservation and accelerating the energy transition amid the Middle East conflict, setting national greenhouse gas reduction targets, and drawing up power and water supply plans for three large-scale megaprojects. Yet staffing levels have not kept pace, and officials say the workload on mid-level administrators has become crushing.

A government official in Sejong said the ministry had drawn criticism from the outset for combining the former Ministry of Environment — whose work centered on regulating existing power sources such as nuclear power plants — with energy policy, the core of industrial strategy. "It was seen as putting oil and water in the same bottle," the official said.

"It was almost inevitable that staff from two organizations that were polar opposites in their working styles, pace of implementation and overall approach would struggle to come together," the official added.

"On top of all that, with every major policy challenge piling up at the ministry and orders coming down to stop thinking about sleep and just work, the intensity had to be enormous. This should not be seen as the problem of one individual manager — it needs to be a moment to examine the entire direction of state affairs," the official said.

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