Christopher Davis will be Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s next chief of staff, Granholm wrote Friday in an all-hands email.
Davis, according to his LinkedIn profile, has been a senior advisor to Granholm since right around Inauguration Day, prior to which he held various roles at DOE dating back to 2011. Before that, he spent nearly two years at the White House after seven years on staff in the House, where he did stints at the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Granholm appointed Davis to replace Tarak Shah, who earlier this week said he would depart DOE after about a year as the Secretary’s right-hand man.
Shah, who hit the campaign trail for Biden and lead beachhead teams into the Forrestal Building in Washington, will depart in April, he said in his message to staff. He has been chief of staff to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm almost since her confirmation on Feb. 25, 2021.
“[W]e have accomplished so much of what we set out to do fourteen months ago when President Biden took office — to restore this agency after years of proposed budget cuts, hiring freezes and an unprecedented global pandemic — and position us to lead the nation in solving the climate crisis,” Shah wrote in the memo, a copy of which the Exchange Monitor read. “You will hear from the Secretary soon about her plans to build on all that we have accomplished together so far and more news about my successor.”
Shah will depart with DOE’s nuclear leadership more or less sorted out. Granholm, a member of the cabinet, was swiftly confirmed, as was Jill Hruby, the administrator of DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the only direct report to Granholm in the entire nuclear-weapons sub-agency.
Geraldine Richmond, since November, has been undersecretary for science and innovation — boss, among others, of the assistant secretary for nuclear energy, whose office quarterbacks DOE’s strategy for safely disposing of the country’s nuclear waste, especially spent fuel from power plants.
Days after Shah turned in his notice, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a nomination hearing for Kathryn Huff, the nominee to lead the nuclear energy office. Committee leadership said Huff appeared qualified for the position.
Only the Office of Environmental Management, responsible for cleaning up shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites, did not have Senate-confirmed leadership as of Tuesday. That has been the case since the latter half of the Donald Trump administration, when then-Undersecretary of Energy for Science, Paul Dabbar, fired Anne White.
Career civil servant William “Ike” White (no relation) has been in charge at the cleanup office as a senior advisor since the Trump administration, and the White House during Biden’s first year has made no move to change that.
