Jeffrey Baran’s nomination for five more years at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was sent back to the White House on Jan. 3, leaving President Joe Biden’s (D) administration with the choice of repeating a hard fight to get Baran through the Senate again or moving on to another candidate.
There are two sessions in each Congress, each lasting a year. If the Senate does not act on a nomination for a senior executive job by the end of one session, the nomination goes back to the President’s desk. Baran’s nomination lapsed along with many others when the second session of the 118th Congress began last week.
As of Tuesday morning, the White House had not renominated Baran for the job, leaving the NRC with four commissioners instead of the legally allowed five. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a presidential advisory body, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday morning.
Renominated in April, Baran proved a contentious choice for the job, even in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee needed two tries to approve his nomination, which a committee spokesperson attributed to a “scheduling conflict.”
The full Senate never voted on Baran’s nomination and one of the only mentions Baran’s name ever got in the chamber last year was during a June floor speech by Sen. Mitch McConell (R-Ky.), the minority leader, who echoed what Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WVa.), the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said earlier that month: Baran was an obstructionist whose goal was to slow or stop the deployment of new nuclear reactors, despite the rising appetite in Washington for more domestic sources of energy.
“So no wonder even some Senate Democrats are thinking twice about rubberstamping Mr. Baran’s nomination,” McConnell said in his prepared remarks on June 20.
