In another flurry of nominations, the Joe Biden administration announced this week plans to nominate Michael Connor as the second-in-command of the army’s civil works division.
Connor, who is currently a partner at the D.C. law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP, will need a Senate greenlight before he takes over as Assistant Secretary of the Army for civil works. The Biden team announced his nomination in a press release Wednesday.
Connor served in the Barack Obama administration as deputy secretary of the Interior Department from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that, he was commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation where he oversaw water resource management.
On April 15, Biden sent to the Senate the nomination of Christine Elizabeth Wormuth to be the Secretary of the Army. If eventually confirmed she would be the first woman to hold that post.
If confirmed, Connor would supervise the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). Established in 1974, control of FUSRAP transferred from the Department of Energy to the Army Corps of Engineers in 1997. The program provides site remediation services at locations where nuclear weapons and nuclear power operations took place from the 1940s to the 1960s. As of 2019 there were 23 such sites.
