Should former Vice President Joe Biden (D) ultimately prevail over President Donald Trump (R) in the presidential race, several women — including a Republican — and a black man could be shortlisted as candidates for Biden’s first secretary of energy, a source with experience in both government and industry said this week.
As of Friday at 1 p.m., the Associated Press had not declared a winner in the presidential election. Biden was leading in electoral votes. Whomever is declared president-elect an intense legal challenge is expected, according to media outlets.
The source spoke to Weapons Complex Monitor after talking with various DOE, industry and government watchers in recent days. According to the source, these people believe there are already a few likely candidates to run the $30-billion Department of Energy — the cabinet-level steward of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons cleanup — in a potential Biden administration.
Among the possibilities are:
- Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, DOE’s deputy secretary of energy for more than two years, starting in early 2014 during the Barack Obama administration, in which Biden was vice president. Also during the Obama administration, Sherwood-Randall worked from 2009 to 2013 as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council and from 2013 to 2014 as a White House coordinator for defense policy, according to a DOE biography.
- New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Los Alamos, New Mexico, native elected governor in January 2019 after representing New Mexico’s 1st district in Congress for six years, according to her bio.
- Christine Todd Whitman is a Republican who endorsed Biden. A two-term New Jersey governor from 1994 to 2001, Whitman went on to serve as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. After EPA, Whitman worked with a nuclear power advocacy organization.
- William Magwood, director-general of the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency, part of the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. From 2010 to 2014, Magwood was part of the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Before that he worked at DOE where he ran the agency’s civilian nuclear energy program, according to his online biography.
On the other hand, if Trump wins a second term in the White House it is likely that Dan Brouillette, who was only sworn in as energy secretary 11 months ago, would stay on the job for the foreseeable future, the source said by phone.
Brouillette was sworn in in December 2019 to take over from Trump’s first Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry. Brouillette is a former auto industry lobbyist and a former congressional staffer.
Hazel O’Leary, a black woman, was the first female secretary of energy. President Bill Clinton officially nominated O’Leary in 1993, and the Senate confirmed her the same year.
