President Joe Biden plans to nominate David Turk as the deputy secretary of energy, according to a White House news release published this week.
Turk, a member of Biden’s Department of Energy transition team, is currently deputy executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), where he has worked since 2016 after leaving the Barack Obama administration.
For Obama, Turk was most recently deputy assistant secretary of energy for international climate and technology, according to an online IEA bio.Turk also worked on Obama’s National Security Council and Department of State on issues such as climate change and the Senate’s ratification of the New Start Treaty nuclear arms control treaty.
Turk has also been on staff in both the House and the Senate. He was born in Quito, Ecuador, and grew up “in a small, midwestern town,” according to the White House’s press release.
It was not clear at deadline when Turk’s nomination might actually be sent to the Senate, which is dealing with the impeachment of former President Donald Trump this week. Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is still awaiting a vote by the full Senate.
Biden nominated a deputy secretary of energy only about two months before his predecessor Trump did. Trump announced his intent to nominate a deputy for then-secretary of energy Rick Perry in April 2017.
The Washington Post noted in a Wednesday article that should Turk be confirmed, neither of the top-two officials in Biden’s DOE would be scientists. Obama’s energy secretaries were Ernest Moniz, a professor of physics and Steven Chu, an American physicist and Nobel laureate.
Neither former Texas Gov. Rick Perry nor Dan Brouillette, Perry’s deputy and later secretary in his own right, had science backgrounds in the Trump administration. Brouillette, said to be Perry’s handpicked deputy, had mostly industry experience, though he had also been a DOE staffer and a congressional staffer before moving on to stints at the Ford Motor Co. and the United Services Automobile Association in San Antonio, Texas.
The DOE is already looking different under the Biden administration in that the $7-billion Office of Environmental Management is not stove-piped below the undersecretary of science for the agency, as it was during the Trump administration.
