President Joe Biden’s nominee for the No. 2 post at the Department of Energy is scheduled for his first make-or-break vote this week in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the panel announced Monday.
At deadline, the committee was scheduled to vote on Turk’s nomination at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday. The former Biden Senate staffer and Obama administration official had a largely uncontroversial hearing in the committee on March 4.
If Energy and Natural Resources approves Turk’s nomination, he’ll still need to clear the full Senate to become Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s second-in-command. Biden nominated Turk to be the deputy secretary Feb. 3. He is currently deputy executive director of the International Energy Agency.
In his nomination hearing last week, Turk told Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) that he would look into DOE’s changes to subcontracting policies at the Hanford Site and told Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) that the Biden administration did not plan to build a permanent nuclear waste waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev. — the only place in the country where Congress has authorized such a repository to be built.
