The White House has nominated longtime Lawrence Livermore hand William Bookless to fill the No. 2 slot at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration — a post that has sat vacant throughout the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump nominated Bookless, now a Livermore senior physicist, on Aug. 16. If recommended by the Senate Armed Services Committee and confirmed by the Senate, Bookless would succeed Madelyn Creedon as NNSA principal deputy administrator. Creedon retired after about two-and-a-half years in the position on Jan. 20, 2017, the day Trump was inaugurated.
The Senate Armed Services Committee had not scheduled a nomination hearing for Bookless at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
There was no immediate explanation for the long delay in nominating a new principal deputy at the NNSA, but the Trump administration has not nominated anyone to fill more than 150 posts that require Senate confirmation, according to the Washington Post.
“NNSA’s Principal Deputy Administrator supports the NNSA Administrator in the management and operation of the NNSA, as well as policy matters across the DOE and NNSA enterprise in support of the President’s nuclear security agenda,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email last week. “Those duties are currently being fulfilled by other senior staff in NNSA, primarily William [Ike] White, Chief of Staff and Associate Principal Deputy Administrator.”
Bookless is the second Livermore weapons man Trump has tapped for a move to NNSA headquarters in Washington. In March, the administration nominated nuclear engineer Charles Verdon, principal associate director at Livermore’s weapons and complex integration directorate, to be NNSA’s deputy administrator for defense programs. Verdon has yet to receive a nomination hearing.
The NNSA has four Senate-confirmed management positions: the administrator; the principal deputy administrator; the deputy administrator for defense programs; and the deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. Brent Park, formerly of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was confirmed in March as deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. The only two slots still open are the ones Bookless and Verdon were nominated to fill. Current Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty came back to the NNSA in February after a long sojourn in industry, prior to which she worked at Department of Energy headquarters, the White House, and Capitol Hill.
After earning a doctorate in physics in 1980 from the University of Wyoming, Bookless spent 32 years as a senior physicist at Livermore, one of the Energy Department’s key nuclear weapons laboratories. While there, he served as deputy associate director for the facility’s nuclear weapons program and as associate director for safety and environmental protection, according to his White House biography. Toward the end of his career, Bookless was a senior adviser to then-NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino and an assistant laboratory director for policy and planning at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state. Bookless retired in 2015.
The semiautonomous NNSA, on an annual budget approaching $15 billion, manages the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation, and naval reactors operations. The Trump administration kept Frank Klotz on as NNSA chief for nearly a year into its tenure, to Jan. 19 of this year.
