President Donald Trump said he plans to nominate Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette to replace Rick Perry as head of the agency responsible for U.S. nuclear weapons and Cold War nuclear-waste cleanup.
Brouillette has been Perry’s deputy secretary for just over two years. When Trump first nominated him, a source said the longtime insurance lobbyist — Brouillette spent more than a decade leading Washington operations for the United Services Automobile Association of San Antonio, Texas — had been hand-picked by Perry to serve as the DOE No. 2.
Media reported that Perry, who has been secretary of energy for more than two-and-a-half years, said this week at the U.S.-E.U. High Level Forum on small modular nuclear reactors that he would leave the agency on Dec. 1. He announced his impending resignation last week.
On Twitter, Trump said the former Texas governor has been “a great Secretary of Energy.”
….He is also my friend! At the same time, I am pleased to nominate Deputy Secretary Dan Brouillette to be the new Secretary of Energy. Dan’s experience in the sector is unparalleled. A total professional, I have no doubt that Dan will do a great job!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2019
Brouillette has spent much of his career in industry, where he arrived after about four years in government service, where he focused heavily on Congress. In 2004, Brouillette left his position as staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which sets policy for most branches of the Energy Department, but not the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
From 2001 to 2003, Brouillette was assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Energy, serving as the agency’s principal liaison to other parts of the executive branch and Congress.
Trump had yet to make his intent to nominate Brouillette official, at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor. The White House ordinarily posts such announcements on its website.
Meanwhile, Lisa Murkowski, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that would confirm Brouillette as secretary of energy, said she would support his nomination to a Cabinet seat and would organize a confirmation hearing as soon as the nomination is official.
On the other hand, Politico reported this week that Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), an Energy and Natural Resources member, thinks Brouillette’s confirmation could be “difficult.” Heinrich said his concerns relate to Perry’s refusal to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee, which subpoenaed the DOE boss as part of its ongoing impeachment investigation of Trump.
“I want to sit down and discuss some things with him because this has been an administration that has sometimes behaved well outside the norm even when some of the individual actors were completely capable,” Heinrich reportedly told reporters.
Heinrich’s office did not reply to a request for comment Thursday. In 2017, the junior senator from New Mexico supported Brouillette’s nomination but opposed Perry’s. Heinrich, who also sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is a prominent supporter of the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico.
Meanwhile, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), the Silver State’s senior senator and another Energy and Natural Resources member, said in a statement that she wants Brouillete to make sure that roughly 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium will be removed from the Nevada National Security Site by 2026.
Perry has said DOE will by then have shipped that tranche of material to the Los Alamos National Laboratory to be turned into warhead cores by then.
Sometime in 2018, DOE shipped half a metric ton of weapon usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to comply with a court order in a lawsuit the state of South Carolina won against DOE in 2017.
DOE told Nevada around August 2018 that it would ship the plutonium to the former Nevada test site, but did not notify Nevada that the material had actually shipped until January: months after the state sued to stop the shipment. Nevada’s lawsuit, now modified to seek removal of the plutonium from the state, is still live.
