With the Donald Trump administration coming to an end in a little over a week, longtime cleanup hand Todd Shrader is expected to take over as acting head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management office until President-electric Joe Biden has his own people in place.
An industry source on Monday said to expect Shrader, currently the No. 2 headquarters official at the Office of Environmental Management (EM), to step in as the branch’s acting assistant secretary soon.
Shrader, who has held the No. 2 job at EM since June 2019, was previously manager of the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico that oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The Environmental Management office has been without a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary since Anne Marie White resigned in 2019 under pressure from her boss Paul Dabbar, DOE’s undersecretary for science.
Longtime federal manager William (Ike) White has led day-to-day operations at the cleanup office since then, with the title senior adviser for environmental management. When Dabbar departs, it is likely that White could replace him on an acting basis, the industry official said.
Separately, William Bookless, acting administrator of DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, announced Monday he is leaving the post effective Jan. 20. Bookless has been in the top job at the DOE overseer of active nuclear weapons programs since shortly after the November election, when then-NNSA administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty resigned under pressure from Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette.
