After moving relatively quickly through the confirmation process, former Senate staffer Terri Donaldson became the Department of Energy’s (DOE) permanent inspector general.
The Energy Department swore in Donaldson on Jan. 23 for a lifetime appointment, but did not announce her installation at the Forrestal Building in Washington until Thursday.
The Donald Trump administration nominated Donaldson in June 2018. The Senate confirmed her in December, rushing Donaldson through along with a limited number of other executive appointments before the end of the 115th Congress.
The Senate has only until the end of a two-year legislative meeting to approve White House nominees for executive jobs. Those not confirmed on the floor before the end of that Congress must repeat the Senate confirmation process. A number of nominees for Energy Department leadership positions, including general counsel, were returned to the White House when the 115th Congress expired and then renominated in January for the current Congress.
As inspector general, Donaldson is DOE’s chief internal watchdog, empowered to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the department — including its nuclear-weapons and nuclear-waste-cleanup programs. Combined, these two programs command roughly $20 billion a year in federal funds.
Donaldson was most recently general counsel for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in the 115th Congress, under Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). Before joining Barrasso’s staff in 2017, less than a year before she was nominated for the inspector general job, Donaldson practiced corporate environmental law in the private sector.
Donaldson’s most recent stint in public service prior to 2017 was from 1999 to 2004, when she served as general counsel for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection under then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R).
Before Donaldson assumed the role, the Energy Department had been without a permanent inspector general for more than three years. April Stephenson, DOE’s principal deputy inspector general, periodically led the office on an interim basis from early 2017, after the Senate stonewalled the nomination of department veteran Susan Beard: the Barack Obama administration’s nominee to replace former DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman.
Friedman retired in September 2015 after nearly 17 years on the job.
Meanwhile, a senior Department of Energy official on Thursday urged the Senate to confirm nominees to fill four agency leadership vacancies, including for general counsel.
“I’d like to kindly ask the committee for consideration … around the leadership positions that are still open for us as a department. We very much appreciate the leadership of this committee on reviewing our nominees, but we still have outstanding the heads of the Office of Science and ARPA-E, as well as general counsel and nuclear energy,” Paul Dabbar, DOE undersecretary for science, said during a hearing on energy innovation before the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.
The White House nominated William Cooper as Department of Energy general counsel last year. The position is separate from the general counsel for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Cooper got the thumbs-up from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year, but the full Senate did not vote on his nomination before the 115th Congress ended on Jan. 3.
“Rest assured that we, too, are trying to get these nominees through the process just as quickly as we can,” committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told Dabbar at the hearing. “You need to have your full team up and running, particularly in these key areas.”
Murkowski did not elaborate. A committee spokesperson on Friday said nothing has been scheduled to date.
