With the Donald Trump administration coming to an end in less than 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.
With his tenure winding down, Dabbar posted a goodbye letter of sorts on Thursday, thanking DOE colleagues and others for progress during the past four years, including achievement of nuclear cleanup milestones at sites such as Hanford Site and the Oak Ridge site.
“As this cycle closes, I will be moving on from the Department and return to being with my family in New York,” Dabbar said.
To remaining DOE colleagues and future leadership of the department, Dabbar wished “fair winds and following seas. “I stand relieved,” he said.”You have the watch.”
Dabbar did not explicitly say if his last day was this week or if he is sticking around into next week.The DOE headquarters press office did not immediately respond to a Friday morning inquiry.
Before being sworn in as undersecretary of science in 2017, Dabbar worked on Wall Street and sat on the DOE’s Environmental Management Advisory Board. He is also a former nuclear submarine officer and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.
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.
