Nuclear Navy vet Don Hoffman, longtime president of Excel Services Corp., in Rockville, Md., is reportedly out of the running to head the Department of Energy’s legacy nuclear cleanup operations, and Eric Knox, a former Energy Department civil servant with ties to the Yucca Mountain, is rumored to be in consideration, sources in Washington said this week.
Neither Hoffman nor Knox — who has also been discussed as a candidate for positions as high as deputy energy secretary — replied to requests for comment this week.
Hoffman has spent the last 30 years or so with his consulting and project management firm, prior to which he served a five-year stint as manager for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing and technical specifications section. For just about all of the the 1970s, Hoffman was a Navy officer with the USS Finback SSN 670 Submarine Squadron 6 out of Norfolk, Va.
Knox is a credentialed Republican who served at DOE during the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. During his most recent government stint, Knox was associate director for system operations and external relations at DOE’s now-shuttered Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: the part of the agency that helmed the Yucca Mountain dual-stream waste-disposal mega-site shut down by the administration of President Barack Obama in 2011. He is now the senior project director, nuclear and environment, for major DOE contractor AECOM.
Another rumored assistant secretary for environmental management, nuclear industry consultant Ed Davis, told Weapons Complex Monitor Wednesday that although his name had been put forward to the transition team paving the way for President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department, Trump Tower had not vetted him for any civil service position.
The new DOE Environmental Management chief would replace Monica Regalbuto, who has held the assistant secretary position since 2015.
Finally, Michael Anastasio, who has led both the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has been mentioned as a possible candidate to succeed Frank Klotz as head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The semiautonomous agency manages DOE’s nuclear weapons and nonproliferation activities.
As always, take these rumors with a grain of salt. New names surface every week, and old names surface attached to new positions. As with any presidential transition, would-be civil servants, from aspirant Cabinet members on down, might float their own names, or have a proxy do the same thing.
Competitors for a job might even suggest one another’s names in order to hijack the conversation about the rival’s fitness for the position.
Besides all of that, the Trump transition team — including the Energy Department transition team led by former oil and gas lobbyist Thomas Pyle — has dealt with turnover because of the incoming administration’s ethics rules that bar lobbyists from participating. People familiar with the transition work say this staff churn has slowed the vetting process.
