President Joe Biden will nominate Jill Hruby, former director of the Sandia National Laboratories, to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration, the White House said this week.
Hruby led Sandia for about two years during the Barack Obama administration, from mid-2015 to mid-2017. Since then, she has worked as an independent consultant, logging time on federal advisory boards such as the Defense Programs Advisory Board, and nonprofits including the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Hruby spent more than 30 years working at Sandia, holding positions in weapons and nonproliferation programs before rising to lead the labs network. She has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.
Hruby would be the second woman to lead DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The first was Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, Hruby’s predecessor. Biden had not made Hruby’s nomination official at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The Senate Armed Services Committee will have to approve her nomination after a hearing, which also had not been scheduled at deadline.
Sources have told the Monitor that the Biden administration also considered Madelyn Creedon, a deputy NNSA administrator, for the top DOE nuclear-weapons job, but that Creedon removed herself from the running.
Meanwhile, some former government officials wrote a letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm urging her to give Gordon-Hagerty an encore at NNSA, sources said this week. Gordon-Hagerty was squeezed out of the government in November by former Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette. NNSA administrators often stay on after a presidential transition.
