Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. We’ll check in with one long, big-picture update every 25 days, with a regular flow of updates in between to keep you up on news affecting U.S. nuclear cleanup during the new administration’s crucial first days.
PHOENIX — About halfway into President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, the Senate has confirmed former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as the 14th secretary of energy, but the agency’s Office of Environmental Management still lacks permanent leadership.
The $6-billion-a-year nuclear cleanup operation seemed closer than ever to a breakthrough on that front this week after John “Rick” Dearholt — a Marine Corps veteran and former Jacobs Engineering hand who worked on decommissioning and decontamination at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee — made it known here that he was in the mix to become Perry’s assistant secretary for environmental management.
Weapons Complex Monitor reached Dearholt by phone this week after he left the annual Waste Management Symposium for an interview with Perry that was tentatively scheduled for Thursday.
However, Dearholt said, the interview was postponed at the White House’s behest as part of a broad Trump administration initiative to review lower-level political appointments at several agencies, including the Defense and Treasury departments.
The tip of this iceberg surfaced last week, when Politico reported the administration had blocked recently confirmed Defense Secretary James Mattis from appointing former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson — who served in the Barack Obama administration — as undersecretary of defense for policy.
There was no immediate word on when Dearholt might get his interview. He told Weapons Complex Monitor the appointment with Perry was not immediately rescheduled. The Energy Department did not reply to a request for comment about whether Perry was currently interviewing candidates for DOE undersecretary or lower positions.
So for now, department nuclear cleanup veteran Sue Cange remains acting assistant secretary for environmental management. Cange is the former manager of DOE’s Oak Ridge cleanup in Tennessee. She relocated to Washington, D.C., last year to become principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, succeeding fellow Oak Ridge alum Mark Whitney, who joined AECOM.
It was not immediately clear what Dearholt’s rising profile might mean for Gary Lavine, the New York attorney and former DOE lawyer who until lately was rumored to be a top choice to head the Environmental Management office.
A source at the Waste Management Symposium this week suggested Lavine’s star was fading in the Trump administration. Lavine himself could not be reached for comment this week and has not returned multiple requests for comments since his name surfaced as a possible assistant secretary for environmental management.
Amid the dearth of permanent leadership at the Environmental Management office, there remains as yet no permanent policy direction from the Trump White House regarding the agency’s Cold War nuclear cleanup program, which at last official tally was slated to cost more than $270 billion to complete over the next 50-plus years.
Senior DOE officials this week said they were poised to make good on any bonus funding the office might get if President Trump’s not-yet-officially-proposed trillion-dollar infrastructure plan becomes law, though they also acknowledged they have not yet received any official direction to plan for that windfall from newly instilled Secretary Perry.
Cange told Weapons Complex Monitor Monday that she had not yet met with Perry, who arrived at DOE headquarters in Washington only days before Cange herself left to attend the Waste Management Symposium. She sidestepped a question about whether she has had contact with any other White House officials since Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20.
Likewise, Stacy Charboneau, the former Hanford manager who last year joined Environmental Management headquarters in Washington as associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operations, said she has not heard through any official channel that the Environmental Management office might get a boost as part of Trump’s hypothetical infrastructure plan.
“I think the entire [environmental management] portfolio could be gauged as investment in infrastructure,” Charboneau told Weapons Complex Monitor after a symposium panel.
Despite bright speculation about a cash infusion from outside the annual appropriations process, the Environmental Management office might actually face an across-the-board cut as steep as 10 percent in fiscal 2018, if the spending plan the White House has teased becomes law. Late last month, Trump said he would propose a $54-billion-a-year increase for defense programs to be paid for with cuts to nondefense discretionary federal spending: the category that includes DOE and all other Cabinet agencies.
Whether affected agencies are cut equally, or if the nondefense funding reductions are narrowly targeted — for example, the Washington Post reported the Environmental Protection Agency budget could be slashed by more than 20 percent — will not officially be known until the administration rolls out its full budget request. Trump has said further details will be unveiled this month.
No matter what the president proposes, Congress will have to approve them in annual appropriations bills before they become law. Already some Republicans — such as Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) who whose Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee drafts DOE’s annual spending bill — have publicly cast doubt on cutting nondefense programs as deeply as Trump has proposed.
But for the sake of discussion, suppose Trump’s planned budget cuts do become law, and suppose the misery is spread evenly across all affected agencies. In that case, the Environmental Management office would wind up with a 2018 budget of just over $5.5 billion, down from 2017’s annualized level of more than $6 billion. For scale, a cut that deep could almost wipe out the combined budgets of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and the Oak Ridge Environmental Management Office.
Agency officials have been publicly politic about any such possibility.
“We would be supporting whatever new priorities the new administration identifies,” Cange told Weapons Complex Monitor at the Waste Management Symposium.
But just in case, the agency is mulling “what the choices and tradeoffs might be should [the DOE Environmental Management office] ultimately receive less funding than expected,” Cange said in a well-attended speech on the first day of the symposium.
The budget cuts proposed by Trump would be deeper than those DOE and the rest of the federal government weathered in 2013 during the dreaded sequester, and they would hit at a time when the agency is set to ramp up construction at a number of sites.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, newly reopened after a nearly three-year pause instigated by an accidental radiation release in 2014, wants to start designing and building a new above-ground storage facility and a critical new underground ventilation system in the next several years.
Combined, these would restore DOE’s ability to bury up to 17 shipments of transuranic waste a week in the deep underground salt mine while simultaneously excavating new disposal space to accommodate the immense backlog of transuranic waste set to be interred at WIPP at least through the 2030s.
On top of those projects, WIPP again has to make the case to DOE headquarters — and its new leadership — that the remaining $50 million or so the federal government owes New Mexico under the 2016 settlement that cleared the way for the mine to reopen should not come out of the site’s annual operating budget of roughly $300 million.
Meanwhile, at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., Bechtel National is preparing to build the Effluent Management Facility the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) needs to begin turning low-activity waste from the site’s tank farms into more easily storage glass cylinders. The company is laying down the concrete basemat it needs to start building the Effluent Management Facility, with an eye toward completing construction in 2018 — a date that could come under pressure if the Trump administration’s proposed budget hammer fell next year.
Putting the squeeze on WTP now might also slow down Bechtel’s longer-term efforts to gear the facility up to treat Hanford’s most dangerous, high-level liquid waste.
“One of the greatest risks we’re facing right now is funding,” Peggy McCullough, Bechtel National project director for WTP, said at a symposium panel discussion this week. “[G]iven the amount of funding that has to be put to complete [low-activity waste] commissioning, it’s putting serious pressure on what can be allocated to high-level waste.”
WTP’s high-level waste facility must be online by 2036, per a legally binding deadline a federal judge handed down last year.
