President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration is one of many political appointees for key national defense posts whose confirmation votes have been blocked in the Senate, multiple people have told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Some of these people told the Monitor this week that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) had held Jill Hruby’s nomination to the top spot at the DOE nuclear weapons agency over concerns about seminars on racism held at the Sandia National Laboratories, which Hruby ran from mid-2015 to mid-2017. Cotton has since lifted the hold.
At deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the Senate had not approved a Biden administration nominee to a Pentagon post since May 28. Hruby and her deputy-designate, Frank Rose, were nominated for jobs that, like Pentagon nominees, are vetted by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Republicans in Congress have expressed broad dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s proposals for defense spending in fiscal year 2022.
Cotton’s office, meanwhile, did not reply to a request for comment from Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. During Hruby’s confirmation hearing on May 27, Cotton grilled her about the racism seminars, which critics sometimes call critical race theory training and proponents sometimes call diversity, equity and inclusion training.
Among other things, seminars at Sandia exposed lab employees, at least as recently as 2020, to the theory that U.S. institutions, including the federal government, were deliberately organized to advance the interests of white people at the expense of the interests of people of color.
In the May 27 confirmation hearing, Cotton used all of his allotted time for questioning nominees — there were two others in addition to Hruby — to put Hruby on the spot about her role in race training at the Albuquerque, N.M., labs network.
Cotton asked Hruby whether she had been involved with “the incorporation of critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion training at the Sandia National Laboratories.”
Hruby replied that she was “a strong supporter and [has] benefited greatly personally, and been part of an institution that’s benefited greatly, from diversity, equity and inclusion training.” Hruby also told Cotton that “[t]he training that I participated in I never considered divisive, nor did I hear that from any employee that participated in the training at the laboratory while I was there.”
In late August 2020, months before the U.S. presidential election, racism seminars at Sandia became a political hot button after a young engineer at Sandia named Casey Petersen posted a series of YouTube videos voicing his displeasure with race-related training programs the lab held last summer.
Amid his complaints, Peterson was relegated to unclassified work at the labs and his story was picked up by Fox News talk host Tucker Carlson, after which then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning federal funding of “Divisive concepts.” Major nuclear-weapon-site contracts had to be modified to accommodate the executive order, which President Joe Biden repealed shortly after taking office.
“The issues with the Sandia divisive training occurred after I left the laboratory and I understand it has been reviewed and if confirmed I look forward to evaluating those reviews and making sure that we have high-quality training programs that will continue into the future,” Hruby told Cotton at the hearing.
The exchange between Cotton and Hruby begins roughly one hour and thirty-eight minutes into the recording of the May 27 nomination hearing posted online by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Weapons Complex Morning Briefing has transcribed the exchange.
