The former Sandia National Laboratories director nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration was scheduled for a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
Jill Hruby was slated to appear alongside three other Biden administration nominees, including Frank Rose, the man nominated to be her deputy at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The Senate Armed Services Committee was scheduled to meet at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time and planned to stream the nomination hearing online.
If confirmed, Hruby will be the fifth Senate-confirmed administrator for the NNSA and the second woman to lead the agency, which Congress created in 2000 to consolidate administration of DOE nuclear weapons programs and give these programs some autonomy from the broader DOE. Of its thousands of federal employees, only the NNSA administrator reports directly to the Secretary of Energy.
Hruby was director at Sandia for about two years during the Barack Obama administration from mid-2015 to mid-2017. She had spent about 30 years at the labs system before that. She holds a masters degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and was most recently a Sam Nunn Distinguished Fellow at the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Rose was assistant secretary of state for arms control during the Obama administration. He has also worked on space and defense-related policy at the Department of State and worked at the Department of Defense. He worked most recently at the Brookings Institution as the D.C.-based think tank’s senior fellow and co-director of its Center for Security, Strategy and Technology.
