New Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Friday said his alma mater’s bid for management of the Sandia National Laboratories helped teach him the value of the agency he once wanted to kill and now leads.
Perry made light of his famous “oops” moment during a 2011 presidential debate in which he said he would eliminate three federal departments but forgot DOE was the third. But the former Texas governor also acknoweldged a steep learning curve — helped along by the Texas A&M University System’s participation in a partnership that sought the Sandia management and operations contract.
“I had a very cursory knowledge of the Department of Energy prior to that,” Perry said in his welcome address to DOE staff. “But going through this process of working with, not only Texas A&M, but the University of Texas, and knowing and learning about what you do, and the potential of what we have in front of us, and these jewels that these national labs are, gave me this incredibly new appreciation about the Department of Energy.”
Perry specifically cited “the importance of commercialization of technology,” a key aim of the national labs even as they pursue their work to sustain the U.S. nuclear deterrent and carry out their other missions.
Perry’s over 14-year term as Texas governor ended in January 2015. The partnership he referenced — led by Boeing and Battelle, with the University of New Mexico and the Texas A&M and University of Texas systems — was formally announced in May 2016 but was years in the making. Ultimately, though, a Honeywell subsidiary in December secured the contract worth $2.6 billion annually over up to a decade.
Close to half of DOE’s roughly $30 billion annual budget goes to its semiautonmous National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees Sandia and other seven other nuclear-security sites around the country.
