Rick Perry on Thursday announced his resignation as the Donald Trump administration’s first secretary of energy after more than two-and-a-half years on the job.
In a published letter to President Donald Trump, Perry said he would resign “later this year” from the Cabinet. Dan Brouillette, the deputy secretary of energy, will then take over as acting secretary.
Perry’s nuclear-weapons legacy is tough to identify. The former Texas governor — whose passion since being sworn into federal service in March 2017 has been promoting American sources of energy for electrical utilities and transportation — seldom spoke publicly about the nuclear weapon- or weapon-cleanup missions that account for roughly 60% of DOE’s annual budget.
In his farewell letter, however, Perry called Trump’s attention to “success” in “modernizing our nuclear [weapons] enterprise,” plus “unprecedented success in the clean-up of our nuclear facilities.”
A DOE spokesperson on Friday did not immediately reply to a request for comment seeking specific examples of these successes. In a slickly produced video farewell, anchored by a three-camera address from Perry behind his Forrestal Building desk, he touted ongoing environmental remediation efforts at “numerous sites” in the now-largely shuttered Cold War nuclear weapons complex.
The video also featured a clip of Perry on a nuclear submarine.
Under Perry’s watch, the Department of Energy has asked Congress to expand the active nuclear weapons budget managed by the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), sometimes at the expense of the agency’s nuclear cleanup branch, the Office of Environmental Management.
In his resignation messages, Perry did not say why he was leaving the administration, or exactly when. He did say that he would return to Texas. Many Cabinet secretaries, in Republican and Democratic administrations, stick around only for one term or half a term.
Perry’s departure was telegraphed well in advance. Earlier this month, media reported that sources said the DOE boss would resign this autumn to seek work in the private sector. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published an exclusive and candid interview with Perry. Later that day, DOE dropped the neatly edited video announcing Perry’s departure.
Reports earlier this month indicated Brouillette could be nominated to replace Perry. Trump, on his way Thursday to a campaign rally in Texas, told reporters “We already have his replacement.” The president did not identify that person.
On Friday, Perry told CNBC that, post-DOE, he might consider charitable work, such as a prison ministry, or perhaps “an opportunity to work with people, to bring power to the billion plus people in the world that don’t have electricity.”
Perry did not say how long he would stick around, though he implied, in his video farewell, that it would not be much longer. In the roughly four-minute piece, interspersed with video clips and stills of his visits around the DOE complex and abroad, the outgoing Energy boss said there would be much work to do “in these upcoming weeks.”
Right up until October, Perry mostly skirted the controversies of policy and conduct that have ensnared, and sometimes forced from office, other members of Trump’s Cabinet.
On Oct. 10, the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Perry’s records of talks with Ukrainian officials. The subpoena is part of an impeachment inquiry led by the House’s Democratic majority, and is based on allegations that Trump used the powers of his office to block congressionally appropriated defense aid to Ukraine, unless the newly elected president of that country, Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed to investigate the son of Joe Biden: the former vice president and current contender for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination.
In a television on interview Friday with Fox News, Perry said his resignation had nothing to do with the Trump-Ukraine controversy or the impeachment proceedings.
In the exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, Perry acknowledged that Trump told him to speak with Rudy Giulliani, the president’s personal lawyer, as part of a plan to “ease a path” toward a meeting between Trump and Zelensky, who was elected in April.
Perry told the newspaper that he spoke to Giuliani in the spring, and that Giuliani mentioned alleged corruption in Ukraine that, Trump has asserted without evidence, was engineered to hurt his chances in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“I don’t know whether that was crap or what,” Perry told the Journal.
Perry also told the Journal that Giuliani and others did not specifically mention a possible Ukrainian investigation of Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was still in office.
On Friday, Perry told Fox News there was no aid-for-investigation “quid pro quo” with Ukraine.
