As of Friday, Rick Perry had been U.S. secretary of energy for one year. Like his predecessor, Ernest Moniz, Perry has been on Twitter since the first day of his tenure at the top floor of the Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C.
In that span of time, Perry tweeted exactly — yes, you read that correctly — twice as many times as his immediate predecessor.
To get an idea of how closely (or not) the two most recent DOE chiefs track, Weapons Complex Morning Briefing has compiled a word cloud that shows the most tweeted words of each secretary’s first year in office.
Because Perry tweets so much more than Moniz did, the word cloud occasionally gives the impression that the current secretary talks less about the Department of Energy’s nuclear programs than did his predecessor.
That’s not exactly the case, as the summary table below shows. By name, Perry has mentioned DOE’s biggest nuclear programs — the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Office of Environmental Management (EM) — about as often as Moniz.
Which is to say, not often at all.
| How Much Did They Tweet in One Year? | Moniz | Perry | Perry vs. Moniz |
| Total Tweets (not including retweets or replies) | 336 | 672 | +336 |
| Days of Service | 365 | 365 | – |
| Tweets Per Day (Average) | 0.9205479452 | 1.84109589 | +100.00% |
| Top Five Keywords (With Frequency) in Year One | Moniz | Perry | |
| 1 | energy (51) | energy (105) | |
| 2 | ActOnClimate (28) | Energy (68) | |
| 3 | today(24) | today (66) | |
| 4 | Energy (21) | ENERGY(61) | |
| 5 | work(15) | great (42) | |
| The Word “Nuclear” in Year One | Moniz | Perry | Perry vs. Moniz |
| Total Mentions | 21 | 19 | -2 |
| Mentions Per Day (Average) | 0.05753424658 | 0.05205479452 | -1% |
| Total Mentions in Year One of DOE Nuclear Subagencies* | Moniz | Perry | Perry vs. Moniz |
| National Nuclear Security Administration/NNSA | 3 | 9 | +200% |
| Office of Environmental Management/EM | 0 | 0 | |
| *This tracks mentions of a keyword (acronym or whole subagency name) only – not how many times a secretary tweeted about a site or a mission that falls under that DOE subagency’s purview. |
If it’s easier for you to follow numbers on a table than words in a cloud, here’s a link to the raw data we used to create our word clouds. By the way, we used wordclouds.com to generate the word clouds.
