Former Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Monica Regalbuto will remain at the Energy Department as a senior technical adviser for the agency’s $6-billion-a-year legacy nuclear cleanup program, the longtime DOE hand said in a farewell message to colleagues.
Weapons Complex Morning Briefing obtained a copy of Regalbuto’s letter.
“I am pleased and honored to continue to be part of this amazing organization as I transition back into the career senior executive service to support EM as a Senior Technical Advisor and will continue to work with you, in a different capacity of course, to achieve great results for our program,” Regalbuto wrote in her farewell.
Regalbuto served about 18 months as assistant secertary for environmental management, succeeding acting DOE cleanup head Mark Whitney, who served from July 2014 to August 2015. Whitney succeeded David Huizenga, who served in an acting capacity for about three years after Ines Triay, the last full-time cleanup head prior to Regalbuto, resigned from the agency in 2011.
The Trump administration has not nominated anyone to replace Regalbuto on a permanent basis. Rumors persisted last week that Gary Lavine, a former DOE attorney now in private practice, could be nominated to the post. In the meantime, Susan Cange, who joined EM headquarters late last year, is the acting assistant secretary for environmental management. The Senate must confirm the next full-time head of the Environmental Management office.
Prior to taking the top spot at DOE’s Environmental Management office, the technically trained Regalbuto was deputy assistant secretary for fuel cycle technologies in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy and then associate principal deputy assistant secretary for EM. Before that, she was a senior program manager with the Environmental Management office’s now-defunct Waste Processing office. Regalbuto began her DOE career at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., in 1988.
It was not immediately clear where Regalbuto would work as she transitions back to the career civil service.
The text of Regalbuto’s farewell-but-not-goodbye message to her Environmental Management colleagues is pasted below.
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
Tomorrow is my last day as Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management (EM). It has been an honor to serve with each of you to advance the EM mission. I can truly say that this has been the experience of a lifetime. I will always cherish your personal support as we have worked tirelessly to tackle some of the nation’s toughest environmental challenges.
Together with all of you, the hard-working and dedicated men and women working across the EM complex, at our sites and here at headquarters, we were able to achieve long-lasting impact for our important cleanup program and for many communities across the nation. I strongly believe that we all have a very important role to play in achieving our mission and when we all come together we bring different knowledge, opinions, and perspectives which makes the EM organization one of the more robust, transparent, and accountable organizations in the Federal Government.
As Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”, and let me say that I will never forget how proud YOU made me feel each day that I served as Assistant Secretary for EM. I am pleased and honored to continue to be part of this amazing organization as I transition back into the career senior executive service to support EM as a Senior Technical Advisor and will continue to work with you, in a different capacity of course, to achieve great results for our program.
Thank you again for your support and for all that you do each day for EM.
Keep up the good work!!
Monica
