ALEXANDRIA, Va. — With her customary caution and courtesy, the Energy Department’s top nuclear cleanup official would neither confirm nor deny that her career at the agency would end when President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.
Asked here at the 2016 National Cleanup Workshop whether she would consider staying at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) if Obama’s replacement asked her to do so, Monica Regalbuto, assistant secretary for environmental management, said only “it’s an honor to serve.”
Typically, political appointees such as Regalbuto will not remain in office longer than the president who appoints them. The longtime DOE hand also now has relatively few opportunities for advancement in the agency, where she has worked for more than 20 years.
Regalbuto stepped into the top spot at EM in 2015, about a year after her initial nomination to become EM-1, as her position is known in DOE bureaucracy code. Her first confirmation hearing in the Senate took place only about four months after an accidental underground radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., rocked DOE’s defense nuclear complex and briefly vaulted EM into the national spotlight.
On Regalbuto’s watch, EM conducted a WIPP recovery that is expected to culminate with the mine’s reopening late this year or in early 2017. Regalbuto was also at the helm for the conclusion of a drawn-out court dispute with Washington state over waste treatment at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. Those proceedings wound down in April, when a federal judge ordered DOE to start treating all Hanford chemical and radioactive waste by 2036.
Regalbuto likewise presided over this summer’s reorganization of EM’s headquarters bureaucracy, which turned seven Washington-based managerial stovepipes into three and installed the former manager of the the Richland Operations Office at Hanford as a headquarters-based field office czar. The shakeup, Regalbuto and her senior colleagues say, is part of the office’s drive to become more responsive to the increasingly specific needs of its cleanup projects across the nation.
