Secretary of Energy-designate Rick Perry will wait until next week for a confirmation vote in a key Senate committee.
Perry, the former Texas governor who helped usher a commercially operated nuclear-waste repository into the state during his 15-year run in Austin, had his initial confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week.
The committee had scheduled a business meeting for Tuesday of this week to consider Perry and fellow Cabinet nominee Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who President Donald Trump has tapped as his secretary of the interior.
However, committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) “had some follow-up questions” for the nominees, “which is why the business meeting was postponed,” a committee aide said Wednesday.
The committee now is slated to vote on the nominations on Jan. 31.
In his confirmation hearing last week, Perry hinted the new administration will pay close attention to the $6-billion-a-year cleanup of Cold War nuclear waste managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
“[P]rioritizing the funding and managing that funding in an appropriate way to clean up these waste sites is going to be very, very high on the priority list,” Perry told the panel.
