The Senate has set up a vote this week on Jennifer Granholm’s nomination to be secretary of energy, following a procedural step on Monday.
Around 4 p.m. Eastern time, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D) filed cloture on Granholm’s nomination, effectively signalling the start of a brief period of debate that typically lasts no longer than two days.
After that, the full Senate, 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans — and, if needed, one tie-breaking vote in Vice President Kamala Harris (D) — will vote on whether to make Granholm the 16th secretary of energy.
Granholm on Feb. 3 cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee by a widely bipartisan margin, 13-4. That was only one week after a largely cordial nomination hearing in the committee, during which one Senator who decided not to vote for her, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said he wished he could have voted for her.
Granholm, like other secretary of energy nominees, spent little time discussing nuclear waste or weapons during her confirmation hearing. She did briefly mention the Hanford Site in Washington State, the biggest nuclear weapons cleanup in the U.S., and gave Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-N.V.) one of the first assurances from Biden’s cabinet-to-be that the administration did not plan to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev.
The Joe Biden administration officially nominated Granholm on Jan. 20, though Biden announced well before the inauguration that he would tap the former Michigan governor for the post.
At deadline, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee had yet to schedule a nomination hearing for Biden’s deputy secretary of energy-designate David Turk, who worked in a variety of agency posts in the Barack Obama administration’s Department of Energy and Department of State. Biden nominated Turk Feb. 13.
Also at deadline, Biden had yet to nominate anyone to lead either DOE’s Office of Environmental Management or National Nuclear Security Administration. These parts of DOE, which respectively manage cleanup of shuttered nuclear weapons production sites and active nuclear weapons programs, account for almost two-thirds of the agency’s budget.
