The Donald Trump administration could already be planning for a new permanent head for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office.
While Energy Department senior adviser William (Ike) White is apt to stay in charge of the Office of Environmental Management for a number months, names of potential successors to Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White are starting to pop up, two industry sources said this week. Both declined to name names.
“I don’t want to kill anybody’s chances” by letting their name get out too early, one said by telephone Wednesday.
“There are a couple of people who are sniffing around out there,” the second source said Thursday. Everything is still very preliminary, with the administration evidently trying to identify suitable candidates.
Anne White resigned in May and departed in June, after about 15 months on the job, apparently at the request of her boss, Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar. Relations between the two were said to be strained prior to this spring’s news of contamination of a middle school adjacent to the DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio. That apparently brought the situation to a head, with Dabbar said to be unhappy about the level of media coverage generated by the temporary closure of the school and White’s degree of involvement in the issue.
In June, the Energy Department placed Ike White in charge of the office overseeing remediation of 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project defense nuclear sites. He is a longtime federal hand who previously served as chief of staff and associate principal deputy administrator at DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Some sources believe DOE decided not to make Ike White the acting assistant secretary, or “EM-1,” which would place a time limit on his tenure at the office. An acting official typically can stay in a presidential appointment post for only 210 days.
At the same time, the White House wants a Trump appointee, rather than a career federal employee, setting Environmental Management policy over the longer term, the second source said.
Both sources agreed any planning is in its nascent stages. They also add the logistics of identifying, vetting, and eventually nominating and confirming an assistant secretary takes a long time. Trump took office in January 2017; Anne White was nominated in January 2018 and sworn in two months later.
Given a long lead time, the administration might realistically look for a permanent EM-1 for a second Trump term, one of the sources said. The confirmation process is arduous and It would be hard to recruit a leader for what might be only a one-year tenure, the first source said.
New Org Chart Issued for DOE Environmental Management
The DOE nuclear cleanup office on July 19 posted its first new organizational chart since April 1.
In addition to showing Ike White atop the structure, it also lists former DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader as principal deputy assistant secretary for the office, or EM-2.
There is a vacancy at chief of staff following the recent resignation of Darcey Bolin, who came to EM from contractor CH2M last year as a member of the leadership team for Anne White. Joceline Nahigian remains deputy chief of staff. Nahigian has been with Environmental Management since 2014, moving from the Energy Information Administration, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The second line of the organizational chart now shows federal manager Norbert Doyle as the acting associate principal deputy assistant secretary for corporate services. Doyle was placed in the position on July 12 by Ike White. A U.S. Army veteran, Doyle was chief procurement and logistics officer for the Veterans Health Administration for four years before becoming a DOE manager focused on procurement in October 2015.
Doyle steps in for Paul Bosco, head of corporate services since October 2018, who is returning to his prior post as director of DOE’s Office of Project Management.
Also missing from the chart is any box for the Environmental Management special projects office.
The office was created by EM in 2017 to focus attention on completion and operation of the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The office was originally led by longtime DOE manager Dae Chung, now listed as the head of safety, security, and quality assurance at the $7 billion annual environmental remediation operation. In September 2018, James Hutton was listed as director of special projects, and he is now working elsewhere in DOE.
“It may have just gone away,” one source said of special projects.
The office never garnered a particularly high profile within the agency, which has never said much about its staffing or accomplishments.
