President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday morning he will nominate former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to lead the Energy Department.
Perry, who served 14 years as governor of Texas, famously suggested eliminating DOE during his 2012 presidential bid, only to blank on the agency’s name during a nationally televised debate. Perry also ran for president in 2016, calling Trump a “cancer on conservatism,” before exiting the race and ultimately endorsing the eventual victor.
The formal announcement came around 6 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday but had been widely reported through the day Tuesday.
Trump transition team spokesman Jason Miller said during the team’s regularly scheduled news briefing Tuesday, that “we’re big fans” of the former governor. Miller was also asked if the president-elect is comfortable with eliminating the Energy Department.
“There will be a number of different reforms and things that we look at as we move into the first of the year, primarily the focus being jobs right out of the gate,” Miller said in response. “There have been a number of things that the president-elect has put down markers on, both for day one activities and also for the first 100 days that we’ve seen the president-elect already dive into. He’s going to find ways to save taxpayers money right out of the gate from the get-go with whoever’s calling out bad contracts or bad deals and finding ways to better negotiate on behalf of American taxpayers, so stay tuned for overall government reform plans and also the president elect’s announcement on this position.”
Perry in 2014 voiced support for finding an in-state location to store Texas’ spent nuclear fuel and opther high-level nuclear waste. Private company Waste Control Specialists is now pursuing a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to operate a consolidated interim storage facility in West Texas for spent fuel. The 40,000-metric-ton-capacity interim storage facility could fall under DOE’s consent-based siting process, the Obama administration’s interim replacement for the Yucca Mountain repository.
Perry would oversee an agency with a roughly $30 billion annual budget, a large chunk of which ($12.5 billion in fiscal 2016) is directed to nuclear weapons, nonproliferation, and other operations conducted by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. One of the agency’s sites, the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant, is located near Amarillo. The department also spends about $6 billion a year on legacy nuclear cleanup.
“Perry unqualified for DOE Sec with NO nuclear weapons/energy experience. Amateur hour!” Ellen Tauscher, former congresswoman from California and undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said Tuesday on Twitter.
Meanwhile, a retired Navy admiral who served in the Department of Homeland Security is under consideration to lead the NNSA, according to a source familiar with — but not involved in — the transition.
The rumored NNSA nominee is Rear Adm. Jay Cohen: the former undersecretary for science and technology at Homeland Security and a nuclear navy veteran. The Desert Storm vet was a senior member of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Examining Board and as the service’s top congressional liaison. He retired from the Navy in 2006 and spent three years at Homeland Security.
Like Cabinet-level posts, the Senate must confirm any presidential nominee for NNSA administrator.
