David Turk was sworn in this week as the deputy secretary of energy after clearing the Senate with only two Republicans in opposition.
Turk took the oath, administered by his boss, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, on Thursday. The full Senate approved his nomination Wednesday 98-2, with only Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voting no.
Turk will now be Granholm’s primary backstop and DOE’s chief operating officer.
“I am so grateful to have such a blockbuster deputy at my side, who brings unmatched experience and commitment to DOE’s core missions,” Granholm said in a prepared statement. “Dave will help guide our work to maintain the nuclear deterrent and deploy the clean energy technologies we need as we hustle to secure our nation’s future — and save the planet.”
Turk was most recently deputy executive director of the International Energy Agency. He served in the Barack Obama administration’s State and Energy departments, working on climate issues and the New Start nuclear arms-control treaty with Russia.
Before Obama was elected, and Joe Biden became Obama’s vice president, Turk was a member of Biden’s Senate staff.
Turk cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with a unanimous vote on March 11.
Deciding where nuclear cleanup fits in the pecking order within President Biden’s DOE will likely be determined by the just-confirmed deputy secretary, the acting boss at the Office of Environmental Management said Wednesday.
The assessment was offered by William (Ike) White, acting assistant secretary for the Office of Environmental Management (EM), when asked by a member of the Environmental Management Advisory Board if the $7-billion nuclear cleanup branch will continue to report directly to the secretary of energy’s office. The advisory panel met online.
The new administration decided, for the time being at least, to have EM report directly to the secretary of energy. This undid a change from the prior administration.
“I don’t really know if that’s a permanent change or not,” White said in a response to a question from Jack Craig, acting chairman of the advisory board, a national body that provides external advice, information and recommendations to the EM assistant secretary.“I suspect when we have the deputy secretary on board, hopefully this week, I would assume that would be one of the things he would take a look at,” White said.
The deputy secretary at DOE acts as the chief operating officer and typically is the driving force for organizational structure, White said shortly before the Senate’s overwhelming approval of Turk.
White is a longtime federal manager at DOE and has been in charge of day-to-day operations at EM since June 2019. His initial title there was special adviser to DOE’s then-undersecretary for science Paul Dabbar. White was given the title of acting assistant secretary by the Biden team. The Donald Trump administration had EM reporting to the science undersecretary rather than directly to the secretary of energy’s office.
In reaction to a question from board member Robert Thompson, White said he expects the DOE, under new Secretary Jennifer Granholm, to take a look at the prior administration’s much-debated stance on reclassifying some high-level radioactive waste. The acting EM chief acknowledged there are strong opinions for-and-against the reinterpretation.
That’s especially true in Washington state, where DOE’s Hanford Site houses much of the potentially re-classifiable waste. In a pair of dueling letters, Washington’s attorney general and others, including local tribes, urged Granholm to jettison the Trump era reinterpretation, while several towns and counties around the site, including Richland, where Thompson is a city council member, endorsed the new approach and urged it be used at Hanford.
“The new administration is still taking a look at all the policies across the department,” White said. “I’m always a glass-half-full kind of guy” and believe it is possible to reach agreement on what the cleanup program should look like at least in the next five-to-10 years, said the EM official.
“I used to think that too,” Thompson said.
