The White House this week renominated William Bookless to be principal deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): the No. 2 post at the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon steward.
Bookless was one of more than 150 nominees for senior executive branch jobs sent to the Senate on Wednesday. Many had been nominated in the 115th Congress, which ended on Jan. 3. In the new Congress, the nominees must go through the confirmation process again.
Bookless, a former senior physicist from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, got nearly all the way through the confirmation process during the last Congress. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved him unanmously for the job in early December and sent him on for a floor vote. However, Congress was bogged down with an ongoing border security debate that led to the current partial government shutdown, leaving little time before the new year to act on Bookless and many other nominees.
The Republican Party still controls the Senate, so Bookless needs support from many of the same lawmakers who backed him in the last go-round. However, the Senate Armed Services Committee had not scheduled Bookless for consideration at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
When Bookless appeared before the committee for his nomination hearing in November, he took a few shots from the panel’s Democrats over the Trump administration’s plans to produce plutonium nuclear-weapon cores, or “pits,” in two states.
Despite the jostling, Bookless stuck up for the administration’s plan, which calls for making 50 pits a year in South Carolina and 30 pits a year in New Mexico by 2030. The joint Department of Energy-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council has endorsed the civilian agency’s split-state pit approach, which has drawn doubts from some Senate Democrats and outright scorn from New Mexico’s congressional delegation.
New Mexico’s Senate delegation includes Armed Services member Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who represents the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Until last year, Los Alamos was supposed to be the NNSA’s sole source for pits.
If confirmed by the Senate, Bookless will fill the last of four senior NNSA leadership position that require congressional approval. The others are: NNSA administrator; deputy administrator for defense programs; and deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. Half of those jobs will be filled by former Livermore hands, if the Senate confirms Bookless this time around.
