Only days after news of his departure from the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management leaked, Mark Whitney, the agency’s No. 2 nuclear-cleanup official, has joined AECOM, the Los Angeles-based DOE contractor announced.
Whitney “has been appointed chief operating officer of AECOM’s nuclear and environment strategic business unit,” AECOM wrote in the press release. The company is one of the EM’s largest contractors, managing or directly working on substantially all the major liquid-waste-cleanup sites that represent the biggest remaining revenue grabs for industry across the DOE complex.
Word of Whitney’s departure, detailed in an internal memo from his boss, first leaked out Tuesday.
“It is with gratitude for his service that I share with you the news that Mark Whitney is leaving DOE to pursue an opportunity in the private sector,” Monica Regalbuto, assistant secretary for environmental management, wrote in the memo.
An 11-year DOE veteran, Whitney was principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management since 2014. He will leave the agency in mid-October, according to the memo.
Whitney most recently oversaw a reorganization of the Environmental Management bureaucracy that brought the office’s active cleanup sites under direct management of a new headquarters-based field office czar. He was the department’s de facto spokesman for the reorganization, saying often in the waning months of his tenure the change would restore to the Office of Environmental Management a focus on the field sites that has been lacking in recent years.
Whitney, also a fond Washington Nationals fan, will be replaced on an acting basis by Sue Cange, manager of DOE’s Oak Ridge Site near Oak Ridge, Tenn.
