Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm this week praised the Senate’s Tuesday confirmation of Ali Nouri by voice vote to serve as DOE’s assistant secretary for congressional and Intergovernmental affairs.
“As both a scientist and a proven consensus-builder, Ali will bring unparalleled perspective and expertise to his work with Congress and our federal, state, and local government partners,” Granholm said in a Wednesday press release issued prior to her appearance before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss the White House’s fiscal 2022 budget request for DOE.
Nouri joined the Joe Biden administration in January as the principal deputy assistant secretary in DOE’s Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs. Before that, he was the president of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization focused on issues such as countering weapons of mass destruction and emerging infectious diseases.
Nouri was nominated to the DOE congressional and intergovernmental affairs post in April.
Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat who spent one term in the House of Representatives serving New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, the home of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, was nominated Thursday to a post in the Biden administration.
Torres Small was nominated by the president to be undersecretary of agriculture for rural development. Her nomination was announced in a Thursday press release by the White House. After the attorney was elected to the House seat in November 2019, Torres Small lost her re-election bid in November 2021 in a rematch with Republican Yvette Herrell, who currently holds the seat.
Stephen Hoffman, deputy manager of the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Field office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will become acting boss there effective Monday.
Hoffman will serve as acting manager until somebody else is named by Environmental Management (EM), outgoing field office manager Kirk Lachman said this week during an online meeting of the Northern New Mexico Site Advisory Board for DOE.
Lachman is set to retire over the weekend after 30 years of federal service that included stints as manager of DOE cleanup at Los Alamos and DOE’s deputy manager at the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico, which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Hoffman joined the DOE Environmental Management office at Los Alamos in October 2016. In addition to three combat support postings in the Middle East and Serbia, Hoffman’s Air Force career included serving as commander of the 1,500 person mission support group at the Beale Air Force Base in California, according to his work biography.
The Energy Facility Contractors Group (EFCOG), a group of more than 100 firms doing business with the Department of Energy recently re-elected a trio of top officers: Michael Lempke of Huntington Ingalls Industries was elected chair, Sandra Fairchild of Savannah River Remediation vice chair and Kelly Beierschmitt of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as vice chair-elect, according to a press release.
In addition, Julie Baker of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado and Mark Peters of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York were elected to EFCOG’s board of directors for the first time while Bob Cochran of Westinghouse and Frank Sheppard of Huntington Ingalls were elected to the board after serving terms in the past.
Also, five individuals were re-elected to the board. They are: Jack Craig of Atkins; Tom Gioconda of Bechtel National in California; Karen Wiemelt of Jacobs; Bob Wilkinson of Hanford Mission Integration Solutions; and Bob Miklos of the Idaho National Laboratory.
The elections were held during EFCOG’s annual meetings held June 9-10.
