President Donald Trump plans to nominate nuclear industry lobbyist and former Capitol Hill staffer Melissa Burnison as assistant secretary of energy for congressional and intergovernmental affairs, the White House announced Wednesday.
If nominated and then confirmed by the Senate, Burnison would lead the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs as the principal Department of Energy (DOE) liaison to Congress, and to other Executive-Branch agencies.
Burnison is now director of federal affairs for the Nuclear Energy Institute trade group. Before serving as an industry lobbyist, she was a senior adviser at the Energy Department and at the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee.
The last full-time assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs at DOE was Bradley Crowell, who left the Barack Obama administration’s Department of Energy in October 2016 after about three years of service to work for the state of Nevada.
The assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs reports directly to the office of the secretary of energy.
The Energy Department has filled out its top ranks recently, after months in which Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Deputy Secretary Dan Brouillette were the only two officials to be confirmed by the Senate. Earlier this month, the upper chamber confirmed Berkshire Hathaway executive Mark Wesley Menezes as undersecretary for the Department of Energy and J.P. Morgan executive Paul Dabbar as undersecretary for science.
An interest group representing communities that host Department of Energy nuclear weapons and cleanup sites wants a meeting with the head of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), who earlier this summer urged the White House to dissolve the decades-old safety watchdog.
The Energy Communities Alliance “believes DNFSB must not be eliminated in order to continue to fully address local concerns,” Chuck Smith, a member of the Aiken, S.C. City Council, wrote in a Nov. 13 letter to DNFSB Chairman Sean Sullivan.
Last month, the Center for Public Integrity reported that Sullivan, a board member elevated to the chairmanship in January by President Donald Trump, recommended the Trump administration ask Congress to eliminate the DNFSB.
In a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget, Sullivan called the board a relic of the Cold War that duplicates DOE efforts to monitor health and safety hazards and risks across the civilian agency’s nuclear complex. He said if Congress eliminated the board, the government could save more than $30 million a year.
Three of the five DNFSB members quickly distanced themselves from Sullivan’s letter, and a broad range of nuclear weapon-site watchers dismissed the idea that the board had outlived its usefulness.
Those experts, like Smith, acknowledged the DNFSB could stand some reform.
“DNFSB’s operations can and must improve,” wrote Smith, chairman of the Energy Communities Alliance Executive Board. “In particular, the Board at times has made decisions that impact DOE or [National Nuclear Security Administration] project development due to a Board or staff member’s opposition to a certain project. Additionally, DNFSB has, on occasion, caused significant project delays and increased costs with DOE and NNSA rather than working with their respective offices.”
Smith gave no examples of such operational intrusions on DNFSB’s part, but he did request a meeting with Sullivan to discuss matters further.
“I’m not aware of any meeting between our chairman and that group,” a DNFSB spokesperson said Tuesday. “We just got the letter today.”
