The White House is considering Alan Parker, who now leads one of the Energy Department’s nuclear-cleanup contractors, to head the agency’s entire remediation of its Cold War legacy as assistant secretary of energy for environmental management (EM), a source said Thursday.
Parker is currently president and project manager for Mid-America Conversion Services: a new Atkins-led contracting team that in February started work on a five-year, $318-million contract to process a total of 740,000 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites in, respectively, Ohio and Kentucky. The material is left over from Cold War-era uranium refining.
Parker is an industry veteran who has previously worked for CH2M and EnergySolutions, and on 10 large-scale DOE projects. Weapons Complex Monitor could not reach him for comment this week. The last rumored administration choice for the top EM job was John “Rick” Dearholt: a Marine Corps veteran and former DOE contractor at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
If the Trump administration wants Parker to head up EM, the White House will have to announce its intent to nominate him, then formally nominate him for consideration in the Senate. Both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations had confirmed permanent EM heads by this point in their respective first terms. The Senate confirmed Ines Triay for the Obama administration May 9, 2009. Bush’s choice, Jessie Hill Roberson, was confirmed July 12, 2001.
So far, Trump has shown a preference for filling executive branch posts, including at DOE, from the top down.
For example, Rick Perry was sworn in as secretary of energy in March, Dan Brouillette was nominated to be Perry’s deputy in May, and a pair of industry executives were nominated for DOE undersecretary positions this week.
The administration tapped Mark Wesley Menezes, a lobbyist for Berkshire Hathaway Energy, as undersecretary for the Department of Energy, and Paul Dabbar of mega-bank J.P. Morgan to be DOE’s undersecretary for science, the White House said in a press release Tuesday.
“Under secretary for the Department of Energy” is the official title for the position labeled on DOE’s current organizational chart as “under secretary for management and performance.” The department’s assistant secretary for environmental management reports directly to the undersecretary for management and performance.
Menezes and Dabbar now face hearings and votes before Senate subcommittees, and then the full Senate. The process can take months, even when the president’s party controls the Senate. Trump nominated Brouillette as deputy energy secretary on May 16, and the full Senate has yet to vote on the nomination. Also, any one senator can delay a floor vote on a nominee by threatening a filibuster: a practice known informally as a hold.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal in early June quoted an aide to Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) as saying “all options are on the table” when it comes to Brouillette, including blocking a confirmation vote, in opposition to DOE’s efforts to revive the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site in Nevada. Heller’s office did not reply to questions this week about whether the senior senator from Nevada would vote to confirm Brouillette on the floor.
There are three DOE undersecretary positions in total. The only one for which Trump has now not nominated someone is undersecretary for nuclear security, the additional title given to the head of DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). However, rumors persist that the administration prefers former National Security Council and Department of Energy senior staffer Lisa Gordon-Hagerty. Gordon-Hagerty has declined to comment about whether she is in the mix to lead NNSA.
In the meantime, Frank Klotz, a holdover from the Barack Obama administration, remains in charge of the NNSA.
