Dan Brouillette was sworn in Wednesday as the 15th U.S. secretary of energy, after the Senate voted 70-15 to confirm him for the Cabinet spot earlier this week, a Department of Energy spokesperson said.
Brouillette had served since 2017 as the deputy secretary of energy under Rick Perry, who resigned as secretary effective Sunday. The former Texas governor was President Donald Trump’s first secretary of energy.
Trump had not nominated anyone to fill Brouillette’s old job as deputy secretary at deadline Friday. The DOE spokesperson on Thursday did not say who became the acting deputy secretary of energy after Brouillette’s swearing-in. The undersecretary of energy, currently Mark Menezes, is third in the department’s official secretarial order of succession.
The Department of Energy has roughly a $30 billion annual budget, most of which is in some way for work on defense-nuclear programs. Nuclear weapons programs managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration take up about $15 billion of the overall budget, while cleanup of active and shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites accounts for another $7 billion within the Office of Environmental Management. The Office of Nuclear Energy, home to the agency’s nuclear waste management activities, had a fiscal 2019 budget of $1.3 billion – which the administration proposed to cut to $824 million in the current fiscal 2020.
Trump nominated Brouillette on Nov. 7. About a month later, more lawmakers from states with major defense-nuclear constituencies voted for him than against him.
Among the 15 “no” votes on the floor Monday were Nevada Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) and Jacky Rosen (D). Both have clashed with the DOE over the agency’s 2018 shipment of half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site for temporary storage. They also oppose the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to turn Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., into a permanent repository for civilian- and defense-origin nuclear waste.
“Mr. Brouillette was Deputy Secretary when DOE shipped weapons-grade plutonium to our state without our consent,” Rosen tweeted Monday. “We must continue to demand transparency from this Administration’s Energy Department and rebuild trust.”
During a nomination hearing on Nov. 14, Cortez Masto touted Brouillette’s qualifications for the job, but said the matters of the plutonium shipment and Yucca Mountain were too much for her to overlook. In 2017, when she was Nevada’s junior senator, Cortez Masto was one of only 10 Democrats who voted to confirm Perry as secretary of energy.
During the nomination hearing, Cortez Masto quizzed Brouillette regarding his position on reviving the Yucca Mountain project. Brouillette offered much the same response as his predecessor had in earlier appearances on Capitol Hill: The Energy Department must follow the law, and the law – specifically the 1987 amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act – says the nation’s nuclear waste must be buried in a geologic repository under Yucca Mountain.
But Brouillette also appeared to acknowledge political realities – that Congress has repeatedly rebuffed the Trump administration’s requests for appropriations to resume federal licensing for the disposal facility, suspended nearly a decade ago under then-President Barack Obama.
“Until Congress makes a decision on Yucca Mountain, the Department of Energy will do nothing,” he told lawmakers.
Also voting against Brouillette’s confirmation on Monday was Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a whistleblower advocate from a state whose northern reaches are near the Hanford Site: the former plutonium-production campus that is now the largest and most expensive nuclear weapons cleanup in the country.
Wyden objected to confirming Brouillette on the grounds that the former auto insurance lobbyist and DOE hand would not answer questions about Perry’s role in the Trump administration’s dealings earlier this year with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Those talks are now at the heart of House Democrats’ ongoing effort to impeach Trump for allegedly abusing the powers of his office for political gain.
On the other hand, several Democrats representing major DOE nuclear cleanup and weapon sites waved Brouillette through this week. Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), champions for DOE’s Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in their state, both voted “yea.” So did Sens. Parry Murray (D-Wash.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), constant allies for Hanford Site cleanup funding.
On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a powerful DOE appropriator who has favored temporary, centralized storage over Yucca Mountain to expedite removal of radioactive used fuel from nuclear power plants, voted in favor of confirmation. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Alexander’s freshman colleague, also approved Brouillette’s nomination.
No Republican voted against Brouillette. However, several major nuke-state senators sat out the vote.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a big booster of the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., missed the vote, as did his South Carolina colleague, Sen. Tim Scott (R).
A Graham spokesperson said South Carolina’s senior senator was absent for the vote, which was officially recorded at 5:29 p.m. Eastern time on Dec. 2, because of a “delayed flight” from his home state. Graham did show up for the day’s next roll call vote, officially recorded at 6:11 p.m. Eastern time, to curtail debate on a judicial nomination.
A Scott spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) missed the Brouillette vote due to the death of his father in-law, Joseph Dudley. Ohio is host to DOE’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, a former uranium enrichment campus that is now a cleanup site — and home to a pilot project to perfect a much smaller-scale enrichment technology owned by Centrus Energy Corp. of Bethesda, Md.
Brown’s colleague, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), voted against Brouillette’s nomination.
Brouillette rocketed into the Cabinet after a 13-year private-sector stint encompassed two years at Ford Motor Co. and more than a decade as an executive at the United Services Automobile Association. He previously spent a handful of years of government service, during which he topped out as staff chief of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2003. Before that, Brouillette spent two years in then-President George W. Bush’s DOE as assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs.
