The White House sent Texas insurance lobbyist Dan Brouillette’s nomination to be deputy secretary of energy to the Senate on Thursday, marking the Donald Trump administration’s first substantial change to DOE’s leadership since Rick Perry was sworn in as secretary of energy in March.
Brouillette, said to have been handpicked for the job by Perry, would if confirmed become No. 2 in the chain of command at the roughly $30-billion-a-year Department of Energy. He is currently senior vice president at the United Services Automobile Association in San Antonio, Texas, where he has worked for over a decade.
Brouillette now faces a confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which must approve his nomination before the full Senate can confirm the one-time DOE hand for a second stint at the agency he last served when George W. Bush was president.
The committee had not scheduled a hearing at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.
From 2001 to 2003, Brouillette was DOE’s assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs. He left the agency in 2003 for Capitol Hill, where he was staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee that has jurisdiction over DOE. Brouillette’s time on the Hill lasted just a year, and he has been in industry ever since.
Meanwhile, there is still no official word about when the Trump administration plans to fill lower-level DOE positions that require Senate confirmation. Among these are the assistant energy secretary who leads the Office of Environmental Management that helms the agency’s annual $6 billion-plus cleanup of Cold War nuclear waste from Pentagon weapons programs.
Sue Cange has led the Environmental Management office on an acting basis since Trump’s inauguration. As of Friday, the name of former DOE cleanup contractor John “Rick” Dearholt was still circulating in the Washington rumor mill as a possible assistant secretary for environmental management.
Dearholt, reached Thursday by phone, said he has not lately visited DOE headquarters in Washington, nor had any communication with either the Trump administration or Perry.
Asked whether he was still in the running for the job, Dearholt replied: “Nobody’s heard anything about it.”
In March, Dearholt told Weapons Complex Monitor he was scheduled to interview with Perry for the Environmental Management job. However, the interview was canceled almost as soon as it was scheduled.
Multiple sources have said Dearholt has openly discussed in private what he characterizes as his impending nomination to the top DOE cleanup post, though the former Oak Ridge Site contractor has made no such claim publicly.