In fulfillment of a long-circulating rumor, the Donald Trump administration announced it will nominate former National Security Council and Department of Energy staffer Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to run U.S. nuclear warhead programs as undersecretary for nuclear security and head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
If approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee and confirmed by the full Senate, Gordon-Hagerty would become the first female administrator of the NNSA, and the fifth leader of the semiautonomous Department of Energy (DOE) subagency established by Congress in 2000. The NNSA manages all DOE nuclear-weapons programs, along with nuclear nonproliferation and naval reactor operations.
The White House announced its plan to nominate Gordon-Hagerty on Monday. If confirmed, she would replace Frank Klotz, a retired Air Force general who was nominated by then-President Barack Obama in 2014.
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor first reported the White House’s plans to install Gordon-Hagerty at the NNSA in June.
Gordon-Hagerty has federal experience in national security and nuclear weapons, but her recent experience is in the private sector. For the past seven years, she has been president of Tier-Tech International: a government consulting firm in McLean, Va., specializing in national security. She also owns and operates her own consulting firm, LEG Inc., in McLean.
Jon Wolfsthal, former senior director for arms control and nonproliferation in Obama’s National Security Council, lauded Gordon-Hagerty’s nomination on Twitter on Tuesday.
Lisa is extraordinarily qualified and a proven leader with strong leadership skills. She would be the first woman to head NNSA and would be a worthy successor to @FrankKlotzNNSA https://t.co/nUEVAKa2Xi
— Jon B. Wolfsthal (@JBWolfsthal) December 12, 2017
A pair of former DOE officials privately praised Gordon-Hagerty’s nuclear and national security expertise, calling her a “tough” leader who will “be great for [NNSA’s] nuclear weapons and emergency response/operations programs.”
From 2003 to 2005 Gordon-Hagerty was executive vice president and chief operating officer of the United States Enrichment Corp., now known as Centrus. She was laid off from the company as part of a reorganization that preceded the group’s eventual bankruptcy filing and received a severance package that included a lump-sum cash payment of more than $1 million, plus stock, according to a 2005 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Before her stint in the private sector, Gordon-Hagerty served five years in the the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations at the National Security Council’s director for combating terrorism.
Prior to her stint on the National Security Council, Gordon-Hagerty served six years at DOE, where she led the agency’s Office of Emergency Response and Office of Weapons Surety. She was previously a congressional staffer.
The NNSA has a roughly $13-billion annual budget and is in line for a roughly $1-billion-a-year raise, under fiscal 2018 appropriations bills awaiting final votes in Congress. Besides its Washington headquarters, the agency has eight field sites across the country: three weapons-design labs, four production sites, and one test site.
