Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, former two-term governor of Michigan, will headline a fundraising event for the South Carolina Democratic Party Friday evening in Columbia, S.C., roughly an hour’s drive from Aiken, where the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is located.
“She is not on official travel” but personal travel, and the federal government is not paying for the trip, a DOE headquarters spokesperson told Exchange Monitor by phone Tuesday. Granholm is not scheduled to visit Savannah River Site or any in-state nuclear facilities during the trip, the spokesperson said.
While the trip to South Carolina’s state capitol is only a 90-minute flight from Washington, D.C., it comes as the Republican-led the House of Representatives Committee on Energy & Commerce seeks details on the energy secretary’s travel since Feb. 25, 2021.
Granholm will be guest speaker for the Democrats Blue Palmetto: Bling or Jeans at the South Carolina state fairgrounds, according to the state party’s website. Individual tickets for 7 p.m. Eastern Time dinner start at $125, or $225 per head to attend both the dinner and 6 p.m. reception.
“As South Carolina Democrats come together in anticipation of our first in the nation primary, we’re excited to hear from a national Democratic thought leader who will energize us for the months ahead,” according to the South Carolina Democratic Party’s April 17 announcement. The South Carolina Democratic’ primary would occur in February 2024, according to NBC News.
President Joe Biden, Granholm’s boss, announced his plans to seek re-election over the weekend.
The GOP-led Energy and Commerce Committee and its Oversight and Investigations subcommittee wrote Granholm Friday April 24 raising questions about the energy secretary’s travel. Granholm took multiple trips to Puerto Rico and also visited international destinations “before finally visiting the Hanford Site, one of the most costly and challenging cleanup sites in your agency’s Office of Environmental Management complex,” according to the letter.
Granholm visited Hanford in Washington state in August 2022, having canceled a trip there six months earlier partly because of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the full committee, and Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who chairs the subcommittee, said in the letter to Granholm they want the travel information by May 8.
Scrutiny of travel patterns by secretaries of energy are not new. During the Donald Trump administration in October 2017, then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry defended his use of charter planes in certain circumstances. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s energy secretary, Hazel O’Leary was criticized by Congress for the frequency and expense of her foreign trips, according to the Los Angeles Times.
