MONIZ OUTLINES PRIORITIES, PLEDGES FOCUS ON MANAGEMENT AT DOE

New Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz laid out his priorities for the Department of Energy moments after being sworn in yesterday morning, emphasizing what he called the “clean energy climate agenda” as his top priority. “All said and done, that fundamentally is the real driver in my coming back to help advance the President’s and this department’s agenda,” Moniz said, specifically highlighting the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future—on which he served—to “hopefully put the nuclear waste issue back on track.” A video of the swearing in ceremony was posted by the Department of Energy and is available by clicking here. In remarks at the ceremony, Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren called Moniz “unquestionably, in my view, the best qualified incoming Secretary of Energy in history.” Holdren added: “He knows energy, he knows stockpile stewardship, he knows nuclear weapons, he knows nuclear weapons materials, he knows environment and he’s an individual who will be able to work with everybody he needs to work with to get this job done.”

 

Rounding out his priorities, Moniz said, would be nuclear security, science and research infrastructure and cleaning up the Cold War legacy. The new Secretary pledged a particular focus on improving management at DOE. “To achieve our goals, we are going to have to raise our game, raise our focus on management and performance,” Moniz said. “I’m going to have to consider how to do that best organizationally and this will entail a lot of dialogue both internally and externally … This is a key enabler for us to do our job.” Moniz also highlighted the need to fill a number of key vacancies at DOE. “Another near term issue is: we need to complete the bench,” Moniz said. “As you know we have many Senate-confirmed positions, many advisor roles that we need to fill to get the team fully in place and this process is starting; there’ll be some announcements very soon. But I want to stress—it’s not that we have an empty bench. Far from it. We have very talented people staying on in advisor roles and we have very strong career ranks and I want to work with you very, very closely. I know many of you and have great respect for your dedication and talents, but, you know, just like a playoff team with injuries, we play the team we have and we expect success and that again is going to span across our advisor ranks, our DAS’s and our career ranks.”

 

Notably, Moniz highlighted the need to “amplify” the role of national laboratory directors going forward. “We have a challenging budget environment … but where I’m coming from is this department has done a whole string of new things in this area, providing new tools for our scientists. We can’t stop—we have to do new things. And in doing so, I want to emphasize that I think we need to amplify the role of the lab directors as strategic partners in figuring out how are we going to accomplish that no matter what the bounding conditions are in terms of the budget environment.”