Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who the Senate confirmed last week to lead the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), is expected to report to the agency’s Washington headquarters on Thursday, a source said Tuesday.
A Department of Energy spokesperson did not reply to multiple requests for comment Tuesday about when Gordon-Hagerty, who would be the first woman to lead the NNSA, might be sworn in.
President Donald Trump nominated Gordon-Hagerty to be NNSA administrator on Dec. 19. The Senate confirmed her one month and 28 days later, a year and 26 days into Trump’s first term. That is the fastest any U.S. president has ever replaced an NNSA administrator in the semiautonomous agency’s roughly 20-year history. Frank Klotz, the previous administrator, left his post on Jan. 19, a year into Trump’s first term.
Once sworn in, Gordon-Hagerty will embark on her third stint in the executive branch. She previously served five years in the the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as the National Security Council’s director for combating terrorism. Prior to that, she spent six years at DOE, where she led the agency’s Office of Emergency Response and Office of Weapons Surety. Gordon-Hagerty also served as a congressional staffer and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
As NNSA administrator, Gordon-Hagerty has said she would prioritize production of plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear weapons the agency may make at either the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., or both. Either option requires investing in new nuclear infrastructure.
The NNSA is the roughly $13-billion-a-year DOE agency that maintains, repairs, and ensures the continuing potency of U.S. nuclear warheads. The agency also manages global nuclear nonproliferation programs and reactor programs for U.S. Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. The Trump administration requested about $15 billion for the agency in fiscal 2019, which begins Oct. 1. The increase would speed up the agency’s four existing nuclear-weapon modernization programs, on which the NNSA now spends about $1 billion a year.
