The Senate Arms Services Committee on Thursday approved William Bookless, for the second time, to be second-in-command at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The committee approved Bookless, along with three nominees for non-DOE senior administration jobs, by voice vote at the top of a hearing.
Bookless is a former senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. If confirmed by the full Senate, he will finally assume the role of principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The Senate had not scheduled a vote on Bookless’ nomination at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The Donald Trump administration first nominated Bookless to the semiautonomous DOE nuclear weapons steward in August. The Senate Arms Services Committee approved his nomination unanimously in December, but the 115th Congress ended Jan. 3 before the full Senate could confirm him for the No. 2 job at the NNSA.
The White House then renominated Bookless in January. The Senate Armed Services Committee did not require him to sit for a second confirmation hearing.
If confirmed, Bookless will fill the last of four NNSA senior leadership posts that require Senate approval. The other three are: NNSA administrator; deputy administrator for defense programs; and deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. Half of those jobs will be filled by former Livermore personnel, if the Senate confirms Bookless. Charles Verdon, the new deputy administrator for defense programs, is also a Livermore alum.
Bookless retired from government service in 2015, after serving as assistant laboratory director for policy and planning at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state. Prior to being posted to Brookhaven, he was an adviser to then-NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agnostino.
Before that, Bookless spent more than three decades at Livermore, where among other jobs he served as deputy associate director for the facility’s nuclear weapons program and associate director for safety and environmental protection.
Bookless got his doctorate in physics in 1980 from the University of Wyoming: the same year he joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
