The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has delayed a planned vote on whether to send three of President Donald Trump’s nominees for senior Energy Department roles to the full Senate for confirmation.
The would-be DOE officials scheduled for committee votes Thursday were: Mark Wesley Menezes, a lobbyist for Berkshire Hathaway Energy tapped to be undersecretary for the Department of Energy; Paul Dabbar, of mega-bank J.P. Morgan, a prospective undersecretary for science; and David Jonas, the White House’s choice for DOE general counsel.
Of the three, Menezes would be most involved with the legacy nuclear cleanup programs managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. In the department’s current organizational hierarchy, the assistant secretary for environmental management reports directly to the undersecretary office Menezes would occupy if confirmed.
The DOE nominations were bundled in with several nominees for the Department of the Interior. The business meeting in which the votes would have happened was canceled amid news reports that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that her decision to oppose health-care legislation in the Senate this week had imperiled Alaska’s standing with the Trump administration.
If approved by the committee, the three DOE nominees would wind up on the Senate’s executive calendar awaiting a floor vote, along with Dan Brouillette: Trump’s nominee for deputy energy secretary. The White House nominated Brouillette in May and he sailed through committee hearings and votes only to hit a roadblock on the floor, where Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) has reportedly blocked a confirmation vote over concerns about Yucca Mountain: the proposed nuclear waste repository in Nye County, Nev., that the Nevada delegation has sworn to oppose tooth and nail.
Meanwhile, Trump has yet to nominate anyone to head either DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) or the Office of Environmental Management.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, a former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist and DOE headquarters employee, is said to be the administration’s top choice for the NNSA job.
For the Office of Environmental Management, the Trump administration is said to favor Alan Parker, president and project manager for Mid-America Conversion Services: a new Atkins-led contracting team that in February started work on a five-year, $318-million contract to process a total of 740,000 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites in, respectively, Ohio and Kentucky.
Both Gordon-Hagerty and Parker had interviews at DOE headquarters in Washington this month, sources said, but that so far has not precipitated a White House statement of intention to nominate either.
