The nomination of Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to serve as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy has been met, predictably, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual “green energy” suspects. The League of Conservation Voters vice president for government affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld, professed herself unsurprised, but appalled by the choice of a man noted for a major role in the fracking industry. Jackie Wong of the Natural Resources Defense Council characterized the nomination as “a disastrous mistake.” I haven’t been able to find anything from Greta Thunberg on the nomination, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time.
Often enough over the years, a DOE Secretary has been raked over the congressional coals because of a security issue at the nuclear weapons complex.
Conservatives on the other hand have greeted the nomination with acclaim. National Review’s Dominic Pino, for example, characterized Wright as “Trump’s best cabinet pick,” and the enthusiasm seems genuine. Pino notes Wright’s science and engineering background and his experience across a wide range of energy disciplines. He lauds Wright’s professed commitment to promoting energy abundance, contrasting his embrace of a “positive future for greater energy accessibility and lower levels of poverty worldwide,” in studied contrast to the “anti-human, anti-growth views” of the net-zero environmental radicals.
Pino’s essay also notes that Wright will face a learning curve as he transitions from CEO to cabinet secretary, and also observes that the Department of Energy (DOE) is not “as powerful in the energy sector as its name would suggest.” In this, Pino is correct, and many people are seeking more from the Wright appointment than he can reasonably be expected to deliver. Like most commentators, however, Pino fails to articulate — and doesn’t appear to fully understand — just why this is so.
One of the first lessons I learned in government service was that to genuinely understand an agency’s mission and priorities, one should look at its budget, not the pious pronouncement in its “strategic vision” or its “mission statements.” In the case of DOE, this reveals that the name of the agency itself is highly misleading.
Fossil energy and carbon management, that portion of the department about which Wright’s supporters and detractors are most vocally exercised, accounts for 2 percent of the budget. Nuclear energy, which certainly plays a role in the new administration’s vision, accounts for 3 percent of the budget. Renewable energy, including all the promotional investment in solar and wind favored by the Biden administration, accounts for 7 percent. And the department’s Office of Science, which supports a wide range of research and development activities, not all of them energy-related, accounts for 17 percent.
All of these different elements, the ones at the heart of the discussion over Wright’s suitability as energy secretary, are dwarfed by something called the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which accounts for 46 percent of the DOE budget. And what is NNSA? In a phrase, it’s the nation’s “nuclear weapons complex,” that portion of the government that conducts nuclear weapons research and development, designs and builds nuclear weapons, updates and refurbishes our nuclear weapons stockpile, and dismantles nuclear weapons as they become outdated or in response to various international treaties.
It also includes a significant component of the naval nuclear reactors program. When one adds the 17 percent of the budget for the Office of Environmental Management, largely concerned with legacy nuclear weapons program cleanup, then the dominant role of nuclear weapons becomes even more pronounced.
So, you thought nuclear weapons belonged exclusively to the Department of Defense? Well, you were wrong, although in my experience you’re in very good company — most people outside of the nuclear weapons community, including, for example, many in Congress and in other branches of government, are largely clueless, and so too are most pundits and journalists. The separation is deliberate, a legacy of the original, post-Manhattan Project Atomic Energy Act, much concerned with separating the creation of nuclear weapons from responsibility for their employment, keeping the former in civilian hands.
I worked in the DOE under nine different secretaries. Some of them understood full well the immensity of the role of NNSA and its predecessor, the Office of Defense Programs. Some had a glimmering, and some came into their confirmation hearings in a state of near-cluelessness, deceived by the title “Department of Energy.” Sooner or later, all came to understand the centrality of the NNSA to their job as Secretary, as often as not when something embarrassing happened at one of the nuclear weapons facilities.
The existence of the NNSA itself followed from a series of embarrassing security incidents, going back to the 1980s but coming to a peak of congressional concern in the late 1990s. The creation of the NNSA as a “semi-autonomous” agency within the DOE was meant to correct this situation by concentrating management attention. It’s not entirely clear that this worked out as intended, a subject that would require a book rather than this brief essay, and certainly the nuclear weapons complex has benefited when well-chosen NNSA “Administrators” — the title for the person in charge — have given the nuclear weapons mission its due attention.
But the NNSA Administrator is also the “Under Secretary for Nuclear Security” in the DOE, and as such, answers to the Secretary of Energy (and forgive me if I glide over the kabuki dance that this relationship frequently entails). As long as things are going well, the Secretary can safely let NNSA go its semi-autonomous way and concentrate on the other parts of his portfolio.
But when things go wrong, as they did, for example, in 2012 when an 82 year-old nun and two other anti-nuclear weapons protestors penetrated past several layers of security, then the buck stops with the Secretary. Secretary Ernie Moniz, who served under Obama, became a critical player in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, not the Administrator of the NNSA. “Semi-autonomous” only goes so far.
Often enough over the years, a DOE Secretary has been raked over the congressional coals because of a security issue at the nuclear weapons complex. It was widely understood, for example, that President Clinton parked Bill Richardson at DOE so that he could be safely tagged as Al Gore’s 2000 vice-presidential running mate, a safety that evaporated when Richardson found himself confronted with yet another DOE security flare-up.
Among my last jobs at DOE was assisting incoming secretarial staffers — the politically-appointed underlings who help make the secretary’s job easier — in understanding the relationship with the NNSA, including some of the pitfalls arising from the complicated administrative structure. A large part of this consisted of leading them through departmental history and alerting them to the need to pay close attention to the weapons complex — they weren’t there just to promote windfarms. Looking back, I’d like to think that, if nothing else, I helped them avoid some of the most obvious pitfalls.
Don’t get me wrong. I happen to agree with other conservative commentators that Chris Wright offers great promise as Secretary of Energy, and I hope that he is speedily confirmed. After the empty symbolism of the Granholm years at DOE, it’s time for someone who can energize a vision of responsible growth across the energy sector, and Wright seems very much the man for the job.
The current Administrator of the NNSA, Jill Hruby, has by all accounts been a success, and, one hopes, can be relied on to help him manage his nuclear weapons responsibilities — that, after all, is her primary job. If and when she is to be replaced, I trust that the choice will be treated with appropriate seriousness. We stand, after all, amidst nuclear weapons challenges unseen since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Still, I wish that those who write about such things, both those in favor of Wright’s nomination, and those so passionately opposed, understood the job of the Secretary of Energy. DOE may be one of the smaller cabinet agencies, but it remains hugely important, and now never more so. I hope Chris Wright is speedily confirmed, and I wish him the best of luck. He will likely need it.
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James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.
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