When Donald Trump named Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy, it seemed like a capstone to a series of worst-possible selections. Hire the guy who has eight open lawsuits against the EPA to run the EPA. Get the woman who wants to replace public education with a scam to run the schools. And put a cherry on top by taking the guy who wants to eliminate the Department of Energy and putting him in charge of the thing—a choice so awful it seemed like a deliberate punch to the national nose.
The irony was only magnified in that when Rick Perry was listing departments he’d send to the chopping block, he famously forgot the name of the Department of Energy. The joke was that Perry didn’t know what the department did. As it turns out, that was not a joke at all.
When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.
Pausing there for a moment. Rick Perry ran for president. Twice. He proposed getting rid of the Department of Energy. He talked to Donald Trump about running the Department of Energy. He agreed to head the Department of Energy. And all that time he had no idea, not the least damn clue, what the Department of Energy is about.
In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.
Don’t say those aren’t smart glasses he’s wearing. They’re just attached to the face of a staggering idiot.
Who is this guy who doesn’t have the first f#@king clue about the DOE replacing?
If approved by the Senate, he will take over from a secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, who was chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics department and directed the linear accelerator at M.I.T.’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Before Mr. Moniz, the job belonged to Steven Chu, a physicist who won a Nobel Prize.
Can we get Mark Hamill to read that in a Joker voice? Because nothing else may capture the sheer insanity of this moment. And if you’re trying to reassure yourself with the comforting thought that a guy who will spend his first six weeks on the job just trying to locate his office can’t really do that much harm, remember this little factor.
As Gizmodo reported earlier this month, the NNSA chief and his deputy have not been invited to stay on by Trump, and are planning to clear out their desks at noon Friday—marking, Heinrich warned, “the first time in [the agency’s] 16-year history, through four different administrations, in which there will not be any continuity in leadership during a presidential transition.”
Where’s the NNSA? Don’t ask Rick Perry, but it’s part of the Department of Energy. What’s it do? It manages and maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Who’s running it now?
That may be the one point where everyone else is just as clueless as Perry.
According to an official within the Department of Energy, the Trump team has still not reached out to the NNSA about its transitional leadership in any capacity. And unless anything changes significantly in the next three days, come January 20, Klotz and Creedon will both step into retirement, though they will likely remain active in the nuclear community.
The DOE has over 100,000 employees, a $28 billion budget, and 7,700 nuclear warheads to deal with. Oh, and it also tends a little thing called the nuclear Navy.
But maybe there’s a plan to this. Maybe the only way to save the world from having Donald Trump in charge of a nuclear arsenal, is to put Rick Perry in control of maintaining that arsenal.