Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
Stephan: The most notable thing about Trump's cabinet and agency appointments is how willfully ignorant, and generally incompetent they are, and that most of them have a prior career trying to dismantle or castrate the agency they now head. It is, of course, a measure of the corrupt and pusillanimous behavior of the Republican congress that these men and women were confirmed for the office they now hold.
Nowhere is this clearer than with the Department of Energy, the cabinet level department that according to the White House is charged with “advancing the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; promoting scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and ensuring the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex.”
Trump replaced internationally respected physicist Ernest Moniz with former Texas governor Rick Perry, a man who at least in his public statements seems not only not very bright but completely ignorant of all the relevant science in which the DOE is involved. Mostly he just seems deeply confused.
Here is where the DOE stands under the "leadership" of Trump and Perry. It is not a pretty story.
On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver the same talks from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders, with the Department of Energy seal on them, to the Trump people as they would have given to the Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,” said one former Department of Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the intention that, either party wins, nothing changes.”
By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,” says a former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was ‘Maybe they’ll call us?’
Teams were going around, ‘Have you heard from them?’ ” recalls another staffer who had prepared for the […]
