The Scariest Nuclear Threat Might Be in the White House
July 26, 2017 at 8:19 am EDT By Taegan Goddard
Michael Lewis has a must-read piece on the Department of Energy from the ceremonial and bizarre role of energy secretary Rick Perry to the Trump administrations apparent total disinterest in the agency.
In his confirmation hearings to run the department Perry confessed that when he called for its elimination he hadnt actually known what the Department of Energy didand he now regretted having said that it didnt do anything worth doing.
The question on the minds of the people who currently work at the department: Does he know what it does now? D.O.E. press secretary Shaylyn Hynes assures us that Secretary Perry is dedicated to the missions of the Department of Energy. And in his hearings, Perry made a show of having educated himself. He said how useful it was to be briefed by former secretary Ernest Moniz. But when I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours Perry had spent with Moniz, he laughed and said, Thats the wrong unit of account. With the nuclear physicist who understood the D.O.E. perhaps better than anyone else on earth, according to one person familiar with the meeting, Perry had spent minutes, not hours. He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change, a D.O.E. staffer told me in June. Hes never been briefed on a programnot a single one, which to me is shocking.
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https://politicalwire.com/2017/07/26/scariest-nuclear-threat-might-white-house/