NY TIMES: Rick Perry thought his job would be to promote oil and gas industry
According to a New York Times report, when Rick Perry accepted the job offer from Donald Trump to be secretary of energy, he thought the job would have “a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry…”
This is, of course, the federal agency that Rick Perry famously forgot he wanted to shut down during a Republican presidential debate in 2012.
The New York Times piece goes on to say:
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.
Two-thirds of the agency’s annual $30 billion budget is devoted to maintaining, refurbishing and keeping safe the nation’s nuclear stockpile; thwarting nuclear proliferation; cleaning up and rebuilding an aging constellation of nuclear production facilities; and overseeing national laboratories that are considered the crown jewels of government science.
According to a Republican energy lobbyist who spoke with the New York Times, “If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy.’”
Rick Perry, if he is confirmed, would be preceded in the job of secretary of energy by Ernest Moniz who was chairman of the M.I.T. physics department and directed the linear accelerator at M.I.T.’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science. And before Secretary Moniz, Steven Chu who is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist held the job.
Rick Perry’s last job, of course, was with ABC’s Dancing With The Stars.
