NYT: Rick Perry Thought as Energy Secretary He Would Be Global Ambassador for US Oil Industry

Embarrassing Profile of Former Texas Governor Published Hours Before Confirmation Hearing

Rick Perry will sit before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Thursday to answer questions about his ability to lead the $30 billion U.S. Dept. of Energy. Many questioned Perry’s fitness for the job when Donald Trump announced the nomination last month, given Perry has nearly zero experience dealing with nuclear materials. But many believed Perry, having served as governor of oil-rich Texas was perfect for the job, wrongly understanding what the department does.

As a New York Times profile of Gov. Perry notes, among them was Gov. Perry.

“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,” the Times article, published hours before Perry’s confirmation hearing, begins.

“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,” the Times reveals.

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.

Perry, of course, has zero experience in “keeping safe the nation’s nuclear stockpile,” or in “thwarting nuclear proliferation,” or anything else nuclear to any great degree, as the Times, almost mockingly makes clear.

“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,” the Times explains.

“For Mr. Moniz, the future of nuclear science has been a lifelong obsession; he spent his early years working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Mr. Perry studied animal husbandry and led cheers at Texas A&M University,” the Times embarrassingly reports.

Mr. Moniz had such deep experience with nuclear weapons that in 2015, President Obama made him a co-negotiator, along with Secretary of State John Kerry, of the Iran nuclear deal.

Gov. Perry, who Donald Trump beat handily in the GOP primaries, sat down with the president-elect in Trump Tower to interview for the job. It took him weeks after he was officially nominated to learn that the job he accepted was not even close to the job he thought he had interviewed for. The question is, what did Donald Trump think the Secretary of Energy does?

On Twitter, many responded in shock or anger: 

You can respond directly to Rick Perry by sending your comments to him on Twitter: @GovernorPerry.
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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license