“Two weeks after the election the Obama people inside the Department of Energy read in the newspapers that Trump had created a small ‘Landing Team.’ According to several D.O.E. employees, this was led by, and mostly consisted of, [the] president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, D.C., propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. [He] had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a side business writing editorials attacking the D.O.E.’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon.
“[He] says that his role on the Landing Team was ‘voluntary,’ adding that he could not disclose who appointed him, due to a confidentiality agreement. The people running the D.O.E. were by then seriously alarmed. ‘We first learned of [his] appointment on the Monday of Thanksgiving week,” recalls [the] D.O.E. chief of staff… ‘We sent word to him that the Secretary and his Deputy would meet with him as soon as possible. He said he would like that but could not do it until after Thanksgiving.’
“A month after the election [he] arrived for a meeting with [Obama’s] Energy Secretary…, Deputy Secretary…, and [Chief of Staff]. [The Secretary] is a nuclear physicist, then on leave from M.I.T., who had served as Deputy Secretary during the Clinton administration and is widely viewed, even by many Republicans, as understanding and loving the D.O.E. better than any person on earth. [The Landing Team] appeared to have no interest in anything [the Secretary] had to say. ‘He did not seem motivated to spend a lot of time understanding the place,’ says [the Deputy Secretary]. ‘He didn’t bring a pencil or a piece of paper. He didn’t ask questions. He spent an hour. That was it. He never asked to meet with us again.’ ”
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“[The] Deputy Secretary… has spent her 30-year career working on reducing the world’s supply of weapons of mass destruction — she led the U.S. mission to remove chemical weapons from Syria. But like everyone else who came to work at the D.O.E., she’d grown accustomed to no one knowing what the department actually did. When she’d called home, back in 2013, to tell them that President Obama had nominated her to be second-in-command of the place, her mother said, ‘Well, darling, I have no idea what the Department of Energy does, but you’ve always had a lot of energy, so I’m sure you’ll be perfect for the role.’
“The Trump administration had no clearer idea what she did with her day than her mother. And yet, according to [her], they were certain they didn’t need to hear anything she had to say before they took over her job.”
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“The C.F.O. of the department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type… He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job — and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left.
“This was a loss. A lunch or two with the Chief Financial Officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs.
“The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does.”
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“In the run-up to the Trump inauguration the man inside the D.O.E. in charge of the nuclear-weapons program was required to submit his resignation, as were the department’s 137 other political appointees… He was a retired three-star air-force lieutenant general with a Ph.D. in politics from Oxford. The keeper of the nation’s nuclear secrets had boxed up most of his books and memorabilia just like everyone else and was on his way out before anyone had apparently given the first thought to who might replace him.
“It was only after [the] Secretary… called a few senators to alert them to the disturbing vacancy, and the senators phoned Trump Tower sounding alarmed, that the Trump people called [the] General, on the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, and asked him to bring back the stuff he had taken home and move back into his office. Aside from him, the people with the most intimate knowledge of the problems and the possibilities of the D.O.E. walked out the door.”
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“By the time I arrived the first eighth of Trump’s first term was nearly complete, and his administration was still, largely, missing. He hadn’t nominated anyone to serve as head of the Patent Office, for instance, or to run FEMA. There was no Trump candidate to head the T.S.A., or anyone to run the Centers for Disease Control. The 2020 national census will be a massive undertaking for which there is not a moment to lose and yet there’s no Trump appointee in place to run it.”…
“When I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours [Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick] Perry had spent with [Obama’s Energy Secretary], he laughed and said, ‘That’s 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. ‘He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.’ “
“The list of things that might go wrong inside the D.O.E. was endless. The driver of a heavily armed unit assigned to move plutonium around the country was pulled over, on the job, for drunken driving… ‘At D.O.E. even the regular scheduled meetings started with ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ says [the] former [DOE] chief of staff.’ “
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“Now [DOE’s former Chief Risk Officer] tells me about an incident that occurred back in 1961, and was largely declassified in 2013, just as he began his stint at D.O.E. A pair of four-mega-ton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina.
“One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed itself. It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane’s breakup. Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, D.C., and New York City.
” ‘The reason it’s worth thinking about this,’ says [he], ‘is the reason that bomb didn’t go off was [because of] all the safety devices on the bombs, designed by what is now D.O.E.’ The Department of Energy, he continues, spends a lot of time and money trying to make bombs less likely to explode when they are not meant to explode.”
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