The Senate on Monday approved the nomination of Heather Wilson as secretary of the Air Force, the second Pentagon confirmation for the White House since the inauguration.
After a 76-22 vote, Wilson, a former congresswoman, will now take her position as the service’s highest civilian leader and could add some important influence for a new administration that has been slow to fill top jobs.
The Senate confirmed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in January and until Monday, he had remained the lone Senate-confirmed Trump official among the Pentagon’s vast professional staff and some Obama administration holdovers.
“I’m sure she’ll work hard in this new role to strengthen the branch of the military that she cares so much about,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.
Wilson will be taking the helm of an Air Force that has struggled for years with constrained budgets due to caps passed by Congress.
If Trump has his way, Wilson will oversee a major buildup of the service, which now has an aging fleet of aircraft and is short more than 1,500 pilots and thousands of maintainers.
She will be the public face of the Air Force as it presses for more funding and lawmakers wrangle in the coming weeks and months over Trump’s soon-to-be-unveiled 2018 defense budget.
Meanwhile, Trump’s second choice for Army secretary, Mark Green, dropped out Friday after widespread criticism over his views on gay and transgender rights. That withdrawal occurred two months after the first candidate, a billionaire Wall Street trader, could not clear financial ethics hurdles.
So far, the administration has not named a nominee for Navy secretary. The previous candidate for that position withdrew in February.
Wilson, an Air Force Academy graduate, spent a decade in the House representing New Mexico before leaving in 2009 and had been the president of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, a university that provides engineering and science degrees, since 2013.
To clear her own ethics hurdles, Wilson agreed to quit the university, step down from the board of directors at two companies, and divest her stocks of Defense Department contractors including Raytheon, Husky Energy, Honeywell International and IBM.
Some Democrats, including Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, criticized Wilson for $450,000 in poorly documented consulting payments Wilson accepted in 2009 and 2011 from contractor-run nuclear labs, including Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Nevada National Security Site.
The labs repaid the money to the government and Wilson said it was for consulting services rendered.
