The Senate voted Monday to confirm Dan Brouillette to be secretary of the Energy Department, positioning him to pursue the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda.
Brouillette, a known commodity who is currently DOE deputy secretary, the No. 2 position, was confirmed easily in a bipartisan 70-15 vote on the first day after Rick Perry ended his nearly three-year run as secretary.
Brouillette, 57, won bipartisan support after assuring Democrats of his commitment to developing clean energy technologies, along with advancing Perry’s “energy dominance” agenda focused on producing and exporting coal and natural gas, especially to European countries dependent on imports of gas from Russia.
Brouillette and Perry recently gave an exclusive joint interview to the Washington Examiner where the duo plotted the second phase of their agenda to expand consumption of American fossil fuels, a concept that runs counter to calls for greater urgency in shifting to renewable energy to combat climate change.
Despite his fondness for fossil fuels, Brouillette said he wants the best for clean energy, highlighting the agency’s work to boost zero-emissions technologies such as small modular nuclear reactors and battery storage to expand the use of intermittent wind and solar.
“What we have done from day one is adopt the policy of all of the above energy dominance,” Brouillette said in the interview. “None of that is going to change. What we might do is apply different technologies.”
As deputy secretary, Brouillette has already been the primary driver of the administration’s policies, albeit in a less front-facing and political way. Brouillette is an insider who previously worked at the Energy Department, focusing on legislative affairs, in the Bush administration from 2001 to 2003.
He is also a former chief of staff for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the panel that oversees the agency he now leads.
Brouillette is also a former lobbyist, sharing that characteristic with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Andrew Wheeler and Interior Department’s David Bernhardt, two former deputy secretaries who President Trump later elevated to lead those agencies.
Brouillette, however, unlike Wheeler and Bernhardt, lobbied for companies that do not primarily interact with energy policy or with the agency he will lead, including a stint as the Ford Motor Company’s vice president for domestic policy.
