Former Texas governor Rick Perry is Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary, the AP reported Tuesday morning. Perry has been a clear favorite for the post among conservatives who value his anti-regulatory stance.
More on the cabinet pick, and his history with the Trump campaign, from NBC News:
Perry, a rival of Trump’s during the Republican presidential nominating campaign, met with Trump for about 90 minutes earlier in the day at Trump Tower in New York. Perry dropped out of the race and endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz, a fellow Texan. Before he left the race, he denounced Trump’s candidacy as “a cancer on conservatism” and criticized Trump, himself, as a “barking carnival act.” By May, however, as it became clearer that Trump was likely to win the Republican nomination, Perry had retreated from his criticism, saying that “I will be open to any way I can help” and that “I believe that Donald Trump should be our guy.”
And more, from Politico, on what to expect from Perry’s DOE—and a now-notable campaign gaffe from five years ago:
The conservative Heritage Foundation last month urged the next president to eliminate vast swaths of the department, including all the research, development, regulatory and loan programs that the Obama administration has used to drive advances in green energy, as well as its 700-million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And last week, Trump’s transition team asked DOE to supply the names of all agency employees who had worked on Obama’s climate initiatives, a request that Democrats and former staffers denounced as a “witch hunt.” Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, also had the Energy Department in his sights during the 2012 presidential campaign, when he called for eliminating it as part of his program to shrink the federal government. That was the origin of Perry’s “oops” moment in November 2011, when he said during a Republican debate that “it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the, uh, uh, what’s the third one there, let’s see?” Pressed on whether he could name the third agency, he confessed: “I can’t. Sorry.” Perry later said the third agency would have been the Energy Department.
