“Simmons was the No. 2 individual donor to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns, with contributions totaling $1.2 million,” noted the Observer. “Perry’s administration seemed to reciprocate,” the magazine added, explaining that “in 2008 and 2009, his Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) appointees granted Waste Control two licenses to handle radioactive waste. One allowed Waste Control to take 3,776 canisters of radioactive residues from NL Industries, a Department of Energy (DOE) contractor that Simmons also owned. The second one gave the company the authority to bury a wide variety of state and federal radioactive waste. The company’s planned West Texas dump in Andrews County was so dangerously close to nearby aquifers that three state employees reviewing the application resigned.”
People who worried about the aquifers may not have been happy with Rick Perry. But people at Waste Control Specialists were thrilled with the governor. “No other state has licensed a nuclear waste facility like this, and it was all done on Governor Perry’s watch,” Charles McDonald, a spokesman for the corporation, told the New York Times. “He really understands this stuff.”
Okay, so Rick Perry may not always remember whether he wants to maintain the Department of Energy (after his nomination to head the agency, he said he was learning a lot about the great work it does), but he does know how to arrange for nuclear waste burial services by a major campaign donor.
Why does this matter? The “DOE continues to focus on all things nuclear,” begins the latest fact sheet from the federal Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. “Nearly two thirds of our budget still goes to maintaining America’s nuclear deterrent and cleaning up the legacy of past nuclear arms development.”
The fact sheet is titled “The Path Forward for Nuclear Waste Disposal.”
That’s right, as energy secretary, Rick Perry will be in charge of nuclear waste disposal.
Most of the DOE’s $30 billion annual budget goes to maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpile and updating nuclear production. It also has a big role in monitoring, and hopefully preventing, nuclear proliferation. And, as the agency notes, “the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), which provides the basic policy framework for U.S. efforts to manage nuclear waste” charges the DOE with determining what to do with a whole lot of highly radioactive garbage. The waste is now stored at the power plants where it was produced, but the neighbors are restless. So the DOE has the job of figuring out how to take charge of the trash, collect it and store it in a single secure location. These are immense responsibilities with awesome consequences if anything goes wrong. President Obama took them seriously. He went with the best and the brightest, literally, when he chose energy secretaries. His first was Stephen Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in physics. His second was Ernest J. Moniz, the former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics department (where he kept watch on the linear accelerator at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science).
Rick Perry never directed a linear accelerator program or won a Nobel Prize. Nor has he ever been thought of as an expert on climate science, green technologies or any of the other issues that might concern an energy secretary, a fact noted with some discomfort by groups that monitor the work of the Department of Energy. “If the consequences weren’t so dire, it would be humorous that the Senate just confirmed Rick Perry to lead the Department of Energy—the agency he couldn’t recall by name when asserting he wanted to eliminate it,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune observed after the Senate voted 62–37 to give the Texan the job on March 2, 2017. “Beyond that, Perry’s financial interests in major energy projects run counter to his responsibility to manage the Department of Energy’s activities impartially. The Department of Energy is now in the hands of someone who promotes dirty fossil fuels rather than the advancing clean energy market all the while ignoring the climate crisis.”
“Unlike the preeminent physicists who ran the department for the last eight years, Perry lacks the knowledge and experience to run the DOE,” says Damon Moglen, a senior strategic advisor to Friends of the Earth. “The absurdity of trusting former-Gov. Perry to clean up the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities speaks to the clueless nature of the Trump administration.”
But perhaps the Trump administration is not so clueless as it seems. Perhaps Perry’s “experience” could be just what is required by an administration that sees as its mission the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Where better to show a true commitment to Steve Bannon’s mission than by bartering off responsibility for nuclear waste to the highest bidder—or the highest campaign donor?
Perry could do just that.
In 2016, the Texas Tribune reported that Waste Control Specialists had applied for a federal license to accept “spent nuclear reactor fuel, much of it highly radioactive” at a “temporary storage site” on the grounds of its fourteen-thousand-acre site that Perry helped it get going as governor. “The application seeks a 40-year license to take in up to 40,000 metric tons of higher level waste in eight phases, with the possibility for 20-year renewals going forward,” reported the Tribune.
There were skeptics. Friends of the Earth reviewed the details of the proposal and dubbed it as a plan for a “dump” that “would be little more than a parking lot on which casks of the highly radioactive waste would have to be stored.”
“The WCS location is close to the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation’s largest aquifer, which lies beneath eight states. What if our water becomes contaminated?” said Karen Hadden, director of the Texas-
based Sustainable Energy & Economic Development coalition. “Rather than store this radioactive waste on an exposed parking lot in West Texas, it should remain at the power plant where it was generated or nearby until a scientifically viable isolation system for permanent disposal can be designed and built.”
Tom Smith, the director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, picked up on the transportation theme when he said: “This plan is all risk and no reward, not only for the states of Texas and New Mexico, but for the whole country, and it should be halted immediately. People across the country should be concerned because putting this waste on the nation’s railways would invite disaster. The amount of radioactive waste on a single train car would contain as much plutonium as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Radioactive waste moving through highly populated cities across the country could be targeted for sabotage by terrorists or could cause catastrophe in the event of an accident.”
As it happens, accidents can happen. “In June 2016, two trains in Texas collided head-on at 65 miles per hour, creating a huge fireball and causing at least two deaths,” noted Hadden. “What if one of these trains had been hauling radioactive waste? Real world accidents sometimes exceed modeling. The risky transport of radioactive waste across the country and the plan to dump it on people in West Texas without the resources to fight back should be halted immediately. We do not consent to being put at radioactive risk.”
No need to fret, said Rod Baltzer, the president and CEO of Waste Control Specialists, who explained that “we’ve got a unique environment and a unique state, and I think they understand the risks and the technical challenges. But they also know that with the proper regulatory oversight and the proper technology that you can overcome those.”
So who would provide that “proper regulatory oversight”? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission officially accepted Waste Control Specialists’ application two weeks after Donald Trump became president. That approval began a review process that is expected to conclude in about two years. And here’s the interesting part: “for the project to go forward, the Department of Energy would have to assume the title to, and liability for, the spent nuclear fuel stored at the site,” explained the Texas Tribune.
Congress may have to weigh in with a few winks and nods. But Public Citizen’s Tom Smith takes us to the bottom line: “The U.S. Department of Energy will write the rules that will determine where this waste can be stored.”
Someone
from MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science? A winner of the Nobel Prize in physics? Nope.
After President Trump announced his nominee to serve as energy secretary during the term when the question of whether the disposal of nuclear waste will be privatized, Waste Control Specialists spokesman Chuck McDonald announced that “from our perspective, from the perspective of the nuclear radioactive waste disposal industry, it’s a benefit to have Rick Perry’s experience at the Department of Energy.” Oops.
— 38 —
THE SECRETARY OF CORPORATE AGRIBUSINESS
Sonny Perdue
Secretary of Agriculture
There is a good argument to be made that Donald Trump, New Yorker from birth and urban to his core, did not even know the United States had a secretary of agriculture when he decided to run for president. Though Trump swept farm country in the election of 2016, winning more than 90 percent of the nation’s rural counties, that was not because the Republican presidential nominee offered a coherent program for the renewal of regions that have been battered not just by agribusiness consolidation but by the deindustrialization of small towns and small cities. Trump ran well because the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Farm Security Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and rural electrification forgot how to speak to farm families and voters in small-town America. Hillary Clinton did not even show up to campaign in key farm states, while Trump made the trip. There is no evidence to suggest, however, that he paid attention to anything but his own voice.
So it was that, as the president-elect and his transition team “staffed up,” there was a glaring omission. No one was nominated to head the Department of Agriculture, a sprawling agency with a $155 billion budget and a staff of more than a hundred thousand, in the immediate aftermath of the election. November passed and no one was named. December passed and no one was named. As Trump’s inauguration approached in January, media outlets began to note that no one had been designated to lead the department that oversees everything from rural development to soil conservation to natural resources preservation to food safety to food stamps to nutrition labeling to determinations about whether consumers have a right to know whether they are being sold genetically engineered food.
Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican who was embarrassingly loyal to Trump on most issues, tweeted about how it was frustrating to read about the failure of the Trump team to accomplish the “pretty simple” task of picking a secretary of agriculture. Finally, one day before Trump’s inauguration, the president picked a career politician who had spent much of his adult life in Atlanta to fill the post. Once the announcement was made, however, Trump promptly forgot about the nominee and the position. Even as Trump and his aides complained (and complained and complained) about Senate Democrats “slow-walking” the president’s nominees for cabinet and subcabinet posts, the Trump administration never bothered to send its nominee’s paperwork to the Senate in January, or February or the first weeks of March. “They don’t seem to have a reason as to why his name hasn’t come up,” griped Senator Grassley as the clock ticked onward. Vox headlined a March 8 assessment of the mess: “The weird mystery of the Trump administration’s agriculture secretary vacancy: Sonny Perdue’s stalled confirmation, not explained because nobody knows what’s happening.”
There was no mystery. Sonny Perdue was an afterthought, a nominee nominated for a post to which someone had to be nominated. He met the baseline standard established by the Trump transition team (“a mild-mannered and reliably conservative politician who campaigned vigorously for Trump,” as Modern Farmer magazine noted) and he had the added bonus of being very well liked by the bosses of Monsanto, Conagra and the other agribusiness combines that maintained a particularly pecuniary interest in the department he was slated to head. But Perdue excited zero enthusiasm among small farmers and the tens of millions of nonfarmers whose lives are influenced by the Department of Agriculture.
“We’d love to see Perdue really support rural farmers and Americans, by supporting the farmers who are farming in a responsible way. But as Naomi Klein said, the Trump cabinet is a ‘corporate coup d’état.’ Perdue, from all appearances, fits right in with the rest of the millionaire and billionaire corporate cronies tapped by Trump to run the country,” observed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), which noted that Perdue was a millionaire businessman, not a working farmer. “Perdue may have impressed Trump by showing up for his job interview wearing a backpack and a tie with little tractors on it,” explained the OCA assessment. “But most farmers are smart enough to see through Perdue’s phony concern for rural farmers, no matter how he dresses it up.”
Tom Colicchio, the co-founder of Food Policy Action, was equally dismissive. “Sonny Perdue’s record on food policy is light on substance and poor on action,” said Colicchio. “We need strong leadership to reform our food policy, promote affordable, nutritious and safe food, fight hunger, safeguard our lands and clean water, and protect our farmers and farm workers, not someone who is weak on oversight and in the pocket of Big Ag.”
“While he may have grown up on a family farm,” observed Modern Farmer writer Brian Barth, “Perdue is clearly more of an industrial agriculture and agribusiness guy.”
In reality, he’s more of a “politician guy” who has made a lot of money moving back and forth through the revolving door between elective offices and corporate suites. As Georgia’s Republican governor, Barth notes: “Perdue was not known for a focus on agriculture or rural issues.” In response to what the Atlanta Journal Constitution referred to as an “epic drought, threatening the region’s water supply,” Sonny Perdue urged Georgians to pray for rain.
To the extent that Perdue caught the attention of a Trump transition team packed with fossil-fuel industry advocates, it may have been because of his attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act and his mockery of what he once termed “ridiculous” coverage of climate change. “It’s become a running joke among the public, and liberals have lost all credibility when it comes to climate science because their arguments have become so ridiculous and so obviously disconnected from reality,” the Georgia conservative wrote in a 2014 National Review article. Or, perhaps, the alt-right contingent on the Trump team was excited by an aspect of Perdue’s gubernatorial record highlighted by Think Progress: “As Governor, Perdue delighted neo-Confederates by signing legislation permanently making April ‘Confederate History and Heritage Month’ in the Peach State and issued proclamations that honored ‘the more than 90,000 brave men and women who served the Confederate States of America,’ and falsely suggested that ‘many African-Americans both free and slave’ voluntarily served in the Confederate armed forces.”
It was certainly not Perdue’s ethics that gained him a job overseeing one of the largest agencies in the federal government. “In his campaign, President Trump promised to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington. But his nominee for secretary of agriculture, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, is mired in ethical lapses, self-dealing and back-room deals that raise troubling questions about his fitness to run the department,” observed Colin O’Neil, the agriculture policy director of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), whose investigation of Trump’s Department of Agriculture pick revealed that, as governor, Perdue:
· refused to put his businesses in a blind trust;
· signed state tax legislation that gave him a $100,000 tax break on a land deal;
· received gifts from lobbyists after signing a sweeping order to ban such gifts;
· filled state agencies and boards with business partners and political donors;
· allocated state funds to projects that benefited companies he created after his time in office.
Reviews of Perdue’s record focused particular attention on his habit of accepting substantial farm subsidies—more than $278,000—while serving in Atlanta as a legislator and governor. “In his first two years as governor, Perdue rec
eived a sizable payment through the peanut buyout program, as well as direct payments for wheat—both likely as a result of him being a landowner, not necessarily a farmer. Although he had a financial interest in farms, there is scant evidence that he was ‘actively engaged’ in farming, which is now an eligibility requirement for subsidy recipients,” wrote O’Neil, who asked: “Was Perdue like thousands of other city slickers whose land ownership made them eligible to receive subsidies that should be flowing to family farmers?”
It was not just Perdue’s city-slicker stylings that troubled the folks who took the former governor’s nomination more seriously than did the Trump administration. It was the Georgian’s very long and very intricate alliance with corporate agribusiness, not just as a politician doing the bidding of corporate interests but as an actual living, breathing corporate interest. “Perdue has started or been associated with well over a dozen agribusiness companies and limited liability corporations: Houston Fertilizer and Grain Co. in 1976; Perdue, Inc., a trucking company, in 1993; Perdue Family Limited Partnership, LLC in 1996; and AGrowStar, LLC, a grain buying company, in 1999,” recounted the EWG report “Trump Agriculture Nominee Brings the Swamp to Washington.” The report noted that “in his last year as governor, Perdue’s attorneys created four companies, including Perdue Business Holdings, Inc.; Perdue Management Holdings, LLC; Perdue Properties, LLC; and Perdue Real Estate Holdings, LLLP. Since leaving office, he has created at least two new companies—Perdue Partners, LLC, and Perdue Consulting Group—and he also serves as secretary for the Georgia Agribusiness Council.”