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Nia and Aughie move on to the lucky 13th department, the Department of Energy, formed in 1977.
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
Nia Rodgers: I'm excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine. In large part because we are continuing our series about the federal government cabinet departments. Nia, which one are we doing today?
Nia Rodgers: It is the sweater wearing Department of Energy. Sorry. I know that it was formed by Carter and my strongest memory and image of Carter is him saying Raul have put on sweaters, and turning down the heat in the White House. Which I just think is awesome, but it does go to why the formation of the Department of Energy. It actually does have, it's not just Jimmy Carter being a little bit dramatic, which what he is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. Let's take a step back. I understand listeners because Nia and I shared generational.
Nia Rodgers: I was going to say share childhood.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. We make sometimes references that listeners might be unfamiliar with. What Nia is referencing is President Jimmy Carter during his term in the late 1970s, gave a rather infamous address to the American public.
Nia Rodgers: Basically energy austerity.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
Nia Rodgers: Right. What he did was ask people. He came on wearing a sweater and he asked people to turn down their heat in the winter and conserve by wearing a sweater and turn up their air conditioning in the summer for the same reason. Trying to conserve energy because in the 1970s, we had a giant energy shock.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
Nia Rodgers: OPEC decided let's see what the market does when we remove a bunch of oil from it. Let's see what happens.
J. Aughenbaugh: You have the energy crisis in the 1970s and until that energy crisis in the 1970s. The federal government played a very limited role in crafting a national energy policy. Because in large part,
energy was relatively cheap and abundant. The nation relied on the private sector to fulfill most of the country's energy needs.
Nia Rodgers: That worked out.
J. Aughenbaugh: It worked out fine. But as Nia points out, as the 1970s dawn, the nations that comprised OPEC, which is the Organization of?
Nia Rodgers: Of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
J. Aughenbaugh: Consortium or countries.
Nia Rodgers: It's something like that.
J. Aughenbaugh: But those nations that comprised OPEC, it finally dawned on them that the one thing that they had as leverage, was Western democracies consumed a whole bunch of their oil.
Nia Rodgers: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries,.
J. Aughenbaugh: Countries, okay.
Nia Rodgers: It's what it stands for. Meaning not just the Middle East, but also Russia, Venezuela. But yes, the drinkers of said petroleum were US and Canada, and France and Australia and Britain and Germany. We imported a great deal even though we had a great deal.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the end of the 1970s during the Carter administration, the energy crisis, was quite high. I think it was either '78, the winter of 1978 was a particularly cold winter. President Carter goes on national TV and he's sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. He's got a cardigan sweater on and he's telling the American public, hey, until we can go ahead and craft a national energy policy that slowly wings us off fossil fuels, we're all going to have to make sacrifices, we're all going to have to pitch in. What I'm saying to you, my fellow Americans is, put on that sweater, turn on your heat.
Nia Rodgers: That was actually the February of '77.
J. Aughenbaugh: February '77.
Nia Rodgers: Which makes sense with the signing of this department into law, which also happens later in '77.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're talking about the Department of Energy. It was signed into law in 1977. We've already talked about the one reason why it was created, which was the energy crisis of the 1970s. Nia, can you guess the second reason?
Nia Rodgers: Well, I'm guessing that this isn't the first time that the US government has been entangled in energy stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Hear me out on this, there are all little agencies and little stuff that's in other departments that end up in the new department. My guess is that something that there was at least one agency in other departments that ended up in this department.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and it's a big one. Because as you correctly point out, this is a theme throughout our discussion of the cabinet departments. But the other main reason, was Atomic Energy Policy. The Manhattan Project during World War II, that was the government effort to come up with an atomic weapon. Because we found out that Germany was creating their own version. We needed to go ahead and be able to match the Germans during World War II.
Nia Rodgers: And we thought they were closer than they actually were. Because excellent propaganda on their side.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure, it was, so much of war is propaganda. How do you boost the morale of your nation while also diminishing the morale of your opponents.
Nia Rodgers: Well, that's the whole, we're winning, we're winning, we're winning thing. That's why no side in a war says, it doesn't look good for us. They never say that, neither side, even if it's wildly out matched. They don't ever say, I don't like our chances.
J. Aughenbaugh: Post World War II, we have atomic weapons. But as we've discussed in a previous podcast episode, pretty quickly the United States came to the conclusion that if atomic weapons can produce the amount of energy to destroy an entire city.
Nia Rodgers: Surely we could use that to power homes.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. If we could go ahead and harness that energy, we could use it for domestic energy sources.
Nia Rodgers: Is that when we see the development of nuclear reactor?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: I speak here from Richmond and our closest is North Anna. The North Anna nuclear plant.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, which is right up inter State 90. Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia in the late 1950s. Again, the Soviets beat us to this. The Soviet started using nuclear energy for domestic energy sources before we did. But even here in the United States by the late 1950, we see our first domestic nuclear power plants.
Nia Rodgers: I didn't realize it was that far back, but okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. The reason why in part I know this is earlier this semester in my politics and firm class, we viewed and discussed a movie made in the late 1970s, the China Syndrome. I did a whole bunch of background research as what to do, as listeners, after multiple years of listening to this podcast, I get research geeky with our various topics. I did a whole bunch of research and I found that out.
Nia Rodgers: Which by the way, side note, for listeners who have not seen that movie, you should watch that movie. It's an excellent film.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: It will scare the sweet bejesus out of you, but it's an excellent film.
J. Aughenbaugh: In 1954, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act. This ended the exclusive government use of the atom and allowed for the growth of the commercial nuclear power industry. You combine those.
Nia Rodgers: Now the Atomic Energy Commission is over both the government use of nuclear not just weapons, but think naval vessels think all things that are powered in the military, but now also commercial. They're over both of those things. They become part of the Department of Energy. Is that so?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Department of Energy does, I know this is going to sound dumb, but they do all the energy. They do green energy, they do nuclear energy, they do fossil fuel energy. All of it falls under their purview.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. In fact today Nia the department actually spends more money and has more people on nuclear energy and weaponry than all those other, if you will, categories that you just mentioned.
Nia Rodgers: Do they spend a lot of money?
J. Aughenbaugh: Actually not all that much money.
Nia Rodgers: Really? Are they one of our smaller departments?
J. Aughenbaugh: They are one of our smaller departments, but they're one of the most technical, one of the most scientific.
Nia Rodgers: Well, I would hope so If they're dealing with nuclear and I'm just going to say I don't want that to be a casual. I just ran by the plant the other day. It looked fine to me. I'm like no. I want an actual scientist in charge of that, considering what could happen if it blew up.
J. Aughenbaugh: That actual scientists. You don't want those of us with just a casual interest.
Nia Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, what's fascinating about the Department of Energy is how much the rest of the world relies on our DOE, Department of Energy, to track the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
Nia Rodgers: I'm not surprised by that. We have a strong interest in knowing who has nuclear weapons, especially with the dissolution of the USSR. I think we were very worried about where their nuclear arsenal would end up and who would end up in charge of it. To that point, states that had not been nuclear states before that, because they became states, and there were nuclear weapons within those places, are now nuclear states; Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chechnya.
Nia Rodgers: Ukraine, Belarus. Because there were nuclear weapons stashed there when they were all part of the USSR. Now there's still nuclear things stashed there because it's not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you have other nation-states who believe that one of the ways that they can protect their borders, but also be a player in the global, if you will, community, is by developing their own nukes.
Nia Rodgers: Iran, North Korea. Then you have one country that has sworn off entirely, and that is Japan.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Japan has said we will never have nuclear weapons.
J. Aughenbaugh: Though they, I believe have.
Nia Rodgers: They have nuclear power.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, yeah, in fact.
Nia Rodgers: Well, they did.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, they still do. In fact, they're in the top five nations in the world in regards to the highest percentage of their domestic energy output being derived from nuclear power.
Nia Rodgers: Really, even after Fukushima?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Because I know for awhile there they were pretty scared, that they didn't have a good handle on that.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's been debated at length, but Japan still in the top five. France is number 1, by the way. Well, let's get back to the United States Department of Energy. When it was first created, and again, this is a really good case study of why when you are creating a new department, it is best not to promise too much too soon, because if you can't deliver, then the department becomes a punching bag from across the ideological spectrum.
Nia Rodgers: Well, was it popular to start with?
J. Aughenbaugh: No, it wasn't very popular to start with. Well, let me finish this point.
Nia Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: When Congress created it, this is a really good example Nia of institutionalism. There's a public policy problem. We have an energy crisis. Law makers are like, "Hey, we need to come up with a solution. Hey, let's create a Department of Energy. Okay, sounds great." But when it gets created, almost immediately those who created the Department, the media, the public were like, "What are you guys going to do to solve the energy crisis? Because you just created this department. Because you said, we need to solve the energy crisis. What are you going to do?" Almost immediately, the Carter administration was just like, "Well, this is a really complicated problem."
Nia Rodgers: It's going to take awhile.
J. Aughenbaugh: But there was a lot of fanfare behind creating it. Instead of creating it and saying, let's give it a little bit of time almost immediately, stakeholders were like, "Where's the solution?"
Nia Rodgers: Can I just say that this is like going to a wedding and asking the bride and bride or bride and groom, or bride and groom and groom and groom, whichever the mixture is; when are going to start a family? Like dude we just got married 10 minutes ago. Can you give us just a little bit of time. It's a similar thing that people do sometimes at weddings. I hear that question occasionally at weddings and I'm like, really, why don't you give them time to get through dessert first?
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's see them navigate their honeymoon.
Nia Rodgers: Exactly. Where they suddenly realize one of them likes to spend money on lots of frivolous stuff and other one doesn't and now they have to work that out. Let's wait until they do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were never together before they got married.
Nia Rodgers: Personal habits.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's give them 6-9 months of basically merging two lives.
Nia Rodgers: Before we start. So I can see where the media the next day is like, fix the energy crisis, and they're like we got here yesterday.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Right.
Nia Rodgers: We're going to get back to you on that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you mentioned this earlier in this episode. The only cabinet level departments with smaller budgets in our federal government. Interior, commerce, and the EPA. Congress has never given the Department of Energy a whole bunch of money.
Nia Rodgers: Well, Congress did not do the Department of Energy a solid because they put them in charge of regulating energy and developing energy. Those are two complicated. They can be opposites.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this is a theme throughout our discussion of these departments.
Nia Rodgers: Right. We put you in charge to both regulate the thing and encourage the thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and not surprisingly, with that mixed message, those involved with the thing at times will go ahead and push back and say to the department, which one is it?
Nia Rodgers: Right. You are giving me competing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Conflicting messages. Which one is it?
Nia Rodgers: Competing imperatives. That's the word I was looking for. You're giving me competing imperatives about am I supposed to go green and work on green energy? Or am I supposed to encourage drilling, drill baby drill, fossil fuel use? Which am I supposed to do? Because those two things work in opposition if one of the things I'm concerned about is greenhouse gases for instance, or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: You can't go ahead on one hand and say, like right now, you got executives from energy companies who are saying to the Biden administration, "Mr. President, which one do you want us to achieve? Do you want us to go ahead and pick up the slack? Because OPEC announced earlier this
year that it's going to reduce the number of barrels of oil we make available to the west? Or do you want us to go ahead and shift to more green energy sources?"
Nia Rodgers: Because we know that the shifting will take longer.
J. Aughenbaugh: It will take longer. We will have to go ahead and basically tell our shareholders, if we're a publicly owned company or our workers. We now need you to go ahead and focus on the development of new energy sources and not worry so much about flagging this more oil to get into the marketplace, right?
Nia Rodgers: Right.
Nia Rodgers: Similarly.
Rick Perry: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: If you're in the business of providing nuclear energy to people, but you're also in the business of shutting down nuclear plants that are not safe or something needs to be done to them, prepares whatever as part of regulation. How does that work? Again, the competing imperatives, and it's unfortunate that departments seem to be asked to do both because I think what makes it opens them up to a lot of criticism on both sides.
Rick Perry: Well, that wasn't going to be my next point. In the short history of the Department of Energy, neither side of the ideological spectrum is all warm and fuzzy about. Liberals, for instance, have criticized the department almost from its inception that they spend way too much money on energy research and development, on fossil fuels and not enough focus on renewables or green energy. Liberals, almost immediately because of what happened at the three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979, criticized the department for prioritizing nuclear energy.
Nia Rodgers: Even though in the fifties, so same liberals were we need to pursue nuclear energy because it will be clean,.
Rick Perry: Clean, yes.
Nia Rodgers: I think at one point they were saying it will be free. It will be free energy for people. We can free people from energy bills, which by the way would be wonderful just as a consumer, I would say,.
Rick Perry: Oh heck, yeah.
Nia Rodgers: There was all this talk of in the '50s and '60s of, oh, nuclear is going to be the answer to the world's energy problems and all that other stuff. If you don't develop that, then it can't be the solution.
Rick Perry: It cannot. Again, some of these criticisms are fair. But again, with nuclear energy, Nia, if you're telling the energy sector of the economy, we need more nuclear energy. At times, in the rush to go ahead and produce more nuclear energy, there are going to be safety concerns.
Nia Rodgers: Right.
Rick Perry: These are the trade-offs, particularly when you're dealing with something like nuclear energy.
Nia Rodgers: Yeah, because the margin of error there is very thin. Because if you screw that up, you can explode an area and make it Chernobyl like four centuries to come.
Rick Perry: Then you've got the conservatives. Let's be balanced here in our treatment concerns. Long complained that when we've had Democratic presidents, they've spent way too much time money on renewables, green energy when historically the United States is the home to so much fossil fuel.
Nia Rodgers: I'm just going to say we have plenty of dead dinosaurs in the United States.
Rick Perry: Natural gas and oil. Even to this day, technically the United States could address all of their energy needs for nearly a year by not using a drop of oil from any of the opaque nations. Now, we will complete this.
Nia Rodgers: That's still true,.
Rick Perry: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Considering what we've released out into the wild and sold and all that other stuff.
Rick Perry: Sure it is. But it would only be good for about roughly a year or, maybe a year and a quarter,.
Nia Rodgers: Then everything would go dark.
Rick Perry: Yeah, everything would go dark.
Nia Rodgers: We live well for the year.
Rick Perry: But that's the conservative.
Nia Rodgers: I'm assuming part of the conservative argument there is, that is all experimental and we don't know whether it's going to work or not.
Rick Perry: Yeah.
Nia Rodgers: As opposed to we know that petroleum works. We know how to make petroleum.
Rick Perry: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Bend to our will in a way that we are not sure. We're still trying to figure out how to make solar work and enlarge scale how to make wind turbine work in large scale. It's a scale concern.
Rick Perry: You just addressed. Probably the biggest concern coming from the energy industry, which is if the United States government actually wants the energy industry to shift to renewables, to green energy sources, then they're going to have to incentivize both ends of the economic equation.
Nia Rodgers: Making oil extraction very expensive.
Rick Perry: Well no, what I was talking about Nia was incentivize American consumers to actually want renewable energy.
Nia Rodgers: Okay.
Rick Perry: That's one.
Nia Rodgers: Make it cheaper than any other energy so the people can have that?
Rick Perry: Because once the demand, then the industry will go ahead and respond accordingly. They will go ahead and ratchet up the supply. But right now.
Nia Rodgers: If a billion people asked for solar panels then companies we get into the solar panel business.
Rick Perry: Sure.
Nia Rodgers: Because they could make a lot of money.
Rick Perry: Sure. Again, that's the conservative side of this, which is if we're going to make the transition.
Nia Rodgers: Go big or go home.
Rick Perry: Yeah. It's the response to the climate change.
Nia Rodgers: We need got to fix it or we got to let it or we've got to destroy the planet. We can't keep limping along with.
Rick Perry: Yeah, pick a lane and let's drive it.
Nia Rodgers: Right.
Rick Perry: But doing this piecemeal and by the way, this is an artifact of living into democracy. Because we will have a Democratic presidential term for 4-8 years, where there is an emphasis on renewables, green energy, etc. Then you follow it up with 40 years of Republican administration, which is we already have cheap, plentiful natural gas and coal.
Nia Rodgers: We don't need to spend all this money on R&D for things that we don't know whether they're going to work when we do know this other thing works and we have a lot of it.
Rick Perry: Yes. We still do have a lot of it.
Nia Rodgers: Yeah. There's some argument about whether it is a finite resource.
Rick Perry: Sure.
Nia Rodgers: They're also saying the other argument as part of that is we will innovate out of that when the time comes. When we run out of fossil fuel is it will force us to innovate into something else.
Rick Perry: If we don't want to wait, then you have to incentivize or goose behavior in the market. You got to do it on both sides because otherwise, if you're a consumer, why go ahead and buy solar panels for your house If they're still expensive?
Nia Rodgers: Well, and if their price is still more expensive than the price for using a coal-fired plant or whatever energy they're using in he house.
Rick Perry: Natural gas etc.
Nia Rodgers: That's the other part of that equation. Is that the government would also need to incentivize the use of the other by either making it more expensive or harder to get or whatever so that you make the other thing look attractive, isn't it? That's the two sides of the economy is.
Rick Perry: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: I'm going to make the one thing look unattractive by making the other thing look more attractive. It's cheaper, it's easier to access, it's whatever it is.
Rick Perry: It's like their early years of non gasoline powered automobiles, because they were so much more expensive than automobiles that still used gasoline. Many Americans were just like, Well, that's not attractive.''
Nia Rodgers: I can't afford to leave. I like it in principle.
Rick Perry: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: But in practicality, it's too expensive.
Rick Perry: It's too expensive.
Nia Rodgers: The Prius or whatever.
Rick Perry: Which then put the makers of automobiles in a bind because they know what the government wants them to make more of. But their consumer base is just I want my SUV that has six cylinders that might get 18 mile to the gallon using gasoline. Well, that's terrible for the environment. We know this. Those vehicles produce a whole bunch of greenhouse gas. We know this. But the consumers are still, I want my SUV, even though they probably don't need it and as SUV.
Nia Rodgers: That's partly marketing and cultural. I do have a question for you about this that I didn't ask you before recording. Tell me if you don't want to go here. But I'm curious is California putting a thumb on the scale?
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
Nia Rodgers: With its new law of there will be no gas-powered vehicles after and I can't remember what year. It's 2030 or something. It's not.
J. Aughenbaugh: In 2030 new vehicles in California cannot be gasoline powered.
Nia Rodgers: Are they trying to push the hybrid or not hybrid, I guess at that point it would be all electric.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's all electric. But in California is doing this almost completely because the air quality in that state is terrible.
Nia Rodgers: But I would like to side note, California, we're talking to you now and we like you because you're a nice little edge state. We like your shape. You seem to be full of nice people, but your power grids sucks. It sucks and so you saying this to people, if were living in California, the first thing I would say is then you need to fix the power grid. If you want me to plug my car into it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: You're going to need to fix it so that my car will actually charge. Because otherwise, not only do I not have power, but then I can't go anywhere to.
J. Aughenbaugh: Non-partisan energy industry experts acknowledge that California basically has about 5-6 years to ramp up their electricity grid capacity. Because if they don't,
Nia Rodgers: There's no way.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're going to have a massive problem in that state.
Nia Rodgers: Yeah. If you tell them you want them to plug in a vehicle, they need to be able to plug in a vehicle.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because California has such a huge impact in that market, like many other markets, you're basically going to force the automobile manufacturing industry to change your product lines.
Nia Rodgers: Because California is an enormous car market.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: It's probably the largest in the nation. If it's not, it's got to be two or three. It can't be less than that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now you bring in culture, which you mentioned earlier. Californians love to drive their cars. That's part of the reason why they have an air pollution problem.
Nia Rodgers: Well, and whether they love it or not, their highway system forces them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: That and this cost of living in their cities means that people need to live further out if they're going to have any standard of living at all.
J. Aughenbaugh: Anytime they attempt to invest resources in public transportation particularly of recent vintage, has been an unmitigated disaster. All you got to do is take a look at the Nascent subway system in Los Angeles.
Nia Rodgers: Or the light rail they were going to build between I can't remember what cities and it just completely fell apart, cost a fortune.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. They're scrapping major sections of it now. That's where you get a lot of criticisms for instance, the Department of Energy and then you have presidents like Trump.
Nia Rodgers: He's not been the only one.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's not been the only one but it's probably the most egregious example of how little the Department of Energy.
Nia Rodgers: Mattered. Keep in line.
J. Aughenbaugh: When Donald Trump was running for the Republican Party nomination for president, one of his competitors was Texas governor, Rick Perry.
Nia Rodgers: By the way, Donald Trump had nothing nice to say about any of his competitors.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
Nia Rodgers: Because that is not the Trump way. The Trump way is not to be kind about your competitors ever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Doing one of the debates, then Governor Perry, he said, he was going to get rid of three cabinet departments if he was elected president. Now he couldn't name all three. He actually could not one of them. But one he did remember was he said he would get rid of the Department of Energy. Well, Governor Perry, where it obviously does not win the Republican Party nomination for president. But when Donald Trump wins in 2016, President Trump picks Rick Perry to become the secretary of the Department of Energy. You want to send a very clear message to the career bureaucrats working in the Department of Energy about how little you think of their department, go ahead and pick.
Nia Rodgers: The guy who stated openly he would get rid of your department.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Now, part of in fairness to Rick Perry, I didn't think those words would come out of my mouth I was not going to say. In partly in fairness to Rick Perry, a Texas politician could never come out in favor of the Department of Energy?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
Nia Rodgers: They perceive the Department of Energy as an enemy to the state of Texas because the state of Texas is hugely run by oil.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes and if they're not extracting it from the ground, they're refining it at refineries.
Nia Rodgers: Then transporting it out of Galveston.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. In that state's economy, booms and busts depending on the price per gallon of petroleum in the world.
Nia Rodgers: They perceive any regulation as bad regulation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Because again, Wild West, that's part of Texas's culture.
J. Aughenbaugh: And mythology.
Nia Rodgers: Is that they know better than anybody what to do with their oil and get out of our way and let us do it. Whether that is right or wrong, and I don't know if you can tell from my tone that I think it's pretty wrong. It doesn't matter because putting in a Texas governor was going to give that impression whether he had said something dumb on the campaign trail or not, or in the debates or not. But I also think that's partially Donald Trump saying, ''How badly do you want to be in government? I'll give you a job, but it's the job you don't want.'' That's very Trumpian in the sense of standing on the neck of your enemies like that. That's a pretty clever thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: In Donald Trump demonstrated throughout his presidency even since he's been out of office. You can be my enemy today but if I need you tomorrow then you're no longer my enemy.
Nia Rodgers: But I'm never going to embrace you as a friend. I don't know. He's got an interesting way of dealing with both his enemies and his friends. Who's the first? The first, sorry, secretary. I'm sorry, we had moved to the idea of secretaries and bless his heart Rick Perry.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the first appointed by Jimmy Carter, was James Schlesinger, who interestingly enough, was a Republican and was a former cabinet secretary under both Ford and Nixon.
Nia Rodgers: Did him being a republican, make that go down easier for in terms of partisanship?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, partisanship. But also too, remember, this is still the era where you had cabinet secretaries who served presidents from both political parties. You could get accepted by the United States senate simply because you had a reputation for being a seasoned credible manager.
Nia Rodgers: We had not yet entered the stage of.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hyper-partisanship to where you're a Democrat, Mr. President or Madam President, you can't pick a republican or you were a Republican Mr. or Madam President you can't pick a Democrat. No, you didn't see that? Remember this is the 1970s. You had a managerial class that were viewed as seasoned DC bureaucratic leaders.
Nia Rodgers: Which I'm sure part of what Carter was looking for was someone to stabilize the energy issues in the country since they seem to be at that point so unstable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
Nia Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Our first female and African-American to serve as the Department of Energy Secretary was Hazel O'Leary which just reading that name, that's an Irish name, wow.
Nia Rodgers: It's pretty cool.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's really cool.
Nia Rodgers: Our longstanding love affair with names, Hazel. Her name is Hazel. That sounds like a person you'd want to be in charge of something, I like her. Appointed by?
J. Aughenbaugh: Bill Clinton. Then she was replaced by Bill Richardson, who I believe is a Native American in part. But he brought a lot of gravitas to the position because he was the former governor of New Mexico in the former US ambassador to the United Nations.
Nia Rodgers: I'm not sure that gravitas comes from governor because I don't know that Rick Perry had a lot of gravitas. I'm just going to throw that out there probably comes from being an ambassador. Ambassadors learned to talk to people who have vastly different worldviews and still be respectful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia I'm going to push back about former governors because you have recognized, in fact, in our first set of episodes entitled Unicorn, that governors probably have a skill set that is better than most to run departments, to be the department secretaries because of their experience as governors.
Nia Rodgers: That's true. That's fair and in fairness to Rick Perry, nothing exploited on his watch, literally or figuratively, like he did what good managerial drones do, which is he kept the trains running on time like that's the whole he kept everything moving. I'm sure that there were things that career folks in the department disagreed with. But he didn't burn the place to the ground.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, he did not. In the current, I can't even tell you who the current Secretary of Energy is, which in most situations.
Nia Rodgers: Is a good thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is a good thing.
Nia Rodgers: You don't really want to know who the current Secretary, Jennifer Granholm.
J. Aughenbaugh: She's the former governor of Michigan, yes.
Nia Rodgers: No.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Well, it cool that you knew that off the top of your head. She was sworn in in February 25, 2021.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. They moved her along pretty quickly because let's face it, Joe Biden didn't take office until January 20, 2021. That's about a month wow.
Nia Rodgers: Well, she must not have been particularly controversial.
J. Aughenbaugh: Adversarial, yeah. There you go. Again, for that department, I would prefer that in part because of the nukes.
Nia Rodgers: You want this person to be so chill that you have to check for a pulse every so often, because let's not get excitable if you're in charge of nuclear anything.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because every time North Korea does a missile test, over Japan, where they're trying to figure out, do we actually have the technology to go ahead and deliver a nuke hundreds of miles away. You need to be able to walk into the Oval Office and say, Madam or Mr. President, this happened, no need to get worried. We knew it was going to happen. It was part of your daily briefing five days ago. They did what we thought they were going to do. We know where it landed, etc. You need to be that kind of calm, reassuring voice yes.
Nia Rodgers: Also, I'm going to link to one of my favorite government publications, which are the new REG, which is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, publications prepared by the staff, and I don't know how to describe how much I love the new REGs because things like this, just a tidal calculation of releases of radioactive materials in gaseous and liquid effluence from pressurized water reactors, which sounds really boring until you say something like, that's how much radiation is in the air around the plant and go, whoa, I definitely want somebody measuring that. Yes, you do. You want these people measuring that and you want them to know what they're doing and you want them to report it very commonly. There's a reactor safety study that they do every year where they basically say, oh, that one's going to crash and burn to the ground or whatever. They don't actually, none of them are in that bad condition, but still.
J. Aughenbaugh: They do risk management work in the Department of Energy, that would put most statisticians to shame.
Nia Rodgers: Its because their margin of error is non-existent.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
Nia Rodgers: If they screw this up, they will kill hundreds or thousands of people, and they know that. But so I'm going to link to those because I find them a delightful government document. Well, delightful is probably not the right word because every once in a while you'll see on their incident and you're like, wait, what happened? But usually it's a fire actually. It's usually a fire and it gets put out and people know what they're doing. But the reason you want somebody in charge of this who's very calm as Fukushima. Fukushima was a totally unexpected nuclear accident. They had no idea that a tsunami would take that plant down the way it did. If they had known, they would have been arranged differently, and now they do know and they're taking care of with other. This is in Japan, the Fukushima nuclear power accident and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. We learn from those accidents and we make it better and safer, but we want people in their learning so that we can improve the safety as much as we can each time.
J. Aughenbaugh: We want folks who don't engage in hyperbole. We want them to tell us the facts so we can make good informed decisions.
Nia Rodgers: We also don't want them to lie. Nothing to see you move along. We want them to be honest and calm in their delivery which I would say that a lot of folks could learn from but anyway. That's 1977 we're up to. We're getting into almost what our students would think of as the modern era? Our next is Department of Education in 79, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I believe that is. We have the Department of Education.
Nia Rodgers: We will be back with listeners, we won't see listeners because that would be weird. But we'll be back with listeners in a week or so to talk about the Department of Education.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sounds good Nia.
Nia Rodgers: Thanks, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Bye.
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