Donald Trump has selected former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to head the Energy Department, The Associated Press reports. Perry had been rumored to be the leading candidate for the job.
Perry ran for president in 2012, during which he proposed scrapping the Department of Energy (although he famously forgot its name when he was listing the three agencies he wanted to eliminate during a 2011 GOP debate).
The Energy Department is responsible for the country's policies on energy and safety in handling nuclear material, energy conservation, research on energy, and domestic energy production. Under President Obama, the Energy Department has been run by two scientists — current head Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist who once headed an energy initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate who was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology and directed the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
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Perry sits on two corporate boards, including Energy Transfer Partners, whose subsidiary is trying to build the Dakota Access Pipeline.
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