Failed Dept. Energy Nominee Appointed to Senior Role in Efficient Energy Office
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee canceled the vote to confirm Jeff Marootian as the office’s assistant secretary so DOE Sec. Granholm put him the role just below that position.
The Department of Energy (DOE) appointed Jeff Marootian as the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
EERE issues and implements those awful efficient energy regulations.
Marootian’s appointment is a big deal because Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin (D-WV) canceled the vote to confirm him to lead the office as the assistant secretary.
Manchin canceled the vote because Marootian supports the office’s proposed stove efficiency rules:
“While I supported Mr. Marootian’s nomination in December, since then the office he’s been nominated to lead has proposed stove efficiency rules that I’ve raised concerns about,” Manchin told Fox News Digital in a statement.
“While I appreciate that these rules would only apply to new stoves, my view is that it’s part of a broader, administration-wide effort to eliminate fossil fuels,” the West Virginia lawmaker continued. “For that reason, I’m not comfortable moving forward with Mr. Marootian at this time.”
Therefore, the Senate never had a chance to confirm Marootian.
The White House withdrew Marootian’s nomination.
DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm hired Marootian as her senior advisor for the office. Before the appointment, he served as Biden’s special assistant and D.C. Department of Transportation director.
Granholm obviously likes Marootian because the department hired him for a position that doesn’t need confirmation: principal deputy assistant secretary in EERE.
Marootian’s role (emphasis mine):
Jeff Marootian leads and directs the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), focused on creating and sustaining American leadership in the transition to a global clean energy economy. The role oversees the planning and execution of the organization’s $3.2B portfolio of research, development, demonstration, and deployment activities.
Information from Marootian’s DOE page (emphasis mine):
The Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) is responsible for supporting EERE’s Assistant Secretary in leading the organization. In this role, the Office of the PDAS oversees the External Affairs and Strategic Analysis teams, who work to increase the overall effectiveness and impact of all EERE activities. The projects, work products, and activities of these teams directly contribute to realizing EERE’s mission, facilitate and amplify the successes of EERE technology offices, and soundly and consistently inform the Assistant Secretary’s decisions.
—
The External Affairs team coordinates interaction with key external stakeholders to raise awareness of EERE’s work and create opportunities to advance EERE’s mission, helps EERE technology offices deliver key messages and information about their work to a diverse range of media, consumers, and stakeholders through multiple communication channels, and serves as the primary liaison between EERE technology offices and congressional authorizing committees, as well as other committees and offices. The team also provides corporate guidance on congressional interaction and strategic advice on legislation relevant to EERE.
The Strategic Analysis team provides consistent, objective, and credible analyses for EERE’s activities—from market to impacts analysis—as well as an understanding of the effect of various policies on EERE’s core mission.
Marootian’s new job doesn’t sound like a paper-pushing job.
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Comments
Schedule F can’t get here soon enough.
If Republicans ever regain power, they need to establish “re-education camps” for fossil fuel nuts, where the only things available have no dependency on fossil fuels. We could call them as “The Cave Man Experience”.
And they can’t get any things like electricity from outside the “cave”.
Seal the cave?
If you allow Climate Alarmists to set Energy Policy, it will Fail Spectacularly!
Ask Germany.
That would be fine if they were only hurting themselves, but they’re screwing everyone else too
If the nominee is not voted on or rejected, they should be banned from any employment with the agency. Even as a contractor.
Then how would they be able to get their slice of the grift? What you’re suggesting is completely against the way Washington operates!
I know! Scary thought, innit?
“principal deputy assistant secretary”
Now, there’s a job title that brings to mind words like bloat, patronage, feather-bedding….
I thought most all deputy assistant secretary needed confirmation. This certainly looks like a work around.
You’re confusing “deputy secretary” and “assistant secretary” with “deputy assistant secretary.”
The Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary
Yeah… ‘principal’ and ‘deputy’ and ‘assistant’ all seem to be redundant or contradictory.
There’s the old adage that the longer your title, the less actual work you do, and it might apply here.
Marootian is a crackpot.
This clown ranks high in the nomenklatura. The Party will have its way. We spent decades watching the USSR but forgot ‘Democrats’ right under our noses.
Not precisely true. McCarthy did his best to out them. They retaliated by ruining his career and his reputation.
We need a constitutional amendment to relegate ALL of these three- and four-letter agencies to advisory-level-only status, eliminating their ability to actually create laws and regulations. Congress, answerable to the voters, should then be required to vote on any suggestions from these agencies.
What an excellent idea! Could we add a clause limiting their pay and completely eliminating bonuses as well? Otherwise, they’ll want those (meaningless) jobs even more.
I realize I’m being unrealistic. This sort of thing will never happen.
I’m all for it
What we really need is for Congress to be forced to write the regulations themselves, hold hearings, negotiate and vote on them instead of outsourcing the pain in the ass, unglamorous stuff that voters could then hold them directly accountable for to the Executive Branch.
The size of Congress itself, the legislative calender and basic human nature should be harnessed to limit the scope of the Federal government. That’s more/less how we operated until WWI and we were much better off.
AND, we need my amendment for the reading of bills. It requires a full Congressional work day for every 5 pages of Arial 10pt or larger text between the time a bill is introduced to a committee or to the floor and the time it is voted on. (There is more to it.) That limits the House to about 735* pages of legislation (including spending bills!) a year. That puts all of those things you mention to work to control the power of Congress.
(BTW, that includes pages of charts and tables, too. Indexes. Tables of content. Everything.)
(* At about 147 days a year for the House of actually working, according to “List of All Sessions.” History, Art, & Archives – United States House of Representatives.)
LOL. Someone going through and downvoting (almost) all my comments. And not responding to them at all, it seems.
Now they’re ALL downvoted (some of them twice). Thank you for at least being thorough.
That hasn’t happened in years, Commo Chief. I doubt any of them know how to write laws or bills anymore. Everything seems to come from K Street.
That’s a bit too much; regulations are far too detailed for Congress to be able to make them all.
But since agencies authority to make regulations is delegated by Congress, the rule should be that either house can veto any regulation. It shouldn’t require a vote of both houses and possibly a veto override, as it does today. A regulation that is vetoed by one house should be deemed as if the authority granted to the agency to make it in the first place did not pass that house, and therefore the agency does not have that authority.
If it’s too much for Congress to vote on in the first place, then how would it not be “tooo much” for them to provide continual oversight?
The real problem is so very much is not authorized by the Constitution and so much is passed off in order to not bear the responsibility for the decision-making.
If we bothered to actually follow the Constitution, it would already work that way. Although most extraneous agencies wouldn’t even exist.
Another unelectable bureaucrat looking to exercise power and control over the unenlightened.
“Appointed to Senior Role in Efficient Energy Office”
When I read the headline, my first throught was,
“Please, God, let it be as Senior Roomba!”