White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Infrastructure Needs Bring Comity to Congress

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By the current standards on Capitol Hill, there is astounding comity in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The committee, which held its first hearing of the new Congress recently, exhibits a kind of good humor, of give and take, which largely ceased with the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.

What makes this committee different is that Republicans and Democrats are staring into the jaws of hell together, so to speak. Disparate as they are, from super-liberal Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia to the committee’s conservative chairman, Bill Shuster, R-Pennsylvania, the members know that the nation’s infrastructure is in deplorable condition.

They know, too, that in the current Congress, with its GOP aversion to new taxes, there is not enough money to fix the deteriorating infrastructure. They know all too well the old saw about immovable objects and irresistible forces.

A panel of heavy infrastructure users, headed by business celebrity Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, laid out the choke points for his industry: air traffic control and the interstate highway systems.

One of Smith’s ideas for improving the nation’s highways, bridges and public transit systems is to raise the gasoline and diesel tax, which has languished since 1994. But he warned this might not be the whole answer when new forms of propulsion, like electricity and compressed natural gas are changing or threatening to change the transportation mix.

No one on the panel objected to the idea of taxes for infrastructure. The overriding concern was from committee members who wondered whether the money would be spent where it was planned or diverted to general revenue needs.

It interested me that it was Smith who recommended greater taxation. His panel colleagues, including Ludwig Willisch, CEO of BMW of North America, and David MacLennan, CEO of Cargill, did not demure. More important, Republican members of the committee swallowed the tax poison without visible physical effect. No retching, trembling or detectable palpitations.

The elephant in the room, of course, was the Trump administration. Candidate Trump promised a massive infrastructure leap forward.

No one seemed confident that spending hawks in the Congress would support such athletics. It is hard to be hopeful that President Trump will get all or any of the new money out of a Congress that is looking at escalating deficits.

Talking to people involved in infrastructure, one gets this picture: user fees are not enough and toll roads, favored in principle by many, do not raise enough money to attract and keep private investors. Philip White of the global law firm Dentons, points out that many of these have failed in Texas — ground zero for private enterprise — and have had to be taken over by government entities. Similar fates have befallen toll roads elsewhere.

The big initial boost for the infrastructure under Trump will not come from new money, but rather from authorizing previously delayed projects and easing regulations. There is also the current highway fund spending, which has risen somewhat.

But nobody, especially on the House committee, believes it is enough to reverse the relentless crumbling of roads and bridges. The real infrastructure funding need has been estimated to be as high as $6 trillion.

Back to FedEx’s Smith and what he thinks will work: a mileage tax, congestion pricing and high-access lanes on highways; a revised tax code, which would eliminate some of the anomalies that hamper strategic planning; privatizing air traffic control; and upgrading runways.

He pointed to Memphis, FedEx’s “SuperHub,” where there has been a huge gain in productivity with air traffic improvements financed by his company.

Cargill, for its part, sang the song of barges, shipping containers, trucks and railcars. “It is the interconnected nature of waterways, railways and highways — the three-legged stool of domestic transportation — that is important to keeping the United States competitive. When one mode of transportation is troubled, it affects the entire system,” MacLennan said.

All is not lost for infrastructure spending. Trump, it appears, is keen to say he has honored his campaign promises. And he promised big.

Get ready for taxes, fees and congestion charges. The need is great, the means slim and taxes, by another name, will come.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will need all of its evident camaraderie as it takes its shovel to the legislative tarmac.

For InsideSources

Notebook: Theater of Renewal in Rhode Island Village

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It is the theater paradox: regional performances are often as good or better than those in big cities, and even those in the hallowed locales of Broadway and the West End of London.

Away from the established talent and the marquee names, theater flourishes, sometimes in the most modest venues. Having been a theater critic in various places, including London and Washington, I can attest to the fact that theater is where you find it. I saw productions of “Evita” in London, New York and a dinner theater in Manassas, Va.

So I was delighted to find The Arctic Playhouse in Rhode Island, just a short distance from my home. The little theater – and I mean little — is without pretensions. It is as modest as can be and, in its way, a little treasure.

Arctic, in its day, was a destination village in West Warwick, R.I.: a place where professionals lived and shoppers came from afar. But the development of malls nearby doomed little Arctic. Now it is a sad place with an aged population: The senior center is a happening place for many of the residents.

Arctic is proud but poor with businesses that have held on from better days; businesses like Rockway Tailoring and Dry Cleaners (still run by the family which opened its doors 132 years ago), Cayouette Shoe & Leather Repair and Rogers Paint Service Store.

For all of its boarded-up shops, Arctic is fighting back. The symbol of its fight is The Arctic Playhouse, located in a former dog salon on the main street. It was founded by three Rhode Islanders, Jim Belanger, Lloyd Felix and David Vieira, who wanted to arrest the decay in the village.

Though lacking in many amenities, Arctic now has a live theater, which few villages can claim. It is small, seating just 90 people, and very “villagey,” adding to its charm. Audiences are local, pricing ($10 for many performances) is keen. There is a cash bar, free popcorn in red-striped cups and cookies baked by volunteers.

The curtain metaphorically (there isn’t one) rises weekends to some rattling good productions, either the playhouse’s own or those of New England amateur companies. The lights go up and the players are in front of you — so close that you feel you are in the play yourself.

Whether I have seen a production in a full or half-empty house, I have sensed that the audience is part of the performance. One feels responsible for the players and the play.

My wife and I are regulars and have been enchanted. Next year, The Arctic Playhouse moves to a new home, still on the main street, still in a converted shop, but with better facilities and more seats.

The curtain is going up on renewal in Arctic, one show at a time.

Trump Takes Washington in a Storm, but Why the Hurry?

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It is a good thing for politicians to honor their campaign promises. In that, President Donald Trump is acting in an exemplary way.

But does he have to do it so fast?

In a campaign ideas and ideology dominate, details languish. But once office is won, especially the highest office in the land, there is time to contemplate not just the journey but the best route.

There is a vast amount of know-how and knowledge to be tapped that might, on consideration, temper the ideas of the campaign.

For example, the president, before commanding the hiring of 5,000 more U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, might have learned how difficult it is to recruit and train these men and women. He might have taken note that there are 1,200 vacancies along the border right now, despite strenuous recruiting efforts.

His early action in pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a trade deal that was negotiated between 12 Asia-Pacific nations who represent more than 40 percent of the global economy — was done in haste, which might set world history off in a direction that the nation and the world will rue.

One of Trump’s campaign promises, if not the theme of his campaign, was that the United States would be led by the world’s best negotiator, its top dealmaker. Why would he tear up a deal before he had taken time to improve it? There is no art in trashing a deal.

Why would he willingly relinquish a leadership role in global trade to China, which he has called out time and again?

On the face of it, Trump will now have to direct the U.S. Trade Representative to negotiate separate deals with the TPP signatories, possibly taking years. China has proposed the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, stepping right in where the United States has stepped out. Does Trump want to be known as the president who lost Asia? History is cruel; its mistakes devastating.

Would Trump prefer 28 bilateral trade deals with Europe when he could have 27 plus one, Britain? Europe is our largest trading partner, a relationship worthy of tender loving care, but Trump has encouraged its breakup.

Trump loves to make a grand entrance. He showed that with his stately ride in the company of his wife, Melania, down an escalator in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City before announcing his candidacy on June 16, 2015. It was dramatic: the quintessential Trump, showman and grandstander.

His entrance into Washington has been louder and splashier — almost as though it is a finale, not an opening. The city is reeling, the world is agog and the Republicans — to say nothing of the president’s Cabinet nominees — are in the dark about his policies; where his head is at?

The president may not have had as many people at his inauguration as he had wished, but his actions have turned him into a show of shows. Even as the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus goes out of business, Donald Trump is its temporary replacement: The Greatest Show on Earth. But this big top stands for four years, and no performance lasts that long.

Entrances and showmanship are not statesmanship. Trump needs to begin to show that he can stay the course beyond a grand entrance; he needs to be seen to negotiate for the United States, not just to be the great treaty abrogator.

Trump made more than 650 promises on the campaign trail. Some he can keep, particularly when they have no more depth than reversing his predecessor’s executive actions.

Having failed to prove the theory that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, he seems determined to expunge as much of Obama’s legacy as he can get his hands on.

The big promises, like creating 25 million jobs, boosting the growth rate to between 4 percent and 5 percent and balancing the budget, may require the great dealmaker to do some deals with the country’s expectations.

Grand entrances can lead to ignoble exits.

The Left Should Stop Whining and Start Influencing Trump

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Through the nation and across the world the liberals, the centrists, the traditionalists and the orthodox are in shock: Donald J. Trump is America’s 45th president and they don’t like that one bit, or like him at all.

I have some advice for those who are beating their breasts and crying, “The sky is falling!”: Get over it, and get to work.

Trump is the man. Those who fear his changes ought to start using the man’s own tool: leverage.

According to The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who covered Trump’s presidential campaign, and interviewed him again last week, the president has no particular ideology. But he gets ideas from Steve Bannon, his senior counselor and chief White House strategist.

The forces opposed to Trump would do better to focus their fire on Bannon. Criticize him, even ridicule and revile him, but endeavor to get the message straight to Trump.

How can one direct invective at those around Trump, but speak to him directly?
The tool for reaching Trump is television.

Television is a medium associated with mass communication, but now it has a chance of being a medium of singular communication: the way to whisper in the president’s ear in plain sight.

Trump told Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” that he gets his information from “the shows like yours.” Trump’s early Cabinet appointments show the veracity of this: What he knows, how he thinks and how he’ll act is influenced by what he sees on television much more than by learned discourse in the press.

Trump tweets because what he has to say fits in the written equivalent of a sound bite.

Trump is a creature of television, and it’s a two-way street for him: He loves being on it and gets his information from it. That’s why he appoints people whom he has seen on television. He appointed Monica Crowley as senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, but she has relinquished the post amid a plagiarism scandal. Reportedly he was considering Laura Ingraham for White House press secretary. Both are television chirpers.

If you want money to build a new nuclear reactor, more funding for the National Institutes of Health to do research on a certain disease, or if you want to change the fortunes of a small country, take your message to television.

This means the political communications machine needs retooling.

You cannot persuade Trump with dense arguments in journals of opinion. Instead, you must persuade him with easily grasped ideas that will make their way onto television — especially onto the Sunday morning talk shows.

Fox has the edge with Trump, which makes the sale of some ideas more difficult. But he’s open to a catchy concept; something that he can rework into a slogan of his own, while his administration incorporates it into policy.

The other route to Trump are his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Liberals should stop whining about their having a role in the White House. Let them have it. It’s a good thing — and an excellent thing for these times.

Even though they’ve been shielded by wealth from many of the realities of life, they can’t be totally immune to what their generation thinks and says. They are in their middle 30s; Trump is 70. That’s important. It wouldn’t be so if they didn’t get a hearing from Trump. But he relies on them, uses them as sounding board. They could be of value in balancing what Trump hears from Bannon and national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Only a child can say to a parent, a parent who dotes on that child, “You’re full of it.”

That’s what everyone needs to hear sometimes, and Trump especially. Bring them on!

Power — the Lure of Washington

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You are part of the new administration, or want to be part of the administration, or your company thinks it will gain favor if it moves its headquarters to Washington. One way or another, a lot of people are on the move to the nation’s capital.

It is part of the Washington mystique that more come than go. Once you get in the Washington whirlpool, you don’t simply swim back to where you came from.

Members of the diplomatic corps yearn to come back to Washington. And members of the Washington press corps seldom leave Washington, although they may change employers.

Explaining the power that Washington exerts over its migrants isn’t easy, but it is there. Part of it, as Martin Walker, who covered Washington for Britain’s Guardian, told me when I met him in Brussels, where he had been sent by the newspaper, that he longed to get back to Washington — and he did, later, with UPI. “I like living somewhere where the head of government can send in a battle fleet,” he explained.

Journalists love Washington because it is one-stop shopping. There are innumerable stories and many places of employment, from the multifaceted world of trade journalism to the throes of political journalism.

Others, who don’t cover the White House or write for a major international newspaper, are also smitten. Maybe, I should say infected because an unnatural attraction to our nation’s capital is more often referred to as “Potomac Fever”.

There is no therapy for the malady, or known cure. People say, “I love Washington” and they mean it. Writers say, “I love writing.” But author Susan Seliger told me it means, “I love having finished writing.”

A common diagnosis of Washington’s peculiar sickness is that it is about power. But most people in Washington have precious little power and do ordinary jobs. It could be argued that, for the most part, investment banks on Wall Street or software shops in Silicon Valley have more power.

The president has real power, but even he is restrained, as President-elect Donald Trump is about to learn. Most power in Washington is derivative: Your wife’s best friend is married to the chairman of an influential Senate committee. Letting this be known gives you a sense of power.

One man I knew for years impressed people with his “White House contact.” He let it be known that he was “well-connected at the White House.” Beyond bragging, it did him no good.

Access is the currency most sought after. It, too, is dubious. If you have a telephone or an email account, well, you have access. People in Washington get back to you, just in case you’re important.

Lobbyists work on access, raising money, providing tickets to sports events, and ingratiating themselves with members of Congress and their staffs.

This isn’t as hard as it seems. Members of Congress enjoy the attention that multiplies the sense that they are important, therefore, powerful.

Washington schools are important. As Frederic Reamer, professor at Rhode Island College and an expert on prisons, told me in a television interview: “Washington has the best and worst schools in the country.”

The best schools are the private ones — Sidwell Friends and St. Albans stand out — and they are part of the power structure in Washington. Presidents, members of Congress, diplomats and other power people send their children to these schools. School functions are where the elite meet. It’s heady, it’s Washington. The better suburban schools are also part of the game.

The downside of Washington is that it gets more expensive daily, particularly housing. Affordable housing is available in less-savory areas of the city or in the suburbs that spread out 40 miles into neighboring Maryland and Virginia.

Washington traffic is second only to Los Angeles. If you have close friends, better live close to them because they won’t be dropping in on a whim.

The spring and fall are beautiful, but summer hot humid and hellish. When it snows, everything shuts down. Enjoy!

The ‘Quaking Hour’ Of Governance Begins With Trump’s Tweets

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One can only imagine what it is like to be a Republican member of Congress in the age of Trump. What should be a time of harmonious playing, with both houses secure with a GOP majority and a Republican about to assume the presidency, instead is one of jarring orchestration.

The problem is the score written by President-elect Donald Trump. It is discordant and inspires fear among them.

Senate Republicans are not afraid of their leader Mitch McConnell, and their House counterparts do not quake when their leader, Paul Ryan, speaks. But when it comes to the president-elect, there is unspoken fear.

Republicans are not waking to the bright morning of governance, but rather to the “quaking hour” when they find out what Trump did to them overnight by Twitter or some other unplanned communication.

Did Trump ridicule one of them personally, attack a collective Republican action (like the attempt to close the Office of Congressional Ethics) or take aim against a heretofore Republican orthodoxy (like free trade)?

Has he promoted the interest of Russia over the well-grounded suspicions Republicans on Capitol Hill have of Russia in everything, from hacking to aggression in Syria and Ukraine?

Has he offended 27 European countries in the European Union by supporting Britain’s plans to exit?

Has he, perchance, committed the United States to military action on the Korean Peninsula without consulting Congress or our reliable allies in South Korea. Does he know that the South Korean capital, Seoul, lies just 35 miles from the heavily fortified border with North Korea?

There is surely more to come that will cause heartburn with breakfast.

Not all Republicans are climate deniers, even though they may not have liked Democratic prescriptions. Most Republicans are free-traders, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed with Republican support. Are they going to be asked to throw in their lot with dismantling it? And what might they get in NAFTA Mark II?

The known points of stress between the Republicans and their leader-elect are now joined — almost nightly — by random pronouncements with huge policy implications.

Trump is exempt from the normal disciplines of politics. He is comfortable with his paranoia, therefore all criticism is the work of “enemies” or fools. He seems to have no icons, no heroes, and no respect for the institutions of U.S. governance or the history that underlies them — hence giving the back of his hand to the intelligence agencies over Russian hacking.

If Trump does not like the message, he trashes the messenger.

This must sit badly but privately with congressional Republicans. They have fought hard over long years to protect the CIA, the NSA and the rest of the intelligence apparatus from being hobbled by the Democrats. So Trump’s cavalier dismissal of their findings must rankle, if not darn right alarm. The links between the intelligence community and leading Republicans are strong and enduring.

Trump will get his honeymoon. Republicans on Capitol Hill will support and explain and excuse the new president. But, in time, there will be a breaking point; a time when the music will change, when Republicans will speak up again for conservative orthodoxy and the going will get rough for Trump.

Tweeting is not governing, and the presidency is not reality television — particularly when you are threatening to upend the world order on midnight caprice.

Beware the quaking hour. It breaks with the first keystroke of the morning, when the GOP finds out what its leader might have done to it and its verities overnight. It breaks for the person who has spoken up and has been ridiculed, singled out as weak.

This is not what was expected from a party winning both houses of Congress and the White House. It is a new dimension in American politics. And the quaking is not just for Republicans.

The big ideas of 2016 — myths, lies and a dismal narrative

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What were the big ideas of 2016?

The great, world-changing actions are the decision of Britain to leave the European Union — Brexit — and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Both pointed to electorates that had had it with the status quo and the elites who run things.

On either side of the Atlantic the status quo got the heave-ho.

The victors in these elections relied on and triumphed with a simple strategy: a propaganda coup. They told the electorate that things were worse than they actually were.

Start with Britain. Those who campaigned to take Britain out of Europe took an ancient, maybe primal, desire of an island people to remain unattached and exploited it with cunning, disinformation and suspect numbers.

Britons were, this narrative claimed, suffering under the yoke of European bureaucrats. Yet, if you ask people in Britain — let us remember this was an English issue and not a Scottish, Welsh or Irish one — to tell you how they have been adversely affected by the European Union, they cannot tell you.

Britain is one of the most successful nations in Europe and, therefore, the most influential. From architecture to banking to theater, Britain leads the way. Now that is to be ended for small-nation status and mythology about sovereignty.

The nation that has given so much to the world has voted to be insignificant and poorer, all because of leaders telling them they were oppressed by Europe in unquantifiable ways.

A further mystery: Why have American conservatives, almost en bloc, applauded Britain’s decision to embrace irrelevance?

During his presidential campaign, Trump used the same argument as those who wanted Britain to vote to roll back history: Things are awful and getting worse. This postulated that the government has fallen into the hands of people who cannot administer, and that the United States has crushing unemployment.

When it came to foreign relations and trade, Trump averred that our negotiators are feckless pushovers, always ready to cave. Not so. Around the world, we are respected for our powers of negotiation and the depth of expertise we bring to the table.

The Hobbesian Trumpian view of things contrasts with unambiguous facts: The nation’s economy has been growing, unemployment is below 5 percent with shortages in many blue-collar fields, and manufacturing is growing.

Like the “leave” campaign in the United Kingdom, Trump has emphasized the role of regulation in holding back economic expansion. This is the “Gulliver’s Travels” vision of the economy, that there is an economic giant yearning to be free and to lift economic growth when the pesky regulations that keep him tied up are ditched.

Well, perhaps some. The historical picture of deregulation is mixed.

Deregulation of oil and gas — particularly with gas — led to an increase in supply even before the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) boom.

While airline deregulation resulted in many more cheaper — and more unpleasant — flights, it also left many small cities with fewer and more expensive ones.

Electric utility industry deregulation has been a mess, resulting in weaker companies, stranded investment and no consumer dividend.

Drug regulation needs streamlining but remains essential.

Banks howl at regulations and go off the rails when they are slackened, as with the savings and loan scandal and the mortgage debacle. Maybe when greed is a profession, regulators will be needed.

Regulation is not across-the-board deleterious. Relaxing some will help some national goals, such as building more pipelines to move the hydrocarbon bounty to market. But keeping pipelines safe is a regulatory necessity.

The Trump administration will come to power burdened with weight of expectations it has ignited.

This was the year where shaded facts, political myth and old-fashioned lies dominated the discourse.

Expectations levitated in 2016 will fall to earth in 2017 — softly, one hopes. As for the big idea? It has not yet been tweeted to us.

The People Who Give Us Gifts All Year — the Overcomers

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Certain gifts are given to us year in and year out. They are the gifts that keep on giving and they come, to my mind, from people I call “The Overcomers.”

This Christmas week A.A. Gill, one of Britain’s most extraordinary newspaper columnists, died at the age of 62. Gill was nominally a food critic. He used that position as a launchpad for some of the most entertaining and acerbic writing anywhere.

His column in Britain’s The Sunday Times was a weekly joy. But Gill didn’t get there easily. First, he nearly died of alcoholism at the age of 30. He wrote a book about it.

Gill straightened out his drinking, but he never straightened out his awful spelling and severe dyslexia. He overcame them largely by phoning in his columns.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the greatest literary talents to come out of South America, struggled with terrible spelling that he detailed in his extraordinary autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But it didn’t stop him from authoring masterpieces like “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

Willard Scott, who had a successful career in radio in the Washington market before making it as a personality and weatherman on NBC’s “Today” show, suffered acute stage fright. He testified before Congress so that his experience would help others.

But in my random selection of overcomers, the biggest is Laura Hillenbrand, the author of two nonfiction bestsellers, “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” and “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption.” Both were massive works of research and narrative writing.

The back story, though, is one of suffering, terrible unrelenting suffering. Hillenbrand is afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

This is a disease that knows no mercy; a life-sentence disease without a cure and no proven therapy. It punishes sufferers for any effort, even mild exercise, condemning them to bed, often for days. The symptoms are extreme fatigue, migraine headache, aching joints, hyper-sensitivity to light and sound, and dysphasia. Some patients are bedridden for years.

Hillenbrand missed her own wedding because she was unable to walk downstairs or to look down. Yet, this overcomer researched and wrote two extraordinary books. Just as important, in a seminal July 7, 2003, essay in The New Yorker, she told her own story, comforting fellow sufferers and prompting the medical world to take ME more seriously.

My favorite overcomer was a waiter at the National Press Club in Washington, known simply as Mr. Blue. He was a man of such innate dignity that everyone called him “Mister,” and no one seemed to know his first name.

Mr. Blue had had a hard life as an African- American with no education. In fact, he was illiterate, and I was one of the few to find out.

At the club in the 1970s, when I knew Blue, the waiters carried loose, paper checks on which members wrote their orders and club numbers. Blue survived by feats of memory, remembering who had written out which check by keeping them in order. One day, his system failed: He dropped his checks. Mr. Blue was distraught to tears.

Shame is a powerful censor and, like most censorship, it neither helps the sufferer, nor does it do anything for the body politic. No one wants to be famous for their inadequacies or their sickness. But going public comforts and is a gift. It is the gift, so important in the holidays, of saying: You are not alone.

In that spirit, I have to go public with this: I am, for a broadcaster, a bad sight-reader. I have mild dyslexia, and I’ve been humiliated by my terrible spelling all of my long life in journalism. Happy holidays!

An Open Letter to Rick Perry, U.S. Energy Secretary Nominee

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Dear Gov. Perry:

Welcome to the Department of Energy. It is a cornucopia of scientific wonders, brilliant people and, to be true, some duplication and wasted effort.

Oil, natural gas and coal are not the overriding concern of the DOE. Until President Jimmy Carter created it in 1977, fossil fuels were the province of the Department of the Interior.

The DOE was preceded by the Energy Research and Development Administration. This was a short-lived agency that combined the non-regulatory functions of the Atomic Energy Commission with the fossil fuel responsibilities of the Interior Department.

To be sure, DOE has had a manful role in coal gasification, fracking and carbon capture and storage.

But its main role is to be the nation’s armorer; to build and maintain the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, and to detect bad guys testing weapons in places like North Korea and Iran.

The department has 17 major laboratories, headed by the three big weapons labs: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.

In your own state of Texas, as you must know, is the Pantex facility. That is where the weapons are constructed and dismantled. That is ground zero, if you will, of weapons making. That where the “pits” are assembled and disassembled. Weapons are designed and engineered in the weapons laboratories.

You will find that cleanup of nuclear waste — much of it from earlier weapons production — in places like Hanford, Wash., and Los Alamos, N.M., is a continuing and seemingly endless task that chews up talent and money.

Some of the other work of the DOE may surprise you. It was a major player in the human genome project and it helps U.S. companies improve their manufacturing technology. It has developed ceramics for all sorts of non-nuclear uses, like car engines. Its work with 3-D seismic and advanced drill bits has made the fracking revolution possible.

You are, in fact, about to lead the largest science department anywhere in the world.

When you get the feel of the place, one hopes that talk of disbanding it will disappear. Likewise wild talk about rooting out climate science, which has the department in shock. The DOE is not part of climate science conspiracy. Please examine your charge before you trash it.

The DOE national laboratory system is a national treasure, the science mind of the nation. It collaborates with dozens of universities.

If President-elect Trump is determined to renegotiate the Iranian deal, you will be a player. The present secretary, Ernie Moniz, handled the negotiations brilliantly for the treaty we have with Iran. He knew as much about the workings of a hydrogen bomb and its supply chain as his opponent, Ali Akbar Salehi, who also went MIT. If there is another negotiation as the president-elect has suggested, you will have to support the chief negotiator, the secretary of state, with expertise from your department.

First and foremost, the DOE is a nuclear agency, charged with making the weapons that protect the nation. But it also does some amazingly disparate things at its labs, from improving coal combustion to studying cancer to examining the very nature of matter. And, of course, climate science. It has been said that it takes a new secretary a year to find out what the department does.

Because the DOE operates in many states through the laboratory system, Congress rides it hard. Congressmen fight for dollars and projects in their states. An example — and one you will have to adjudicate — is the battle over whether to continue with the construction and operation of the mixed oxide fuel fabrication facility at the Savannah River Site. The Obama administration has said it should be terminated; Congress says no.

As there is throughout government, there is waste in the lab system. But it is a small problem compared with its huge value to the nation. A suggestion: work on making it even more user friendly to technology transfer. That is how we assure the future of U.S. competitiveness: science and more science.

You have a great charge, Gov. Perry, and it has very little to do with oil.

For InsideSources

Raymond Durante, Man of the Atom, Dies Age 88

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Photo: Ray Durante with EPA Administrator Christine Todd-Whitman

By Llewellyn King

Raymond “Ray” Durante, who died at the beginning of December age 88, was a consummate man of the atom. For more than 50 years, in government and in private sector work, Ray championed the nuclear promise.

He was also a man of family, and a man of friendship. I was lucky to be his friend.

Ray was a proud graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, where he earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in industrial engineering. He was a passionate supporter of the university, and remained absorbed in its alumni activities until the end of his life. Every Christmas, he and his wife, Dorothy, who died this fall, hosted a party for Stevens alumni and friends at the Congressional Country Club in Potomac, MD. It was staple of the season.

Ray’s career stretched back to assisting in the design and engineering of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and submarine design. For the Department of the Interior, he was the manager of the Balsa Island Project, a plan in California to build nuclear plants that would produce electricity and desalinate water for Southern California.

When I met Ray, he was vice president for energy systems in the Washington office of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. He was all over the town: in and out of government offices, on Capitol Hill and at the White House.

Ray, with his capacity for friendship, worked well with both Democrats and Republicans. In that time, which cannot be recaptured, people who favored nuclear worked together across party lines. There was a nuclear establishment that believed in a whole-hearted, now-forgotten creed that nuclear would carry mankind forward, that it was a blessing.

Ray was caught up in the energy crisis of the 1970s and strongly believed nuclear power was the ideal way to generate electricity and provide process heat. Natural gas was, at that time, considered a depleted resource, oil was thought to going the same way, and renewables were only a dream. Coal and nuclear stood alone.

Over the years, his work included yeoman efforts on the technology of food irradiation and licensing Canada’s natural uranium-fueled reactor in the United States. For more than 50 years, if it was nuclear, Ray was there hands on.

His devotion to his family was just as complete. He was never happier than when he was building houses with his three sons on property in Ocean City, MD. He was also an accomplished cabinetmaker and did much of the finish work on his own home in Potomac.

He reveled in his family. As it grew to eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, his joy grew with them.

He was palpably proud of and close to his granddaughter Maggie Rose Durante, a charted country singer, who goes as “Maggie Rose” professionally. Ray was looking forward to one of her concerts when he died.

I do not know if Ray could sing. But I do know that as a friend and a father, he hit all the right notes.