Former Texas governor Rick Perry, who was tapped by President-elect Donald Trump as his secretary of energy, is apparently still in the process of learning about what his new job will entail.
"If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy,’" said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who worked both for Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Trump transition team, told The New York Times. "If you asked him now, he’d say, ‘I’m serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.’ It’s been a learning curve."
When Perry accepted Trump's offer to lead the Department of Energy, he had believed that this would involve advocating for the American oil and gas industry on the international stage, according to the Times. He was apparently surprised to learn that his main responsibility would be that of overseeing America's nuclear weapons arsenal, which consumes two-thirds of the energy department's annual $30 billion budget.
Not surprisingly, both Perry defenders and anti-Obama administration critics have taken to Twitter so they can blast The New York Times for pointing out Perry's need for a learning curve.
So while I was offline, the left came up w/ a meme that Rick Perry, who served as governor of the nation's largest energy-producing state...
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) January 19, 2017
...for over a decade doesn't know what the Department of Energy does and isn't qualified to be Energy Secretary? How. Incredibly. Stupid.
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) January 19, 2017
Having worked for Rick Perry, I can say that yes, there are policy topics he is not well-versed in. Energy is not one of them.
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) January 19, 2017
Ernest Moniz is a highly respected former MIT chair who helped negotiate the spread of nukes in the Middle East. Perry's not the idiot here.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) January 19, 2017
Mandel's insult was directed at Ernest J. Moniz, the current secretary of energy who once presided as chairman over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's physics department.
Perry himself is expected to be contrite about calling for the energy department's elimination, which he did throughout his 2012 campaign for the presidency. This culminated in an embarrassing faux pas in which he couldn't recall the department's name during one of the Republican presidential debates.
"My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking," Perry is expected to say during his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.
"In fact, after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination."
He's come a long way toward leading the cabinet department he once forgot he wanted to remove.
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