WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump plans to name former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to lead the Energy Department, elevating a man who once could not remember the name of the agency he wanted to eliminate to the Cabinet post, secretary of energy, that will run it.
"Oops," Perry famously said in 2011 as he racked his brain during a nationally televised presidential debate, trying to remember the name of the Energy Department — the third Cabinet agency he intended to dismantle, after the Commerce and Education Departments.
While Texas is rich in energy resources and Perry is an enthusiastic supporter of extracting them, it is not clear how that experience would translate into leading a department far more devoted to national security and basic science than fossil fuels. Despite its name, the Energy Department plays the leading role in designing nuclear weapons, thwarting their proliferation, and ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear arsenal through a constellation of laboratories considered the crown jewels of government science.
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"The Rick Perry choice is so perplexing," said former Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., who for years led the committee that oversees the Energy Department's budget.
"I think very few people understand that the Energy Department, to a very substantial degree, is dealing with nuclear weapons," he added. "And Rick Perry suggested the agency should be abolished. That suggests he thinks it doesn't have value."
About 60 percent of the Energy Department's budget is devoted to managing the National Nuclear Security Administration, which defines its mission as enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science. Under President Barack Obama, the Energy Department helped secure an agreement with Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and took on a higher-profile role in efforts to combat global warming, particularly through scientific research. It also established the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to support breakthrough research on clean energy technology.
To that end, the last two energy secretaries, Ernest J. Moniz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Chu of Stanford, brought to the office their doctorates in physics, their academic credentials and, in Chu's case, a Nobel Prize.
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Perry, 66, would bring a different set of credentials: governor of Texas from 2000 to 2015 and, before that, a stint as the Texas agriculture commissioner. He holds a bachelor's degree in animal science from Texas A&M University. In his 2010 book "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington," Perry called the established science of human-caused climate change a "contrived, phony mess." Those views are in line with those of Trump, who has called climate change a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese.
More recently, Perry was a contestant on the television show "Dancing With the Stars," but was eliminated in an early round.
He was briefly a front-runner in the 2012 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, but his Energy Department "oops moment," as he called it, is widely seen as having sunk his candidacy. His run for the 2016 nomination ended in late 2015, but not before he called Trump a "barking carnival act" and a "cancer on conservatism."
Perry did campaign energetically for Trump in the months leading up to the election.
Trump's selection of Perry appears to line up with his appointment last week of the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt — who, like Perry, is skeptical of climate change — has built a career out of suing the agency he is now set to lead and seeking to dismantle its rules and authority.
Two former energy secretaries, a Republican and a Democrat, said they could envision Perry adapting to the agency, despite his expressed desire to eliminate it. The Republican, Spencer Abraham — who, as a senator from Michigan, had also frequently called for the abolition of the Energy Department — found that his views of the agency evolved after he was named its leader in President George W. Bush's first term.
"There's a lot of elements to the department that people don't necessarily know about until you get there," he said. "You find yourself surprised by what it really entails."
Abraham also noted that current events often dictate the secretary's role. When he took the helm of the agency in 2001, he said his first focus was on rolling blackouts in California and the Enron electric utility scandal. But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, his focus quickly shifted to the agency's counterterrorism and nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs.
Chu was brought in by Obama to focus on climate change programs, but in the summer of 2010, he became consumed with personally helping to engineer a way to stop the oil gushing from a blown BP well in the Gulf of Mexico. Moniz's tenure centered on brokering the nuclear deal with Iran.
"The thing about the department is its diversity, and no one can have a foot in every single department door," Abraham said. "You've seen people with a science background, a military background. Rick Perry has background running a big bureaucracy, the state of Texas. I think he'll do a great job."
And Bill Richardson, the Democratic former governor of New Mexico who served as Bill Clinton's energy secretary, said Perry's experience as the longest-serving governor of a major state with a diverse energy economy could serve him well — with one major caveat.
"Overall, Gov. Perry is a sound choice, because you need a strong leader with political stature and a megaphone for the job, and Rick has both," said Richardson, who noted that he and Perry had often worked together as governors of adjoining southwestern states.
But, he added, "as a big fossil fuel advocate, my concern is that Perry will get sucked in by the Trump climate deniers and try to dismantle the valuable renewable energy and climate change programs that the department manages."
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Already, Trump's transition team has raised fear that the new administration will target the agency's climate change programs and the federal employees who run them. This month, the transition team circulated an unusual 74-point questionnaire at the Energy Department that requested the names of all employees and contractors who had attended climate change policy conferences, as well as emails and documents associated with the conferences.
Former Energy Department employees and presidential transition officials said that a request for lists of specific people involved in shaping climate policy was irregular and alarming. Employees said Tuesday that the choice of a secretary who has vowed to eliminate the agency compounded those fears.
An Energy Department spokesman said the agency had refused to turn over the names to the Trump transition team. "Some of the questions asked left many in our workforce unsettled," the spokesman, Eben Burnham-Snyder, wrote in an email.
"We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department," he wrote. "We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team."