jack spencer

Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, is leading the DOE transition team. One member of the team—Jack Spencer, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity—has written extensively about nuclear energy policy and energy R&D.

Department of Energy

Notably, Spencer was co-author of a June 2016 report which recommended that the next president should eliminate the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, focus federal R&D on basic research, and reform the national lab system, among other actions. As reported in FYI #146, another one of this report’s authors, James Carafano, is on the landing team for the Department of Homeland of Security. Spencer also contributed to a 2013 report on the national labs entitled “Reimagining the National Labs in the 21^st Century Innovation Economy.”

The June report asserts that DOE is “notorious for spending R&D resources on commercial energy technologies that may be promising or exciting but are well beyond the constitutional role of the federal government,” and expresses skepticism about the value provided by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The report also argues that the labs should be given more independence and that the next president should “lead the way to consolidate labs and transfer others to non-federal entities, such as states, universities, or the private sector.”

The other landing team members are David Jonas, former general counsel of the National Nuclear Security Administration; William Greene, director of communications at DOE for Yucca Mountain during the George W. Bush administration; Mark Maddox, an acting assistant secretary for fossil energy at DOE during the George W. Bush administration; Travis Fisher and Daniel Simmons of the Institute for Energy Research; Martin Dannenfelser, Jr., a former staff member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; and Kelly Mitchell, a vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party.