Long after more flamboyant colleagues flamed out of President Donald Trump’s favor amid ethics scandals, low-profile and folksy Rick Perry survived in the Cabinet in part by steering clear of controversy.
Until now.
The former Texas governor said Thursday that he was quitting as energy secretary by year’s end. The announcement came as the House impeachment investigation highlighted his work in Ukraine, where he promoted U.S. natural gas and where Trump hoped to find dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Trump said that Perry had planned for months to leave the Cabinet, but the timing of the announcement of Perry’s departure fits a Trump pattern, said governance expert Kathryn Dunn Tenpas of the Brookings Institution. Her work shows there has been more turnover in Trump’s Cabinet than under any other president since at least Ronald Reagan.
The more important the issue is to the president, the more likely you're on the chopping block,'' Tenpas said. <br />
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No evidence has emerged that Perry explicitly pressured Ukrainian officials to comply with Trump's push to investigate a Ukraine natural gas company where Biden's son Hunter was a board member. It's a central part of the impeachment investigation. </p><figure role="group">
FILE – Energy Secretary Rick Perry, left, speaks at a discussion on the importance of American leadership in artificial intelligence at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., Aug. 26, 2019.
Publicly, Perry moved through that world as a champion of U.S. energy and energy policy, advocating for American oil, gas and coal, a Trump priority, but also encouraging countries to build up solar, wind and nuclear power.
James Melville Jr., U.S. ambassador to Estonia until he resigned last year in protest of Trump’s treatment of European allies, said he was positively impressed'' by Perry, in some ways, in their one encounter at an event on the Baltic states. <br />
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Perrywas friendly, he was cordial, he was talkative,” and willing to meet Estonian officials whom Melville brought over to introduce.
He struck me very much as a politician,'' Melville said.Broad knowledge but not very deep” when it came to science-heavy matters under Perry’s stewardship as energy secretary.
Before now, Perry’s defining national moment came as a presidential candidate, when he forgot the name of the Energy Department in a 2011 debate as he was listing Cabinet agencies he wanted to eliminate.
Active presence
As energy secretary, by most accounts he has been an active and eager leader, visiting the country’s research labs and touring power plants. He worked well with lawmakers, in a job that required him to appeal annually to Congress for money for projects despite Trump’s own call for cuts.
“The coolest job I’ve ever had,” he said in his departure video Thursday.
Perry stayed low-key with policy aims that ran counter to the president’s likes, tamping down public shows of support for the wind turbines he had promoted as Texas governor, for example.
“The secretary knows he works for the president … and a large part of his job is enhancing and defending his administration’s and the president’s policy goals. And he has done that,” noted Ray Sullivan, Perry’s former chief of staff in Texas.
