WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama intends to round out his environmental and natural-resources team with a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and three former Environmental Protection Agency officials from the Clinton administration.
The president-elect has selected Steven Chu for energy secretary, Lisa Jackson for EPA administrator, Carol Browner as his energy “czar” and Nancy Sutley to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Democratic officials said Wednesday. Still unclear is whom Obama will tap for interior secretary.
Officials close to the transition said support for John Berry, director of the National Zoo and a former assistant secretary at the Interior Department, was growing. But these officials also said Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva and California Rep. Mike Thompson were still in the running.
The Democratic officials who disclosed the selections spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal names that have not been made public. Their release is expected in the coming weeks.
Obama will hold a news conference today in Chicago to name former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle as his secretary of health and human services. That choice has been known for some time.
As for his environment and natural-resources team:
• Chu was one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for work in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He is a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, where he has pushed for research into alternative energy.
• Jackson, who would be the first black person to lead the EPA, is a former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner who worked at the federal agency for 16 years, including under Browner when she was President Bill Clinton’s EPA chief. Jackson is a co-chairman of Obama’s EPA transition team and currently serves as chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.
• Browner, who served as EPA chief for eight years under Clinton, will become Obama’s go-to person in the White House overseeing energy issues, an area expected to include the environment and climate matters. Now chair of the National Audubon Society and on the boards of several other environmental groups, Browner has been leading the Obama transition’s working group on energy and environment.
• Sutley, now deputy mayor for energy and environment in Los Angeles and the mayor’s rep on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is the first prominent gay or lesbian person to earn a senior role in Obama’s new administration. She was an EPA official during the Clinton administration.
