The White House on Tuesday officially nominated Marvin Adams to succeed Charles Verdon as the top weapons official at National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters in Washington, according to an evening press release.
The White House sent Adams’ nomination to the Senate nearly a month after announcing its intention to make him the next deputy administrator for defense programs.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is the semiautonomous, $20-billion-a-year Department of Energy agency in charge of nuclear weapons maintenance and modernization.
As of late Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee had yet to schedule a nomination hearing for Adams, a professor at Texas A&M University who is also an adviser or observer for the management and operations contractors of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Adams has a PhD and a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan, according to his scholar profile at A&M.
Although the Senate has been bogged down in a legislative logjam over President Biden’s domestic spending agenda, the clog briefly cleared last year to allow one senior National Nuclear Security Administration nominee through for what turned out to be an uncontroversial, bipartisan confirmation.
That was Corey Hinderstein, who cleared the Senate Nov. 30 after Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, brought her nomination to the floor and got unanimous consent to confirm it.
If confirmed, Adams will round out the Biden administration’s picks for the four politically appointed NNSA headquarters leaders. Jill Hruby, the administrator, was first, followed by Frank Rose, her deputy, and then Hinderstein, the deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.