A former number-two at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration would not rule out a return to government service on the eve of the presidential election.
“No comment,” Madelyn Creedon, principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the final years of the Barack Obama administration, said in a virtual meeting when asked if she would even consider returning to government service.
Creedon has been consulting since she left the NNSA last inauguration day 2017. Her boss former boss, Gen. Frank Klotz, hung around for about another year, until the Senate cleared Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to take over as NNSA administrator.
Creedon’s resume is certainly right for the NNSA, though whether she got back into federal service at all hinges on whether Joe Biden unseats President Trump in Tuesday’s election, whether Biden’s transition team wants Creedon for another federal gig, and whether Creedon herself would agree to it.
There’s only one position at the semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency that would be a promotion for Creedon — administrator — and it’s not a job that any president has been quick to fill. The Trump administration kept Klotz on for a year, in what rated as a more-or-less ordinary continuity of civilian nuclear-weapons leadership under a new president.
Creedon spoke alongside another former NNSA No. 2, Bill Ostendorff, in a virtual meeting hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance: a pair of D.C.-area non-government groups.
Ostendorff, a Navy veteran, was second-in-command at NNSA during the George W. Bush administration. He stuck around Washington as a Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner during the Obama administration.
Technical difficulties with the webcast on Monday appeared to prevent Ostendorff from weighing in about whether he might rejoin the federal ranks, and if so under what circumstances.