Senate confirms Carson and Perry for Cabinet posts

WASHINGTON: The Senate confirmed Rick Perry on Thursday as head of the Energy Department, an agency he had once pledged as a presidential candidate to eliminate.

Earlier in the day, the Senate confirmed Ben Carson, an acclaimed-neurosurgeon-turned politician, as secretary of housing and urban development.

The Senate action left President Donald Trump with just two open seats in his Cabinet — the agriculture and labor posts.

The vote for Mr Perry, a former Texas governor, was 62-37. He will lead an agency that, despite its name, is largely focused on overseeing the nation’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, as well as a network of 17 national scientific laboratories.

In his confirmation hearing, Mr Perry told senators that he regretted his call in the 2012 campaign to eliminate the agency. His inability to remember the name of the Energy Department in a 2011 debate, even as he called for getting rid of the agency, was widely seen as helping to sink his campaign.

People close to Mr Perry, who is from an energy-producing state, said that at the time he had believed that the Energy Department was largely focused on developing and promoting the nation’s energy resources. At his January confirmation hearing, Mr Perry told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that after “being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy,” he now supported its mission.

The agency does play some role in the nation’s energy policy: Its laboratories conduct research into energy technologies that could help fight climate change.

Mr Perry, who has long called climate change a hoax and mocked the science of human-caused climate change, said he had also changed those views, telling senators: “I believe the climate is changing. I believe some of it is naturally occurring, but some of it is also caused by man-made activity.”

Like Mr Perry, Mr Carson did not face much pushback from Democrats, unlike other Cabinet members chosen by Mr Trump. The Senate voted 58-41 to confirm Mr Carson, despite his lack of experience in housing issues or in running a large federal bureaucracy.

The Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs unanimously advanced his nomination in January, although several Democrats did question him about his belief that government assistance programmes often lead to dependency. Mr Carson will head an agency with a US$47 billion budget and a charge to assist millions of low-income renters, fight urban blight and help homeowners stave off foreclosures.

Mr Carson, whose mother at times received food stamps to provide for her family, grew up surrounded by some of the housing assistance programmes he will oversee. Still, he has embraced Republican dogma that too much government help — both in desegregating neighbourhoods and in lifting people from poverty — can discourage people from working hard.

Mr Carson was awarded a scholarship to Yale, and at 33, he was named director of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre. He later became an author and a philanthropist supporting scholarships for young, often impoverished students. After his medical career, Mr Carson turned to politics and competed with Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr Carson’s views worry many of his critics who believe that the federal government should be doing more, not less, for the nation’s cities, where glittering downtowns and increasingly gentrified neighborhoods are often surrounded by areas of poverty and violence.