By Kennedy Maize
Departing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie said farewell to his colleagues, commission staff, and the public at yesterday’s (July 24) open meeting. He left offering advice that he said he received when he joined the Virginia State Corporation Commission 31 years ago.
Christie said he left his first public SCC meeting impressed by the full house that attended the meeting in a Richmond courthouse. His mentor told him that all the people attending the meeting were lawyers and lobbyists who have business interests and money at stake before the regulators.
The advice the veteran regulator gave the rookie, which Christie said he has tried to follow ever since, was, “You have to remember the people who are not in the room.”
Talking to reporters after the meeting, Christie reemphasized that credo: “What I said at the very end is what I hope for FERC, that the people who sit on the commission always remember the people who are not in the room, because they are not represented.
“The people who pay the bills, the people who suffer from what we do or what we don’t do, they are not represented. There really is no one but us thinking about them and thinking about how what we do affects them.”
FERC does not hold a public meeting in August. That does not mean the commission is taking the month off. The flood of orders and actions continues, as it does every month. Much FERC activity is out of sight of the public through notational votes – where the commissioners do not meet but pass paper among themselves as they reach decisions. For example, at yesterday’s meeting, FERC Secretary Debbie-Anne A. Reese noted that the commission had approved 89 notational orders since the June meeting.
The Trump administration has nominated a veteran of Project 2025’s conservative blueprint for a unitary government unanswerable to Congress and the courts to the commission. The nominee is David LaCerte, 46, currently at the Office of Personnel Management, where he is the agency’s liaison with the White House.
LaCerte is a lawyer with limited energy experience in private practice at the Baker Botts law firm for two years. He is a veteran of the first Trump administration, where he worked on chemical safety and hazard responses at the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board at the end of Trump’s term.
Legal Planet, a legal website collaboration among faculty at the UC Berkeley School of Law and the UCLA School of Law focused on environmental law, dubbed LaCerte “perhaps the least qualified FERC nominee in history.”
Dan Farber, Berkeley Law’s Co-Director of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, wrote: “‘FERC Commissioner’ is not usually considered an entry-level job in energy law….Energy law and regulation are extraordinarily complex and technical, but the issues are big – management of massive U.S. electricity markets, permitting of natural gas pipelines, setting rates for electricity transmission, and ensuring grid reliability. So far as I can tell, LaCerte has no professional background involving any of these issues.”
LaCerte is listed among the “contributors” in the Project 2025 report, although his name does not come up elsewhere in the text, so it isn’t clear what he contributed to the project. Most likely is that he worked on the section dealing with federal government human resource management.
LaCerte joins Vinson & Elkins lawyer Laura Swett, who has rich energy law experience, including at FERC, as a pending nominee to fill Republican seats on the five-member commission. Her nomination went to the Senate on June 2.
There’s no guarantee the Senate will get around to confirming the nominations anytime soon, nor is it clear which nominee will get the gavel, although there was speculation that Swett would be the choice. The confirmations would give the Republicans a 3-2 margin over the current 2-2 partisan split, although the commission is rarely mired in the kind of partisan politics that mars many other Washington regulatory commissions. The chairmanship by law will go to what will be one of three Republican FERC commissioners, sitting Commissioner Lindsay See, Swett, or LaCerte, assuming the Senate confirms Swett or LaCerte.
The confirmation timing is also uncertain. It is likely the Swett and LaCerte nominations will be paired, so the Senate Energy Committee can review them together before possibly passing the nominations to the full Senate for final confirmation. Historically, FERC nominations are not a high committee priority and the shape of the committee and Senate calendars for the remainder of the year are unknown.
Christie will be at 888 First St. N.E. at least through August. “There are a lot of contested cases,” he told reporters. “I hope in the next several weeks we can get a lot of them done.”
Should the end of August arrive with no replacement for at least one of the two, and vacancies, without a quorum of three commissioners and unable to do business, Christie says he will remain. “I’m not leaving FERC with no quorum,” he said. “The commission will continue to do its business.”
Under the law, Christie can stay in the job through 2025 if there is no replacement for his seat.
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