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Trump Names New Nuclear Policy Team
March 2025
By Xiaodon Liang
U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed a cabinet of political allies to advise on nuclear policy issues during his second term in office and supplemented them with some subcabinet staff from his first administration.
The Senate unanimously confirmed Trump’s secretary of state, former Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jan. 20. As a lawmaker, Rubio pushed for a strong U.S. response to Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and urged Trump to rescind the U.S. signature on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in response to allegations of Russian low-yield testing (see ACT, July/August 2019).
Awaiting confirmation is Thomas DiNanno, whom Trump nominated Feb. 11 to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. DiNanno previously served as acting assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance from 2019 to 2020 while confirmed as a deputy assistant secretary, and before that held several senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and former television commentator, had a more difficult path to confirmation, receiving only 50 votes in a split Senate. Senators raised questions about his lack of high-level policy and management experience and personal character.
During questions at a Jan. 14 confirmation hearing, Hegseth claimed that “Russia and China are rushing to modernize and build arsenals larger than ours.” Although U.S. intelligence agencies have not publicly reported a significant expansion of Russian nuclear forces, they have aired concerns that China might build an arsenal of 1,000 to 1,500 nuclear warheads (see ACT, January/February 2025). Those projections remain below the roughly 3,700 warheads in the U.S. stockpile.
Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, has divided Republican hawks. Colby’s history of advocating for a military policy that prioritizes China is “a concern to a number of senators,” according to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Feb. 13 comments to The Hill.
Colby was deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018, and a principal author of the first Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy. With past experience working on nuclear issues in government and at think tanks, Colby has an extensive track record that senators might scrutinize before his confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.
In the past, he has argued against military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and urged the shepherding of U.S. forces and materiel for a potential war with China. In 2014, he also broached the possibility of first-use of U.S. nuclear weapons against China to ensure against a military defeat, long before this option was discussed more widely in Washington.
Another stakeholder in nuclear debates will be the incoming secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, who was appointed principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in October 2020. Among other roles, Meink was a test engineer for the Missile Defense Agency while a commissioned Air Force officer, according to his official NRO biography. In his more recent positions as a Defense Department civilian, his responsibilities centered on acquiring military space assets.
The new secretary of energy, Chris Wright, was confirmed 59-38 by the Senate Feb. 3. In comments to department staff the next day, Wright lauded nuclear weapons as having, “in the big picture, very much a peace-generating impact.”
An oil and gas industry executive, Wright recognized the need to continue environmental remediation work at contaminated Cold War-era nuclear facilities, including the former plutonium production site at Hanford, Washington. “We need to finish cleaning up all of these sites,” he said. Several Hanford clean-up workers were laid off by the Department of Energy later in February.
Trump nominated Brandon Williams, a former New York congressman and former Navy submariner, to be administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Williams, Meink, and Colby await confirmation.
Mike Waltz, until Jan. 20 a Florida congressman, joined the administration as national security advisor. In three terms in the House of Representatives, he sat on the foreign affairs, armed services, and intelligence committees and gained a reputation for being willing to engage across the aisle on issues despite holding doctrinaire conservative views on foreign policy.