Biden expected to name senior Interior official as department’s acting No. 2

President Biden will name a senior Interior department official as the department’s No. 2 official on an acting basis, a person familiar with the Biden administration’s plans told The Hill.

The administration is expected to name Laura Daniel-Davis, Biden’s nominee for assistant secretary for land and minerals management, as acting deputy Interior secretary. She will replace Tommy Beaudreau, who is set to leave his post at the end of October. 

Daniel-Davis, a veteran of the Biden and Obama administrations, was nominated in June 2021, but the Senate Energy Committee deadlocked on her nomination that year and the next, sending it back to the president for renomination. Biden renominated her in 2023, but in March, committee Chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he would not advance the nomination.

Manchin, one of the Biden administration’s most vocal intraparty critics on energy policy, cited an internal Interior memo that Daniel-Davis signed off on declining to lower federal oil and gas extraction fees, which cited the threat of climate change. The West Virginia Democrat, who faces a tough reelection fight in 2024, said at the time that he “will not support anyone who agrees with this type of misguided reasoning.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), an ally of Beaudreau’s, also vocally objected to that memo, saying she was “through the roof” at the time. 

It’s unclear whether the Biden administration has considered Daniel-Davis as a permanent replacement in the deputy secretary job. She would almost certainly face more hurdles to Senate confirmation than Beaudreau, a popular figure across party lines who received an 18-1 vote in the committee and an 88-9 vote in the full Senate. 

Beaudreau was seen as a centrist, industry-friendly counterweight to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, an ally of progressives and environmentalists, and his name, not hers, appears on one of the Biden Interior Department’s most controversial approvals: for the massive Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.

An Interior Department spokesperson told The Hill the department has no new personnel announcements to make.

This story was updated at 3:59 p.m.