Energy Chief Nominee to Study Reagan’s Plan for Eliminating Agency

John S. Herrington, President Reagan’s nominee as energy secretary, told a Senate committee Thursday that he will offer “vigorous leadership” to the Department of Energy but will also thoroughly study Reagan’s proposal to eliminate the eight-year-old agency.

“I have a totally open mind,” Herrington said of the proposal, repeating the phrase many times in admitting that he lacked the knowledge to render an opinion on a myriad of energy policy issues.

Herrington came the closest to taking a stand when he suggested that he favors many tax incentives designed to encourage energy conservation and development. Under the Treasury Department’s tax simplification plan, however, such tax breaks would be repealed.

Pragmatic Responses

Despite his generally vague testimony, Herrington’s candor and pragmatic, deferential responses to senators’ concerns clearly impressed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The members received him warmly and left no doubt that they would unanimously recommend his confirmation by the full Senate.

Herrington’s performance closely resembled the smooth manner in which William P. Clark, the outgoing secretary of the Interior, handled his confirmation hearing when he was about to take over a department about which he knew little.

Herrington, a California lawyer-businessman who is now assistant to the President for personnel, would succeed Donald P. Hodel in the energy post. Hodel has been nominated to replace Clark, who is leaving Interior to return to California.

Herrington said Reagan had told him to be “a full-time secretary of energy, not a caretaker.” At the same time, the President asked him to “go into the department, examine the programs and the operations and give him the best opinions as to the options”--that is, whether to retain the 16,000-employee department or have other agencies absorb it.

Herrington said that, as secretary of energy, he would “aggressively pursue” existing policies that call for reduced federal control of energy markets and for a “balanced and mixed energy resource base, ranging from oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear to hydroelectric power, solar, wind, ocean thermal, biofuels and geothermal energy.”

In addition, he said, “I consider that conservation and efficiency gains are also energy resources.”

Emphasizing his belief in the value of conservation measures, Herrington recalled how he and his wife, Lois--now an assistant U.S. attorney general--”sat in the gas lines with the rest of America” during the 1970s.

“We added insulation to our attic (in Walnut Creek, Calif.) and we wrapped our water heater in an insulation blanket,” Herrington said. “ . . . I learned about ‘R-factors’ and I watched my utility bills climb. . . . Like the rest of America, I learned that we would never again be able to take our use of energy for granted. . . . The country made a start toward the end of energy dependence.”