Blank Rome Government Relations Senior Advisor Spencer Abraham spoke to POLITICO about his experience as U.S. Energy Secretary on September 11, 2001, including the immediate effort to secure nuclear material in transit across Department of Energy sites, the shift in the Department’s mission toward detecting nuclear threats, and how the energy landscape has changed in the 25 years since. Below is an excerpt from the article.
Minutes after al-Qaida hijackers steered United Airlines flight 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center, then-President George W. Bush’s Energy secretary had a new imperative: Get nuclear material off American roads.
The attacks 25 years ago today occurred before the American shale oil boom — or data center politics and Donald Trump’s talk of “energy dominance” — and then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham was largely thinking about how to prevent blackouts in California and — above all — the post-Cold War cleanup of nuclear weapons sites across the United States.
The attacks snapped the nuclear part of the job sharply, and suddenly, into focus.
“Once the second plane hit, and we knew this was, you know, premeditated, our first issue at DOE, as I recall, was to … securitize the most dangerous things that were part of our charter. And so that was job one,” Abraham told me this week, noting that “almost every day, at least in that era, nuclear material is on the move somewhere among all the different DOE sites.”
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“Blackouts to Suitcase Bombs: Energy after 9/11,” by Joseph J. Schatz was published in POLTICO on September 11, 2026.