President Donald Trump nominated energy attorney Laura Swett to fill Chair Mark Christie’s term-limited seat on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday.
Swett will have to get through Senate confirmation to join the commission. The White House has not yet indicated who it will designate FERC chair after Christie departs.
Swett, a litigation counsel at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, previously served as an oil pipeline adviser to former FERC Chair Kevin McIntyre and Commissioner Bernard McNamee, who wrote the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 section on FERC.
Swett’s nomination indicates the White House will not be renominating Christie to the commission, though he could be appointed to fill another commissioner’s seat at a later point. A Republican from Virginia, Christie is considered to be one of the most experienced energy regulators in the country and was first nominated to FERC by Trump in July 2020.
“I learned this evening from a media inquiry that Pres. Trump has appointed Laura Swett to replace me when my term expires,” Christie wrote Monday evening on the social media site X. “I congratulate Laura and wish her the best. I will remain in office for a few weeks after June 30 to help get key orders out.”
Neil Chatterjee, who served as FERC chair in the first Trump administration, called the news “bittersweet” on X.
“I adore Laura Swett and believe she will be an excellent chair (if given the chance by OIRA and OMB). But [Christie] is a patriot. All he did was run the agency well. He’s a veteran who has dedicated his life to serving America. He deserved better,” Chatterjee wrote.
Swett has a cumulative six years working at FERC, first as an enforcement investigator and later as an adviser to McNamee. McNamee’s section of the Project 2025 report laid out an energy strategy for the second Trump administration.
Under it, commissioners would be barred from favoring carbon-free power or justifying costs for “advancing vague ‘societal benefits’ such as climate change.” It called for an end to long-range grid planning, leaving it to states. And it called on FERC to focus exclusively on electric reliability by remaking the way markets price electricity, revaluing coal, gas and nuclear power so they compete with cheaper sources of wind and solar power.
The chapter further criticized FERC Order 2023, which would help clear backlogs of mostly renewable energy projects waiting to connect to power grids.
McNamee wrote that the order “will make it less economical for reliable, dispatchable resources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas to stay operational and support reliability.”
For his part, then-Commissioner Christie called Order 2023 “progress” and voted for it two years ago.
