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Notes -
On the other hand, Brinton is a deputy assistant secretary. That's certainly a job post that gets you an office with a name plate on the door, but how important is it, really? The guy does have relevant qualifications in the field, but they do seem to have done mostly activism before landing this job, and there was a big deal made out of them doing youth work for LGBT+ teens and kids. So it seems to have been a combination of "ticking off diversity boxes to throw some bones to our progressive edge" with "just enough qualifications not to be obviously 'only hired because they're a weirdo'".
I think the general weirdness came before getting interested in being a nuclear engineer; their origin story is their parents were Southern Baptist missionaries, they came out to them about being bisexual in high school and were sent to a conversation therapy camp for two years. The nuclear energy material, while relevant, doesn't seem to have been a big activist fight issue for them, as against LGBT youth suicide prevention and getting conversion therapy banned. So it wasn't "seriously concerned enough about spent nuclear fuel" that generated the weirdness points.
"Deputy assistant secretary" does sound kind of like a joke title, but it's probably exactly these minor-sounding bureaucratic positions that affect the outcomes of government efforts. It probably just takes the right person in the right place such as that to punt or pass along something important.
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