James Richard "Rick" Perry (4 March 1950-) was the US Secretary of Energy from 2 March 2017, succeeding Ernest Moniz. He formerly served as Governor of Texas (R) from 21 December 2000 to 20 January 2015 (succeeding George W. Bush and preceding Greg Abbott).
Biography[]
Rick Perry was born in Haskell, Texas in 1950, the son of a Democratic county commissioner. He worked as a door-to-door book salesman during the early 1970s, and he went on to serve in the US Air Force from 1974 to 1977, reaching the rank of Captain. In 1984, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat, and he pushed for austere state budgets during the 1980s. In 1988, he supported Al Gore in the Democratic presidential primaries, working for his campaign in Texas. A year later, he switched his party affiliation to Republican.
Perry served as Agriculture Commissioner of Texas from 1991 to 1999, and he went on to serve as George W. Bush's Lieutenant Governor from 1999 to 2000. After Bush was elected President in 2000, Perry assumed the office of Governor, serving for fifteen years, becoming the longest-serving governor in Texas history. He campaigned on job growth and tax issues, supporting fiscal conservatism and opposing and vetoing any and all efforts to increase taxes. He opposed Obamacare as "socialism on American soil", oversaw the withering of his state's social safety net, oversaw Texas' becoming the state with the lowest level of access to prenatal care, opposed abortion procedures and their funding, mandated that Texan girls receive the HPV vaccine, believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and that those who did not believe so would go to Hell, supported intelligent design "as a matter of faith and intellect", extended in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants who met the state's residency requirements, supported the state's same-sex anti-sodomy law, supported the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, ended automatic arrest for cannabis possession, supported the death penalty (including its application to intellectually-disabled inmates), supported concealed carry gun rights, and and sought to commercialize the adult stem cell industry. He announced his retirement in 2013, leaving office in 2015. In 2017, he was appointed US Secretary of Energy by President Donald Trump after a failed presidential primary bid, and he believed that climate change was natural and not manmade.