The former Bush officials said they don’t have official roles in the Romney campaign. | AP Photos Bush energy advisers go to Romney

George W. Bush-era energy policy wonks are finding a new home with Mitt Romney.

The former Massachusetts governor can count on support from a who’s who of former Bush officials willing to raise money, brainstorm policy ideas and generally help spread the word among the ranks of like-minded GOP energy experts.


Already on board the Romney train are Jim Connaughton, who ran Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality for all eight years; former Assistant Energy Secretary Andy Karsner; former EPA air chief Jeff Holmstead; and former EPA congressional affairs liaison Edward Krenik.

The former Bush officials all told POLITICO that they don’t have official roles in the Romney campaign. But they confirmed their support for Romney, yet another potential signal that the Washington establishment has decided who has the inside track for the GOP nomination.

“It’s pre-dating,” said a former Bush energy official. “Everybody sees the writing on the wall on who’s going to win, so they’re jumping over there.”

Mike McKenna, a GOP energy strategist helping Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign, said the former Bush officials are making their inroads now in the hope they can find a way back into government jobs via a Romney administration.

“Guys like that don’t come onto the campaign unless you promise them some kind of influence, some significant ability to help the decisions on where the campaign goes,” he said.

Of Connaughton, one of Bush’s closest advisers on energy policy and now an executive vice president at Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, McKenna added, “He’s the guy most credentialed and most likely to be the next EPA administrator. I’ve got to think they’re listening to him pretty closely.”

Romney’s Boston-based campaign did not respond to a request for comments about its formal and informal energy and environmental advising teams. But it’s already clear there are some energy policy chops available from Romney’s staff of both hired and volunteer hands.

The economic team includes Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. Former Sen. Jim Talent, a Missouri Republican whose lobbying clients include Peabody Coal, is helping to shape Romney’s energy and foreign policy agenda. Other big names pitching in include former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and Paula Dobriansky, a Bush-era State Department official who led the U.S. delegation during several rounds of international climate change negotiations.

Romney’s policy shop is run by Lanhee Chen, a former Bush aide at the Department of Health and Human Services. Also on staff is Oren Cass, who GOP sources say has been taking a key role connecting with energy experts outside the campaign.

While Romney hasn’t set up an official energy/environment advisory team, that’s probably only a matter of time. Several other groups are operating, with focuses on economics, foreign policy and national security, justice, labor, veterans, trade and law enforcement.

“He’s shown a taste for bigger policy shops,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former top economic adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential run, who is not affiliated with any 2012 team.

Some of Romney’s supporters are also causing him some headaches. Connaughton, who hosted a Romney fundraiser in September in Bethesda, lobbied for cap-and-trade legislation during the Obama administration. Similarly, Mankiw advocated a carbon tax in a 2007 article he wrote for The New York Times.

“When you have people advising you who have supported a carbon tax, you can imagine that raises some concern,” said Dan Kish, a former congressional GOP energy aide not connected to a Republican presidential campaign.

Romney’s competitors appear to be taking different approaches when it comes to working with energy and environmental experts.

Perry’s Texas-dominated operation knows the nuances of the oil and gas industry. “He’s got access to guys I’m sure in Texas who know at least as much as anybody else in D.C. It’s just a different kind of experience,” McKenna said. “I don’t think he’s underserved, let’s put it that way.”

One of Perry’s closest advisers on these issues is Barry Smitherman, his appointee to the Railroad Commission of Texas and a former member of the state Public Utility Commission. A former public finance investment banker, Smitherman also has been picked by the Bush and Obama administrations to sit on the Energy Department’s Electricity Advisory Committee.

On the official Perry campaign, Deirdre Delisi, a former chairwoman of the Texas Transportation Commission, serves as policy and strategy director. He has also named Emily Domenech as an adviser on defense, energy and environmental issues. Domenech most recently did advance work for then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates. She also held a similar post in 2006 and 2007 for then-Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.

Perry’s economic team also got help from Susan Dudley, a Bush-era director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. But Dudley, now director of the Regulatory Studies Center at The George Washington University, said she’s just playing the field with all Democratic and GOP lawmakers.

“I am an academic and try to help them understand both how the current regulatory process works and what consequences possible reforms might have,” she wrote in an email to POLITICO.

Perry’s staff, she added, “was interested in thinking through these questions in a principled way.”

Most of the other GOP presidential teams don’t have very large energy policy shops — if they exist at all.

Herman Cain’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment, and several GOP experts said they were in the dark on whom the former Godfather’s Pizza executive was leaning on for energy help beyond Americans for Prosperity, the tea party group affiliated with the Koch brothers.

“This may be a breaking news announcement for the media — I am the Koch brothers’ brother from another mother,” Cain said this month during an AFP-sponsored event in Washington.

Cain also was the only Republican to accept AFP’s invitation in June to attend a protest in Manhattan against the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative cap-and-trade program.

Supporters of Newt Gingrich said he’s got a barebones energy policy operation, which is only natural given that the former House speaker knows the issues cold. (He wrote a book on the subject and, in 2007, debated Democratic Sen. John Kerry on climate change.)

“I don’t know if he needs someone to tell him from soup to nuts what to think about it as far as energy production because he’s spent a lot of time thinking about it,” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), a Gingrich backer, said in an interview.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s policy team is led by Mark McIntosh, a former Bush CEQ White House official. He’s also leaning on C. Boyden Gray, a former general counsel in George H.W. Bush’s White House.

Aside from Huntsman’s acknowledgment of climate science, the former Utah governor’s energy policy ideas are not much different from those of his GOP challengers. Several Republicans said the presidential candidates are all in the same place on the issues for a reason and that there’s no need for a major-league-size advising team until the general election campaign.

Said one former Bush EPA official, “The only thing you need to know about environmental issues to get through the Republican primary is that EPA is a job killer.”