A senior aide to Vice President Cheney is the leading contender to become a top official at the Energy Department, according to several current and former administration officials, a promotion that would put one of the administration's most ardent opponents of environmental regulation in charge of forming department policies on climate change.

F. Chase Hutto III has played a prominent behind-the-scenes role in shaping the administration's environmental policies for several years, the officials said, helping to rewrite rules affecting the air that Americans breathe and the waters that oil tankers traverse. In every instance, according to both his allies and opponents, he has challenged proposals that would place additional regulations on industry.


... Hutto, 39, a Michigan native and a veteran of several successful GOP campaigns, has spent almost his entire career working for Republicans in Washington. He started out as an opposition researcher working on Spencer Abraham's 1994 upset Senate victory and conducted similar research for two other Senate bids before serving on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign as a vote-recount team leader in Duval County, Fla.