The White House this week teed up a radical reshaping of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), proposing to add two new members to the independent federal watchdog and boot one member.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the Trump administration nominated a combined four people to the board. The nominees include new faces and existing board members. If the Senate confirms the nominees, Obama-era appointee Daniel Santos would lose his seat.
The update would bring the DNFSB back to its full complement of five members. It would also leave Joyce Connery, board chair during the second term of the Barack Obama administration, as the only serving DNFSB member not renominated by its successor.
If the Senate confirms all the nominations the Trump administration made in recent days, the DNFSB’s roster would be:
- Joyce Connery. Term expiring Oct. 18, 2019.
- Bruce Hamilton, chair. Term expiring Oct. 18, 2022.
- Jessie Hill Roberson. Term expiring Oct. 18, 2023.
- Thomas Summers. Term expiring Oct. 18, 2020.
- Lisa Vickers, vice chair. Term expiring Oct. 18, 2021.
The White House’s plan is to push Santos out by moving Hamilton into his seat; backfilling Hamilton’s seat with proposed Vice Chair Vickers, a Department of Energy site representative at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas; and reappointing Roberson to remain in her seat.
Connery’s term is set to expire Oct. 18, but DNFSB members are allowed to serve after their terms expire. At deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor, Connery was the only board member whose term had not expired.
Board members serve five-year terms that expire exactly one year before the end of one other member’s term. The board has on-site inspectors at several nuclear sites; it no regulatory authority over the Department of Energy, but may make safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree. Roberson, who has been on the board since 2010, is the longest-tenured DNFSB member. Santos has served since 2014, while Connery and Hamilton have both served since 2015.
The White House Trump first nominated Vickers for a DNFSB spot in 2018 during the 115th Congress, which adjourned Jan. 3 before the Senate could approve her for the job. The administration renominated her on Wednesday for the 116th Congress.
Trump nominated Summers to the DNFSB on Thursday. Summers was formerly vice commander of the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. He was the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) assistant deputy for research development testing and evaluation for military application as recently as 2016 during the Barack Obama administration, according to an NNSA press release.
Mistrust at DNFSB Headquarters
Meanwhile, at a meeting Wednesday in DNFSB headquarters, Connery continued to decry a state of mistrust among members of the roughly $30-million a year safety board.
“There’s a good deal of mistrust still among board members and, to put in bluntly, hurt feelings,” Connery said during the second of three scheduled meetings to discuss a scathing November report from the National Academy of Public Administration.
The report, which the DNFSB ordered in an attempt to reverse falling staff morale and worsening relations with the Department of Energy, found that the board was under-performing in its mission to protect the public from potential dangers at DOE nuclear sites.
Connery did not detail any specific reasons for mistrust among the four current board members, and none of the others responded to her comments. However, Roberson, the longest-tenured DNFSB member and a Democrat like Connery, nodded throughout her fellow board member’s remarks.
Later in the meeting, Connery said individual board members should not have conversations with congressional staff without a third-party witness.
“I just want to make sure that when we have those interactions that it’s not just one board member with Hill staff or with a member without a member of the professional staff and/or other board members,” Connery said.
Connery has openly sparred with Hamilton, presently the sole Republican on the board. The DNFSB, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, may have no more than three members who belong to the same political party. In particular, Connery objected to Hamilton’s 2018 plan to cut the DNFSB’s headcount to 80 from 100 and permanently relocate more of the board’s staff to DOE facilities from Washington.
All of Connery’s fellow board members voted in favor of Hamilton’s plan last year. Connery stood alone in opposition, slamming Hamilton for crafting the proposal and asking for board approval “without so much as a discussion” with his colleagues first.
Congress subsequently blocked the reorganization for a year, as part of the fiscal 2019 appropriations bill that is funding both DOE and the DNFSB.
Outside of the trust issues, Hamilton said at Wednesday’s meeting that he was working with board staff on potential legislative language that would prohibit DNFSB members from serving beyond an expired term. The National Academy of Public Administration recommended the board consider such a step, Hamilton said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is organizationally similar to the DNFSB, already ousts members at the end of their appointed terms.
