Don’t expect another Senate-confirmed nominee during President Donald Trump’s current term to succeed Anne Marie White at the helm of the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management.
That was the assessment offered this week by several observers of the DOE weapons complex.
The chances of the White House finding a qualified and willing candidate – and getting them vetted, nominated, and confirmed before the November 2020 election is slim to none – these people agreed. The administration is more than two years old and is just completing confirmation of its first tranche of agency officials, one observer said.
Anyone smart enough to oversee remediation at 16 Cold War sites won’t be dumb enough to take the job, said one source. The forced resignation of Anne White, and reassignment of her chief deputy, Mark Gilbertson, makes people wary, he added.
“I can’t imagine anyone would volunteer for the nominating process” at this stage, a second source said. A more likely scenario is Ike White, a longtime nuclear-agency hand most recently of the National Nuclear Security Administration, will stay in charge of EM for the rest this presidential term as a senior adviser to Undersecretary Paul Dabbar.
Dabbar — a one-time Navy submarine officer who has worked on Wall Street and also served on DOE’s Environmental Management Advisory Board before being confirmed by the Senate for his current post in 2017 — appears to be taking Anne White’s previously-scheduled public appearances for now.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry on May 31 confirmed days of speculation that Anne White is resigning as assistant secretary for environmental management June 14. Relations between Anne White and Dabbar were rumored to be frosty, and Dabbar was said to be unhappy with her handling of a controversy involving possible radioactive contamination at a Pike County, Ohio school.
Anne White leaves office after a little over 14 months on the job, after stating early in her tenure she wanted to increase stability at the EM-1 position. White previously ran her own nuclear regulatory consulting company and did environmental field work at sites including the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, as well as the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York.
Ike White becoming senior adviser at Environmental Management will probably happen concurrent with Anne White’s departure, the first source said. That also goes for Todd Shrader’s move to Washington, D.C. to serve as the No. 2 official at the nuclear cleanup office, after working as manager of the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico since 2015, where he oversaw the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Shrader will become Environmental Management’s principal deputy assistant secretary, while Gilbertson will become director of the DOE’s National Laboratory Operations Board.
No announcement has been made yet about Shrader’s replacement at Carlsbad. The deputy manager there is Kirk Lachman, who has more than 27 years of experience at DOE.
As for Anne White, she was not spotted at the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus gathering Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where she was initially scheduled to moderate a panel discussion. During her final days as EM-1, she has signed off on major documents – including the Energy Department’s reinterpretation of the definition of high-level waste.
Dabbar did mention White once during his presentation to the Cleanup Caucus, saying they decided early on to revisit the Energy Department’s interpretation of HLW to focus more on its radioactive risk profile.
End State Contracting Approach is Sticking Around
While leadership is changing at the Office of Environmental Management, a recently-initiated approach to procurement remains in place.
Some people have inquired recently if the end state contracting approach is still in effect, Norbert Doyle, deputy assistant secretary, acquisition and project management, told the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus.
Both Doyle and Dabbar noted DOE is reviewing bids for the first two major end state procurements – contracts for tank closure, and Central Plateau remediation – at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The new approach applies only to cleanup contracts, not things like managing a laboratory, providing site “landlord” services, or paramilitary security, Doyle said.
The approach is a move away from the more “cost-based” approach to contract and toward more reliance on single-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity agreements, Doyle said. The cost estimates and task orders drawn up by DOE won’t be drafted years in advance, he added.
Contractors who prove highly effective in meeting important cleanup milestone can potentially earn up to 15% fee. In addition, the approach also includes mechanisms to make it easier for the Energy Department to remove poor-performing vendors, Doyle said.
Some of DOE’s responsibilities for negotiating contract specifics will shift to field sites and away from the Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
What’s not changing is that the major contracts issued by the agency will still rely heavily on subcontracts performed by small business, Doyle said.
