With the head of field operations at the Department of Energy’s $8-billion nuclear remediation branch recently announcing departure plans, more of the Cold War and Manhattan Project cleanup sites will start reporting directly to the No. 2 boss at headquarters in Washington, D.C., officials said Monday.
“We are making a change in a couple of our reporting relationships at headquarters,” DOE Office of Environmental Management senior adviser William (Ike) White told the Environmental Management Advisory Board during an online meeting.
The field managers for Carlsbad, N.M., Hanford, Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah, and Savannah River will report to the front office through DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for Environmental Management, or EM-2. That’s according to a “colleagues” email to federal staff from current EM-2 Jeff Avery.
“I want to be clear that this realignment is limited to changing the reporting structure for several senior executive service leaders” within Environmental Management, Avery said in the email. “No positions will be downgraded or eliminated, no employees will be relocated geographically, and no duties or bargaining unit statuses will change.”
“Our large field [office]managers will now all report to the front office,” White said at Monday’s meeting. “It’s not a huge change from a structural perspective,” White said. The new organization chart is designed “to reflect the way we, for all practical purposes, already operate,” White said.
A few weeks ago, the cleanup office said Nelson-Jean, currently associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operations, had been chosen as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) associate administrator for infrastructure. Her last day with Environmental Management is June 3.
