The specter of burdensome data calls between the Department of Energy and its site contractors might still haunt the nuclear security enterprise, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) uses the calls — which may be written requests rather than telephone or voice calls — to glean information of any kind about the goings-on at national laboratories and other facilities. Since 2016, the NNSA has asked its own personnel and DOE personnel to send their call requests to the NNSA chief of staff, who then distributes the requests to its sites.
Currently, William “Ike” White is the NNSA chief of staff.
How pervasive or burdensome these data calls are is unclear, the GAO said in its report, “Nuclear Security Enterprise: NNSA’s Management of Data Calls to Contractors.” For one thing, DOE’s and its contractors “have different definitions of data calls and do not routinely track” whether a call is burdensome or not.
The GAO offered no strict definition either of a data call, or of “burdensome.” All contractors said they provide the NNSA with information in order to fulfill the terms of their contract, according to the report. However, contractors do not formally define what a burdensome call is, nor keep records of which calls are and are not burdensome.
In 2014, during the Barack Obama administration, the congressionally chartered Augustine-Mies advisory panel warned that burdensome data calls were sewing inefficiency throughout the NNSA’s nuclear security enterprise, forcing contractors to drop everything and pull together information packets in response to requests that sometimes were poorly formatted or duplicated information requests received from other parts of the agency.
Such requests wasted both the customer’s and contractor’s time, the Augustine-Mies panel argued, and did little to improve NNSA oversight of its management and operations contractors.
The NNSA did not reply to a request for comment about whether it had finalized the policy, permanently shelved it, or come up with some other way to streamline its data calls process.
Any of the NNSA’s program offices — Defense Programs, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, and Naval Reactors — can place a data call to contractors. The agency’s External Affairs, General Counsel, and Acquisition and Project Management offices can also place calls, as can the secretary of energy.
The GAO’s latest report covered data calls since 2015. Since that year, two of the NNSA’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico, have gotten new management and operations contractors, as has the Nevada National Security Site.
