The specter of burdensome data calls — when the Department of Energy asks its contractors for information about the goings-on at national laboratories and other sites — might still haunt the nuclear security enterprise, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
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 semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its contractors “have different definitions of data calls and do not routinely track such information.”
For another, contractors also do not identify which calls are burdensome and which are not, congressional auditors wrote.
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.
Since 2016, data calls from the NNSA and the broader Department of Energy filter through the NNSA chief of staff, according to GAO. Currently, William “Ike” White holds that position.
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 office, its Office of the General Counsel, and its Acquisition and Project Management office 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.
