Members of the Defense Nuclear Security Facilities Safety Board said the federal organization should not have sent an engineer on a temporary work assignment to the National Nuclear Security Administration to advocate for the White House’s funding priorities.
The two DNFSB members, Jessie Hill Roberson and Daniel Santos, made their opinion known in an internal memo dated Aug. 11. The memo was briefly posted to the DNFSB website but was taken down Aug. 15.
The DNFSB approved sending the engineer to the semiautonomous Energy Department agency on Aug. 4, according to the memo. The detail was to begin Aug. 21, Roberson and Santos wrote.
“This action diminishes the DNFSB’s execution of its mission by unnecessarily raising doubts about the objectivity and independence of the work of the DNFSB, which directly relies on the objectivity of the work of the technical staff,” Roberson and Santos wrote in their memo to DNFSB Chairman Sean Sullivan, Vice Chairman Bruce Hamilton, and board member Joyce Connery.
According to a copy of personnel transfer paperwork appended to the Roberson-Santos memo, the engineer’s duties at the NNSA involve “advocating for and defending NNSA’s FY2018 budget request and providing supplemental information to support the request.”
“I’m not aware of any circumstance where we have assigned a technical person to an advocacy-type role,” Roberson, the longest-tenured member of the board, said in an Aug. 15 telephone interview with NS&D Monitor.
In their Aug. 11 memo, Roberson and Santos said “this is not the first time the DNFSB has considered similar potential staff details to DOE/NNSA, and the DNFSB’s response has been consistent with the position we are taking.”
The engineer from DNFSB’s Office of the Technical Director for Nuclear Facilities Design and Infrastructure — whose name was withheld in the copy of the memo published online — was assigned to the NNSA’s Office of External Affairs as a “congressional relations specialist.” The detail would last 120 days and could be extended if the board and NNSA wish.
The DNFSB is an independent safety regulator for DOE nuclear weapons and cleanup sites.
Roberson and Santos said they detected nothing malicious or subversive about detailing a board engineer to the NNSA, though not everyone saw it that way.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of the anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said sending a DNFSB engineer to advocate for NNSA funding is an “attempt by the National Nuclear Security Administration to compromise the Safety Board.”
An NNSA spokesperson said the agency does not comment on personnel actions, but said details are common practice across the federal government, and that both “detail announcements and candidates undergo a legal review to ensure no conflicts of interest exist.”
