Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White has resigned effective June 14.
In an email obtained by Weapons Complex Monitor, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Deputy Secretary Dan Brouillette confirmed widespread industry chatter that White is leaving the agency after less than two years.
The same email, distributed to a DOE mailing list, confirmed longtime National Nuclear Security Administration official Ike White would become a senior adviser to Energy Undersecretary Paul Dabbar overseeing the Office of Environmental Management.
Energy Department Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader will, as reported, become the nuclear cleanup office’s principal deputy assistant secretary, replacing Mark Gilbertson, who becomes director of the department’s Laboratory Operations Board.
A number of sources first said last week that White had been asked to step down after 14 months leading the office charged with remediation of 16 radioactively contaminated nuclear sites. The sources also said Gilbertson was being reassigned.
White has been out of town for several days attending a memorial service for her father, an industry observer said Friday morning.
Last week, sources said Dabbar, White’s immediate superior, had asked for her resignation after they disagreed on the handling of a controversy over possible radioactive contamination at a public school near DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio. The undersecretary evidently believed White’s personal attention to the matter was increasing public concern rather than reducing it.
Their working relationship was said to be strained prior to the Ohio incident.
Some sources, however, are clearly unhappy about White’s departure as EM-1.
“I have asked DOE who our contact will be going forward (since Anne is gone) and still awaiting a response,” Pike County Health Commissioner Matt Brewster said by email this week.
One elected official near a DOE complex work site expressed concern about the impact of White’s departure on the mission of the office, funded at $7.2 billion in the current federal budget year.
“That’s not good for us,” said the official, who phoned Weapons Complex Monitor Wednesday. “To me that’s a devastating blow to getting shit cleaned up.”
Since becoming EM-1 last year, White “was a daily reminder that this is a cleanup and closure mission and not a jobs program,” said an industry source. The remediation program’s last major closure was the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, in 2006, he added.
White has called the Energy Department’s environmental liability an issue that keeps her up at night. “It’s growing, not getting smaller,” she said in a 2018 interview. “Getting an understanding of what’s driving that; getting it under control” is a paramount concern, she added.
As of fiscal 2018, the Energy Department’s total environmental liability stood at $494 billion, according to the agency’s most latest financial report. Of that, $377 billion came from the 16 sites managed by EM.
As EM-1, White has evangelized about reforming procurements through the end-state contracting model.
The end-state contracting approach would provide vendors with increased fees for meeting schedule and completion milestones, while DOE will get more flexibility to alter the scope of the work as need arises. The agency would issue indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts based on plans for the first year of work, and then negotiate future changes with the vendor.
This new approach is set to be employed for billions of dollars’ worth of contract awards this year.
“Since her confirmation in March 2018, Anne has shown a true passion for EM’s mission of cleaning up the Nation’s environmental legacy resulting from decades of nuclear weapons research and production,” Perry said in the Friday email.
Ike White, chief of staff and associate principal deputy administrator at DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, will now run the Environmental Management office for the time being. White is a longtime federal employee who has held management posts at the NNSA, including deputy associate administrator for safety and health. He has also worked at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Another industry watcher said Wednesday he’s sorry to see Gilbertson, a career federal manager, get caught up in the apparent leadership purge at EM. Gilbertson, a quarter-century member of the Senior Executive Service, provides significant institutional knowledge about the weapons complex, the source added. Gilbertson has been associate principal deputy assistant secretary (APDAS) for EM’s Office of Regulatory and Policy Affairs, and has worked at the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
Shrader has led the Carlsbad office since 2015 and oversaw the reopening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2017 after an underground radiation leak forced it out of service in February 2014.
Anne White’s departure could raise questions about the future both end-state contracting and a potential new DOE interpretation of what should be treated as high-level radioactive waste (HLW).
The Energy Department launched a comment period in October, concluded in January, on whether certain wastes now treated as HLW could be handled as transuranic or low-level waste if the high-level interpretation focuses more on health risks and less on its point of origin.
Before joining DOE, Anne White worked 25 years in the nuclear industry, with hands-on field experience at many DOE complex sites, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Nevada National Security Site, and the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York. She assisted Romania and other nations develop policy and regulations for emerging nuclear power programs.
