The Energy Department said Thursday it completed the reorganization of its Environmental Management (EM) bureaucracy this week, consolidating seven organizational stovepipes into three and bringing the office’s nine field centers under the management of new Washington-based field office czar Stacy Charboneau.
Charboneau take the new position of associate principal deputy assistant secretary for the Field Office unit within Environmental Management. A 20-year DOE veteran, Charboneau had been director of the Richland Operations Office in Washington state since 2014, where she oversaw mostly solid-waste cleanup, reactor interim storage, and groundwater remediation efforts at the Hanford Site’s central plateau and Columbia River corridor, along with building decontamination and demolition and site-wide services.
Doug Shoop, Charboneau’s deputy, will replace her effective Monday, the Richland Operations office wrote in a Thursday press release.
The department formally rolled out the proposed reorganization in June. DOE has said there will be no layoffs or demotions as a result of the second EM reorganization in as many years.
With a roughly $6-billion annual budget, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management employs about 1,400 civil servants nationwide. That includes roughly 160 in Washington and about 110 in Germantown, Md., some 30 miles northwest of the Capitol. These federal employees are represented by the National Treasury Employees Union, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the proposed merger.
As for the other two new EM offices, DOE has tapped Frank Marcinowski to lead the Regulatory and Policy Affairs unit, and Candice Trummell to head the Business Operations unit. Marcinowski was previously acting associate principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management at EM headquarters in Washington. Trummell, a former EM hand of five years, spent most of the past year as deputy chief of staff for Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.
In an industry-hosted Capitol Hill reception in June, Mark Whitney, principal deputy assistant secretary for Environmental Management, said the reorganization will sharpen the agency’s focus on fieldwork — a focus he said had blurred under the management structure in place since 2014.
“I think to a certain degree, we’ve gotten away from our core mission, which is supporting the field,” Whitney told an audience of DOE contractors, lawmakers, and Hill staffers.
