With COVID-19 vaccines now widely available in the U.S., federal agencies including the Department of Energy are supposed to set plans by Monday to return personnel to offices.
The White House Office of Management and Budget gave federal agencies until July 19 to “finalize their phased plans for reentry and post-reentry,” according to a June memo.
At the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), “only individuals whose key duties or work activities are required to be performed on-site are working at NNSA headquarters,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an email last week — a boilerplate statement of agency policy that NNSA headquarters in Washington has provided in response to weekly queries from Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor for most of the ongoing pandemic, which is now in its 16th month.
Exactly how many civil servants will return to offices is not clear, but “it’s not as simple as turning on a switch,” Jason Armstrong, the manager of the NNSA’s Savannah River Site Field Office, said this week in a virtual hearing of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. “There are ongoing challenges with COVID-19,” Armstrong said, citing among other things the more contagious delta variant of the virus.
At deadline, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention had not classed any COVID-19 variant as one of high consequence — that is, dangerous enough that “prevention measures or medical countermeasures have significantly reduced effectiveness relative to previously circulating variants.”
“So far, studies suggest that the current authorized vaccines work on the circulating variants,” the CDC wrote on its website.
According to data tracked by the Johns Hopkins University, about 48% of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19, which broke out in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
Meanwhile, Armstrong said the NNSA’s Savannah River Site office has at least weighed the possibility of a hybrid work schedule that calls federal employees to the office for two or three “collaboration days” each week.
Throughout the pandemic, some NNSA employees, and many more contractors, reported to work inside the fence to continue nuclear weapons work deemed too critical to national security to pause for long.
