March 17, 2014

FORMER NNSA OFFICIALS ADVOCATE SHIFT TO STANDALONE AGENCY

By ExchangeMonitor

Two former National Nuclear Security Administration officials said yesterday that the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee did not go far enough with the reform language it inserted into the Fiscal Year 2013 Defense Authorization Act, suggesting that the NNSA needs to become a standalone agency. Speaking at a hearing on the creation of NNSA 12 years ago, former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks and former Principal Deputy Administrator Bob Kuckuck offered striking critiques of the agency they helped stand up, with Brooks saying the agency has never enjoyed the semi-autonomy that its architects envisioned, and Kuckuck saying it never had a chance. “I believe that we never left DOE,” Kuckuck said. “The process of oversight felt the same. I don’t think anybody believed we were going to have success.”

He said the burdensome oversight that the agency’s creation hoped to eliminate threatened some improvements in safety and security made over the last decade. “The oversight is now so oppressive and has passed the limit of good balance,” Kuckuck said. “The attitudes now are turning toward the overseers and are turning against safety itself.” Gene Aloise, the Government Accountability Office’s Director of Energy and Natural Resources, agreed with Brooks and Kuckuck that the NNSA was never given a chance to work as Congress envisioned and reform was necessary, but said that GAO believes “drastic organizational changes are unnecessary” and might not do much to help NNSA’s problems.

Led by House Armed Services Strategic Forces Chairman Michael Turner (R-Ohio), NNSA reform language would increase the autonomy of the agency, eliminate DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security from oversight of the agency, move the agency toward performance-based oversight and away from transaction- based oversight, and push the agency to streamline directives and regulations. Turner, for his part, has increasingly suggested that the subcommittee may not have gone far enough with its efforts. “As we said before, our proposals were the start of a dialogue. It’s interesting they’re not being considered radical. They’re being considered not far enough,” Turner told NW&M Monitor following the hearing. “But it keeps the discussion going that there is a problem and this needs to be fixed.”

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