March 17, 2014

GAO QUESTIONS DOE SAFETY DIRECTIVES REFORM EFFORT

By ExchangeMonitor

The Government Accountability Office is questioning whether a Department of Energy effort to eliminate nearly half of its safety directives was worth it, suggesting in a report released yesterday that the Department never analyzed how some eliminated directives actually impacted productivity or whether the reform efforts would actually bring about enough efficiencies to offset the cost of implementation. As part of a Department-wide effort to streamline its directives system, the Department eliminated 38 of 80 safety-related directives, but DOE officials had trouble quantifying the benefits of the reform efforts, according to the GAO. The government watchdog agency said that DOE officials said that Department and contractor officials “used their experience and judgment” to identify burdensome and overly prescriptive directives, but GAO said officials were unable to demonstrate how the directives “negatively affected productivity or costs or criteria that they used for making a determination that they were burdensome.”

Combined with the lack of goals and performance measures, the GAO said that “DOE is not well positioned to know that its reform effort will achieve its intended benefits.” The GAO said that eliminating unnecessary requirements that don’t improve safety is a “worthy goal,” but it suggested that DOE had little way of knowing its reform effort was effective. “Simply counting the number of directives revised or eliminated does not indicate the benefit of the reform on productivity and safety performance at DOE’s sites,” the GAO said. “Safety should not be measured by the amount of paper that is saved but by actual improvements in safety performance across the department.”

The report drew a pointed response from DOE Health, Safety and Security chief Glenn Podonsky, who said the Department had “significant concerns” with “mischaracterizations” in the report that it said “could mislead the Department’s stakeholders and the public” in a response to the report. Podonsky noted that the report did not identify significant flaws in the revised directives, though the GAO noted that the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board had raised concerns with some of the changes. “If effectively implemented, the Department is confident that these safety directives, combined with our long-standing safety regulations, provide adequate protection for the public and our workers and will effectively support mission requirements in a safe and efficient manner,” he said.

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