GAO says more work needed on DOE procurements

When it comes to overseeing billions of dollars’ worth of federal contracts, the Department of Energy, and its two nuclear weapons complex offices, still has work to do, a congressional watchdog agency said in a Thursday report.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said DOE, its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its Office of Environmental Management must do a better job on learning lessons and collecting data from past procurements.

The associate administrator for NNSA’s Office of Partnership and Acquisition Services should ensure NNSA offices “consistently document potential lessons learned,” from past acquisition planning, GAO said in the report.

As for the Environmental Management office, it should “implement procedures to consistently record information on canceled solicitations,” GAO said in the report.

“Aspects of DOE’s acquisition process have been on GAO’s High-Risk List since 1990,” GAO said in the report. “Congressional committees and industry have raised questions about the prolonged nature of some DOE acquisitions and abrupt cancellations of multibillion-dollar contract awards.”

In 2019, GAO narrowed its focus on NNSA and Environmental Management contracting to deals valued at $750-million or more, GAO said in a footnote.

DOE’s Acquisition Guide stipulates the department’s Source Evaluation Boards should document lessons learned on contracts of $25 million or more and submit this data to DOE’s Office of Acquisition Management. But GAO said this data was missing in six of the contracts it evaluated for the report.

Some of the biggest contracts for DOE’s weapons complex have experienced stops, starts and do-overs in recent years, and DOE should do a better job of documenting what happened, GAO said.

In particular, management contract awards for the NNSA’s Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge Tennessee have had a chaotic history, with a combined management contract being issued for both sites in November 2021 but then scrapped. On the heels of a bid protest, DOE terminated the combined contract and elected instead to procure separate operations and management contracts for the sites.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Management office’s approach to the liquid waste contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the tank closure contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state have also experienced awards, bid protests and cancellation or termination of the initial awards, GAO said in the report.

“Officials confirmed that these procurements were not included in the data” for DOE’s tracking system, GAO said.

DOE and NNSA concurred with all the recommendations and pledged to fix the NNSA and Environmental Management shortcomings by September 2025.