Mike Nartker
NS&D Monitor
5/23/2014

Despite White House opposition, the House approved a measure late this week that would significantly lower the maximum number of employees at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. The House version of the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act would cut the maximum number of employees the DNFSB has to 120 full-time employees beginning Oct. 1, 2015. Currently, the Board has an employee limit of 150 employees, and is set to have a total of 120 employees by the end of this fiscal year.
            
The House measure comes as the DNFSB is seeking additional money in FY 2015 to add additional staff. In its budget request for next year, the Board is seeking $30.15 million, an increase of approximately $2 million from current funding levels, with the additional money to go toward hiring five additional full-time equivalents to bring the Board’s staff to 125. Notably, the House bill would authorize a funding level matching the Board’s request. In a statement of Administration Policy issued earlier this week, the White House opposed the provision lowering the number of employees the Board can have. “This provision would severely hamper the ability of the Board to provide  external, independent oversight of DOE’s defense nuclear facilities and compromise its core  mission to protect workers and the public,” the White House said.

The Board said in its request that the additional funding and staff are needed to “to address congressional concerns and provide the scientific and technical resources needed to review DOE’s design and construction projects, remediation activities, and weapons programs in a timely and efficient manner.” The request states, “The cost of re-engineering and making post-construction safety modifications to complex DOE defense nuclear facilities due to the late identification of significant design flaws would require significantly more resources than the Board’s requested budget. When incomplete or incorrect safety features are identified late in the design stage (or worse, in the construction stage) project costs are increased and schedules are delayed.”