A House Armed Services Committee panel is worried the top executive post at the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management is becoming too much of a revolving door.
The strategic forces subcommittee on Sunday released its 56-page mark for the House’s 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The document calls for the Government Accountability Office to examine the amount of turnover at the top of the DOE nuclear cleanup office.
The subcommittee believes “instability in its [EM’s] leadership and organization structure” has limited the office’s ability to remediate 16 Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear-weapon sites.
Since 1991, the Office of Environmental Management has had nine different assistant secretaries and nine acting assistant secretaries or senior advisers. In the past five years, the average length of service for the top boss has been one year, the subcommittee said in the document. In addition, EM has been placed under four different DOE undersecretaries in the past 15 years.
The lawmakers want a GAO analysis regarding the extent to which has the Energy Department has provided EM with “sufficient capacity and ensured leadership stability to carry out its mission.”
The comptroller general, who leads the GAO, is instructed to brief the House Committee on Armed Services by Nov. 1, 2020, on preliminary findings.
A longtime federal manager, William (Ike) White has served as DOE senior adviser for environmental management since June 2019. He succeeded Anne Marie White, the last Senate-approved assistant secretary for environmental management, who resigned under pressure that month after only 14 months on the job. Anne White apparently displeased her boss, DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar, with her handling of a probe into potential radioactive contamination at a middle school outside the department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
The House NDAA mark does not cite an authorization figure for defense environmental cleanup, which is the largest bloc of funding for the Environmental Management office. The full figures for the House NDAA proposal are not expected until the full committee mark next week.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s NDAA seeks $5.1 billion in defense environmental cleanup funding for EM in fiscal 2021, down from the $5.6 billion authorized for defense environmental spending in the NDAA for fiscal 2020, which ends Sept. 30.
