Lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee continued to push back against attempts at decreasing oversight of the National Nuclear Security Administration in the wake of last summer’s Y-12 National Security Complex security breach, suggesting at a hearing yesterday that more, and not less, oversight is necessary for the weapons complex. Democrats and Republicans on the committee also suggested that efforts during the Obama Administration to streamline DOE oversight and an overreliance on contractor assurance systems had contributed to a culture that allowed three elderly peace activists to penetrate the most secure areas of Y-12 last July. “This, perhaps, is the most incomprehensible aspect of this troubling situation. It appears that due to a hands-off federal contracting policy, we had ineffective federal security oversight at Y-12 and potentially at other sites around the complex,” Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), the chairman of the subcommittee, said at the hearing, adding: “It appears the department instituted reforms that actually may have exacerbated the deficiencies, turning eyes-on, hands-off to eyes-closed, hands-off.”
The subcommittee’s interest in increasing oversight across the weapons complex stands in stark contrast to NNSA reform efforts championed by the House Armed Services Committee, which last year drafted language in the House version of the Defense Authorization Act that would’ve increased the autonomy of the agency while stripping DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security of its oversight of the agency in an effort to increase productivity and efficiency. “The assessments made after the Y-12 incident show that the problem is not too much DOE oversight; it’s too little,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said. “The problem is that contractors didn’t take their responsibilities to the government or their workers seriously, that federal employees failed to exercise appropriate authority over their contractor counterparts, and that NNSA’s culture didn’t adequately focus on security.”
In response, Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman said the Department was distancing itself from an oversight approach that had been described as “eyes on, hands off” by NNSA officials prior to the security breach. “I think it’s a terrible thing that anyone ever thought that that made sense or was the policy of the department. It’s absolutely the wrong way to think about it,” Poneman said. “We have tried, and we will continue—because you can’t repeat these messages often enough—to be very, very clear that the federal oversight is critical and it needs to be active and performance based, and it cannot be eyes on, hands off. That would never work.”
