March 17, 2014

IG PUSHES DOE ON BROAD RE-EVALUATION OF CLEANUP WORK, AUTONOMY OF NNSA

By ExchangeMonitor

In response to budget concerns, the Department of Energy Inspector General is recommending that DOE re-evaluate its complex-wide cleanup strategy to focus only on “high risk, high priority” activities. In its annual report on management challenges facing DOE, issued yesterday, the IG questioned the Department’s current approach of making cleanup-related decisions based on regulatory agreements, which can contain a variety of milestones. “Modifying these agreements would be a very costly and time-consuming process and would, understandably, be extremely unpopular with a variety of constituencies. However, the current strategy may not be sustainable if the Department’s remediation budget suffers major reductions,” the report says.

Instead, the IG said DOE should look to fund “only high risk activities that threaten health and safety or further environmental degradation.” The report notes, “To ensure that risk drives funding choices and priorities rather than potential local or regional influences, the Department should retain a respected outside group, such as the National Academy of Sciences, to rank and rate, on a national, complex-wide risk/.priority basis the Department’s environmental remediation requirements.”

The IG also calls on DOE to consider the cost savings of re-integrating the semi-autonomous NNSA back into DOE, a change the report acknowledges would require legislation. “The separation was intended to allow NNSA to concentrate on its defense-related mission, free of other bureaucratic distractions,” the report notes. “As a result, NNSA maintains a costly set of distinctly separate overhead and indirect cost operations that often duplicate existing Departmental functions.” The report recommends DOE use an ongoing National Academy of Sciences study of the management of NNSA’s weapons labs as a jumping off point to examine the savings that could be achieved by re-integrating NNSA. “We know of no other time in recent memory when there was such a broad and bipartisan consensus concerning the need to reduce Federal spending and address the Nation’s mounting debt. While the elements of various budget reduction plans under consideration differ on key details, dramatic change appears likely, and the impact on the Department’s operations could be equally dramatic,” the report says.

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