Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
2/28/2014
An interim report from the Congressionally established panel examining governance options for the National Nuclear Security Administration is expected to be completed in late March when members of the panel are set to testify before the House Armed Services Committee on their initial findings, study co-chairman Norm Augustine told NS&D Monitor this week. Augustine, the former Lockheed Martin CEO; and co-chairman Richard Mies, the former Strategic Command chief, will testify before the committee March 26, providing an overview of the panel’s work thus far. The panel has visited various sites around the weapons complex and heard from dozens of weapons complex officials since formally beginning its work in the fall. Augustine said the report will largely be a “status document” because the panel has been in information- gathering mode for several months.
Congress, however, pushed an ambitious schedule for the panel, which was delayed getting off the ground last year because of funding issues. The panel didn’t hold its first meeting until September, but Congress was eager to see an interim report to help inform debate on the Fiscal Year 2015 Defense Authorization Act. A final report is due July 1.
An Ambitious Task
The 12-member panel was created to provide guidance to Congress on the path forward for the NNSA, which has been besieged by a bevy of issues over the last few years that include security lapses and cost overruns on major projects. The panel is expected to make recommendations on revising the governance structure of the agency, and the relationship between the labs and the agency is expected to be among the panel’s most pressing issues. In 2012, a National Academy of Sciences panel described the relationship between the NNSA and its labs as “broken” and “dysfunctional.”
The creation of the panel in the Fiscal Year 2013 Defense Authorization Act was viewed as a bipartisan compromise between House Republicans and Senate Democrats, who were at odds over House-passed NNSA reform measures in the authorization bill. The House-drafted reform provisions would have increased the autonomy of the NNSA while streamlining directives and regulations, eliminating oversight from DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security and moving the agency toward performance- based oversight. Those provisions ran into opposition from labor unions, the Administration, Senate Democrats, and even Republican leadership on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and in the end, most were stripped from the bill in favor of the creation of the panel, which is expected to make recommendations on revising the governance structure of the agency.
The Panel’s Makeup
In addition to Augustine and Mies, the Congressionally picked panel consists of a wide variety of former officials with ties to the weapons complex, including four retired lawmakers: New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson ®, South Carolina lawmaker John Spratt (D), California lawmaker Ellen Tauscher (D), and Ohio lawmaker David Hobson ®. Also included on the panel are former NNSA Naval Reactors chief Adm. Kirkland Donald, former Bush Administration national security expert Frank Miller, former Reagan Administration Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology William Schneider, former Deputy Energy Secretary T.J. Glauthier, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Greg Jaczko, and former Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Mike Anastasio.
