KYL SUGGESTS PENTAGON COULD BE BEST PLACE FOR NNSA AUTONOMY

Former Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, who retired from the Senate earlier this year, suggested yesterday that the National Nuclear Security Administration needs more autonomy to better do its job, and he argued that freedom could come by shifting NNSA under the Pentagon. Before he left the Senate, Kyl helped author legislation that created a 12-member NNSA governance panel that will make recommendations about the future of the agency, and after a speech at the Capitol Hill Club yesterday, Kyl said he believed it would be better if the NNSA could regain the autonomy that lawmakers initially intended for the agency when it was created more than a decade ago, but he said he doubted that could happen. “If you could get the leadership of DOE or the Administration straightened out as to the original intent, which was to have a truly independent entity, theoretically it could still work in DOE, but absent that I think it would be better probably as a part of DoD,” Kyl told NW&M Monitor.