Members of Congress and the chairmen of a congressional advisory panel on governance of the nuclear security enterprise on Wednesday mulled reintegrating the operations of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) fully into the Department of Energy (DOE).
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said at a panel hearing, “NNSA governance reform, at least as it has been implemented, has failed to provide the effective mission-focused enterprise that Congress intended.” He was referring to the conclusion drawn in an April 2014 congressionally mandated report on governance in the nuclear security enterprise.
Murphy said that after the NNSA was created in 1999, “the new agency did not improve oversight or accountability. Problems persisted – billion-dollar cost overruns; delayed and cancelled projects; deferred maintenance; serious safety and security mishaps; and oversight failures at the Department, site office, and contractor level – all documented in this committee’s oversight.”
The case of Wen Ho Lee, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, was mentioned as an example of these failures. In 1999 Lee was accused of sharing information on the U.S. nuclear arsenal with China, but eventually received $1.6 million from the U.S. government in a settlement after he was convicted in a plea deal only of improperly retaining restricted data. Also mentioned in the hearing was the 2012 breach at the Y-12 National Security Complex by a nun and two anti-nuclear activists who vandalized the outer walls of the site’s Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.
Subcommittee Ranking Member Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) agreed that the creation of the NNSA as a semiautonomous DOE agency led to cultural and organizational problems that show “the current structure of NNSA is not working.”
Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin and co-chairman of the panel that released the report, said at the hearing that much of the NNSA has been “highly inefficient” and “poorly managed” for years and that part of the solution is to merge the agency back into the DOE and place the nuclear enterprise mission under the supervision and guidance of a qualified secretary. “The best option we can see is to make it part of DOE, put DOE in charge, [and] put a leader in there that understands nuclear matters,” Augustine said. The next best option, he said, would be to make the NNSA a completely independent agency. However, that would be a “very inferior second-best option,” he said.
Richard Mies, former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command and co-chairman of the panel, agreed that the most appropriate leadership structure would include a Cabinet secretary to set policy and an operational director to implement it. The panel, he said, recommended “[replacing] the separately organized NNSA with a new office, an office of nuclear security within the DOE.” Mies added that the new management structure would need to codify roles and responsibilities across DOE to eliminate staffing redundancies between the department and the NNSA.
Mies also highlighted ongoing problems in the federal-contractor relationship, saying that “mutual trust that has historically existed has eroded over the past decade to an arms-length, customer-to-contractor, and occasionally adversarial relationship.” He criticized inefficiencies in the evaluation of award fees, as “there is a whole body of federal oversight people who are responsible for . . . grading how the M&O contractor is performing to earn that award fee,” a process that “has become very wasteful and ineffective” because it focuses more on contract compliance than on mission execution. He recommended instead turning to fixed-fee contracts with the operators of the NNSA sites.
Mies noted that most of the problems the panel identified with the NNSA “are cultural, not organizational,” and that further reforms are necessary to address “the fundamental problems of the very risk-averse and entrenched bureaucracy.”
The creation of the NNSA followed security lapses in the nuclear weapons complex and was meant to improve management of nuclear weapons research and production. A series of hearings in 1999 highlighted problems with defense against insider threats, tracking of special nuclear materials, and classified information protection. Lawmakers at the time pointed to a historical pattern in which “internal Department criticism on security matters either gets dismissed or white-washed until some event crystalizes public attention—which in turn leads to a flurry of reform initiatives that sound great in theory but falter against the reality of the DOE bureaucracy. And once public attention has shifted to some other topic . . . the Department returns to business as usual.”
