Members of Congress and the chairmen of a congressional advisory panel on the 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.” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), ranking member of the subcommittee, agreed that the creation of the NNSA as a semiautonomous DOE agency in 1999 led to culture and organizational problems that show “the current structure of NNSA is not working.”
Norman Augustine, former chairman and 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 reintegrate 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 the DOE to eliminate staffing redundancies between the department and the NNSA. He also 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.”
