NCSP RAISES CONCERNS ABOUT SECURITY IMPACT OF NNSA REFORM

Most of the concerns raised by unions about NNSA reform provisions in the House version of the Fiscal Year 2013 Defense Authorization Act have been centered on safety oversight, but the National Council of Security Police weighed in on the legislation late last week over its impact to security oversight. In addition to increasing the autonomy of the agency and altering the role of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the bill eliminates the Department of Energy Office of Health, Safety and Security’s oversight role with the agency and moves the agency toward performance-based oversight. “The way we read the draft bill it cripples the ability of HSS to positively influence security in the nuclear weapons complex and it also drastically cuts the ability of the NNSA Administrator’s security staff to manage how the site operations contractors implement security,” Randy Lawson, the president of the NCSP, said in a May 17 letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The NCSP is the umbrella organization representing protective force unions across the weapons complex, with about 4,000 members.
 
Lawson said the NCSP didn’t agree with the House Armed Services Committee’s interpretation of HSS oversight and transaction-based oversight as micromanagement. “We see their role as ensuring that security isn’t compromised by the short sightedness of the operations contractors, who under the HASC bill would apparently be empowered to call most of the shots,” Lawson wrote. He said in his letter that the NCSP was “deeply concerned” with the potential changes. “Our members protect nuclear weapons and materials. We know that terrorists would like to attack what we protect, but we also know that the strength of our security and the dedication of our members have always provided a strong deterrent to such attacks,” Lawson wrote. “Those of us who have been around for many years have seen security watered down before, for example in the 1990s and it always started like this. If the HASC language becomes law, we are afraid that we will find ourselves going through this all over again.”