Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
6/13/2014
New National Nuclear Security Administration head Frank Klotz said this week that he “categorically rejects” the interim findings of a Congressionally mandated panel on governance of the nuclear enterprise that concluded the creation of the semi-autonomous agency was a “failed experiment.” Speaking June 10 at an Energy Facilities Contractors Group meeting in Washington, D.C., Klotz said the conclusion was detrimental to recruiting efforts across the weapons complex and credited the agency’s Stockpile Stewardship Program for helping to successfully maintain the nation’s nuclear arsenal and its nonproliferation program for spearheading efforts to secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the world. “It’s a heck of a statement to make publicly if you’re concerned, as we all must be, about recruiting top talent. After all, very few people have a desire to join a failed outfit,” Klotz said, later adding that he felt the statement was “belied” by the facts. “The Stockpile Stewardship Program continues to deliver tangible results from the combined use of our leading edge computational and experimental tools. It is often said, and I believe it, that our level of understanding of how nuclear weapons work is far greater today than when we were conducting nuclear explosive testing,” Klotz said.
The NNSA has been beset by massive cost overruns on major projects and safety and security lapses that have sapped its credibility with Congress, leading to the creation of the NNSA governance advisory panel. Klotz acknowledged that the agency has had its share of problems, but he noted that Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz had taken early steps to shore up security across the Department and realign the Office of Health, Safety and Security. “There are a number of areas where there may be some overlapping responsibilities within NNSA headquarters and within the complex as a whole,” he said. “This overlapping responsibility can lead to confusion about who has responsibility, who has the authority for taking actions. … We’ll be placing a great deal of emphasis on this.”
Klotz to Wait on Organizational Changes
Klotz, however, said he had no plans to make any immediate organizational changes, choosing instead to better understand the agency and receive feedback from the governance panel and other studies taking place before taking action. “My sense is it’s incumbent on any new leadership to first begin to understand how a new organization is working,” he said. “We can all take a look at the wiring diagram for NNSA … but we all know the reality is the published wiring diagram does not always reflect the real wiring diagram. I need to have a better understanding of that before we press forward.”
He also said input from the governance panel and other ongoing studies would impact his decisions. “There will be a number of recommendations coming from the Congressionally mandated panel as well as other initiatives from the National Academy of Sciences and elsewhere that have been launched that speak to governance of NNSA,” he said. “We also wanted to be informed by the insights that are provided by those efforts.”
Rogers Confident Klotz Will ‘Be Bold’
The top Republican on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee responded to Klotz’s comments during a speech at the Capitol Hill Club this week by saying he is still expecting major changes to the agency. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said he was not surprised by Klotz’s comments defending the agency against interim findings from the Congressional advisory panel on governance of the nuclear enterprise, but he said he was confident Klotz would not shy away from taking action in an attempt to fix the agency. “You don’t go in there as the new guy running the place saying it’s already gone to heck,” Rogers said.
In comments to NS&D Monitor after his speech, Rogers said his dealings with Klotz made him optimistic. Rogers earlier this year implored governance panel co-chairs Norm Augustine and Richard Mies to “be bold” in its recommendations. “From my conversations with him, he is going to be very receptive to what the advisory committee recommends,” he said. “While I think he’s trying to be a leader and keep his workforce thinking positive and optimistic, I think you’re going to see him do big, bold things. [Rep.] Jim Cooper [D-Tenn.] and I spent a lot of time with him. He’s a smart guy, very capable. I don’t think he’s going to be limiting himself to the easy.”
Panel Co-Chair: ‘Failed Experiment’ Reference a ‘Mischaracterization’
Mies, the former U.S. Strategic Command chief, also responded to Klotz’s comments during a separate speech at the EFCOG meeting, calling the reference to NNSA as a “failed experiment” a “mischaracterization” of the panel’s interim findings. “That was not what our report really said or intended to say,” Mies said. “What we said was it was a failed experiment in governance reform in that the NNSA Act which created NNSA, the implementation of that act, never achieved what it was intended to. … We acknowledged there were a lot of significant world class achievements within NNSA and we don’t want to diminish or not recognize those attributes.”
He said the panel’s final report, due in July, would seek to “reset” the issue. “Both Norm and I have talked personally to the Secretary, we’ve talked to Gen. Klotz to clarify; I think they understand where the panel is coming from,” Mies said. “The problem I can’t control is how the media treats some of these things and how they latch onto just sound bites and take things maybe out of context. I think the report to some degree is balanced in that we do try to highlight a number of successes without spending an undue amount of time on it and point out that it’s not a failed experiment totally in operations, it’s a failed experiment in governance reform, which is what we’re focusing on. The [NNSA] Act did not achieve what it intended to achieve.”
During testimony before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee earlier this year, Augustine and Mies did not hold back in criticizing the agency. Mies said the NNSA governance model is “fundamentally flawed” and Augustine said the agency “has lost credibility and the trust of the national leadership and customers in DoD that it can deliver weapons and critical nuclear facilities on schedule and on budget. Simply stated, there is no plan for success with available resources. NNSA is on a trajectory toward crisis unless strong leadership arrests the current course and reorients its governance to better focus on mission priorities and deliverables.”
Mies Emphasizes Culture as Biggest Necessary Change
Mies acknowledged this week that NNSA has “some obvious hurdles to overcome both on the Congressional side, the OMB side, outside of DOE,” noting that the biggest change that has to happen in NNSA is “cultural.” Such a change, he said, would “enable DOE to engender more trust which I think is the element that has really handicapped DOE in their relationships with their customers and their stakeholders and particularly the Congress. To rebuild that trust I think takes time and long-term commitment.”
Mies, who declined to address the panel’s potential recommendations, noted that its work comes on the heels of “roughly 50” reports over the last decade examining the nuclear enterprise, but he said new leadership in DOE and NNSA gave him confidence that progress addressing the NNSA’s issues could be made. “You’re always optimistic but I think the end result will rest with the people who have to really implement the study and take it on,” he said. “The one reason I’m probably more optimistic than I may have been in other periods of time is I think we have a Secretary [of Energy Ernest Moniz] who really understands and cares about the mission as well as a director who really cares and understands about the mission. I think they’re both knowledgeable and motivated to make some bold changes.”
