For four years and through two presidential administrations, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) failed to supply Congress with an adequate plan to verify and monitor global proliferation of nuclear weapons, weapon components, and fissile materials, the Government Accountability Office reported this week.
Congress set the agency up for this public slap on the wrist in a bill report appended to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In the report, lawmakers ordered the GAO to report publicly on a pair of classified nonproliferation plans the NNSA submitted to Congress in 2015 and 2017, and which Congress subsequently spurned as inadequate.
The NNSA plans “failed to answer the congressional requirements, and instead provided only a brief summary of the National Security Council structure and processes,” lawmakers wrote in the NDAA report.
The Government Accountability Office expounded upon that sentiment Monday in an 11-page, unclassified report. The office completed, but did not publish, a classified version of the document in March.
Among other things, the NNSA plan was to estimate how much it would cost to verify and monitor weapons proliferation over 10 years, the 2018 NDAA report says. The agency was also supposed to create a road map that defined the roles and funding requirements for other U.S. agencies, including the military, that would be involved with these decade-long nonproliferation efforts.
Monday’s Government Accountability Office report did not include any feedback from the NNSA. In the 2018 NDAA report, lawmakers ordered the NNSA to produce a third version of the classified nonproliferation plan, which the semiautonomous Department of Energy weapons steward supplied to 10 different congressional committees in April, according to the GAO report.
The office said it is reviewing NNSA’s April report, but did not say when or if it would publish an unclassified summary of this review.
