The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should serve a fixed term, a National Academies panel said this week in an interim report on a four-and-a-half-year study into nuclear security governance.
The National Academies panel did not say how long the NNSA administrator should serve. However, the group did cite the findings of a separate study on nuclear governance published in 2014 — the oft-cited-in-Washington Augustine-Mies report — that called for a six-year fixed term for the federal bureaucracy’s highest-ranking nuclear weapons official.
Such a change might “minimize gaps between confirmed Administrators … by reducing the chance of those transitions occurring during the months following a Presidential Inauguration, when substantial delays are most likely to occur,” the Panel to Track and Assess Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise wrote in Tuesday’s report.
The transition to the Donald Trump administration from the Barack Obama administration was not particularly rough for the NNSA. Frank Klotz, the last Obama-appointed agency administrator, served in the Trump administration for about a year. Klotz resigned about a month before Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was sworn in as his successor. Steven Erhart, a career civil servant, was the stopgap between the latest two confirmed NNSA leaders.
The average tenure of an NNSA administrator over the last two decades has been just over three-and-a-half years, according to the National Academies.
Congress, in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, directed the National Academies to spend four-and-a-half years studying the NNSA bureaucracy. This is the fourth interim report in the study, which is slated to wrap up later this year. Previous interim reports urged the NNSA administrator to write a comprehensive framework for agency governance, which Gordon-Hagerty subsequently did in 2019.
The panel behind the NNSA study is part of the Washington-based, congressionally chartered Academies’ Laboratory Assessments Board within the Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences. Congress authorized the group in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.
Jonathan Breul, a former senior adviser to the deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, co-chaired the panel with Donald Levy, the University of Chicago chemist who ran the Argonne National Laboratory for about a decade starting in the mid-2000s.
Congress created the NNSA 20 years ago, and the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s managerial structure remains to this day a pet topic for some policy wonks and policy makers. The NNSA administrator can, subject to objection from the secretary of energy, generally set policy for the nuclear weapons complex as he or she sees fit. The NNSA’s administrative, legal, and external relations teams are also separate from what agency insiders sometimes call “big DOE.”
So far, the National Academies has not recommended, as the Augustine-Mies team did, reabsorbing the NNSA into the broader DOE and rebranding the parent agency to clarify the size and scope of its nuclear security responsibilities. Roughly half of the Energy Department’s annual budget is funneled into the NNSA.
In budget hearings this year, some lawmakers asked current NNSA Administrator Lisa-Gordon Hagerty whether the agency should remain semiautonomous within DOE, or be moved to the Department of Defense.
Gordon-Hagerty said the agency is fine where it is, without discussing her reasoning.
