The administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration should serve a fixed term, a National Academies panel said Monday 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 administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should serve, but the group did cite the findings of a separate study on nuclear governance published in 2014 — the oft-cited-in-Washington Augustine-Mies study — that called for a six-year, fixed term for 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.
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.
The panel 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 annual National Defense Authorization Act.
Jonathan Breul, a former deputy director of the White House Office of Management and budget, co-chaired the panel with Donald Levy, the University of Chicago PhD 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 semi-autonomous agency’s managerial structure remains to this day a pet topic for some policy wonks and policy makers. The Augustine-Mies report essentially recommended reabsorbing the NNSA into the broader DOE and rebranding the parent agency to clarify the size and scope of its nuclear security responsibilities — nearly half of the cabinet agency’s annual budget, before accounting for cleanup of legacy weapons production sites.
In Department of Energy and NNSA budget hearings this year, some lawmakers asked current NNSA Administrator Lisa-Gordon Hagerty whether NNSA should remain semi-autonomous within DOE, or be moved to the Department of Defense.
Gordon-Hagerty said the agency is fine where it is.
