Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
11/21/2014
The Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise briefed Congress last week on its final recommendations and is putting the finishing touches on its report, NS&D Monitor has learned. The report was initially due in July, but delays in standing up the panel slowed its progress, though its chairmen, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine and retired Strategic Command chief Adm. Richard Mies, are believed to want to get the report out before Thanksgiving.
NS&D Monitor previously reported that the panel is preparing to call for the authority of the National Nuclear Security Administration to be strengthened within the Department of Energy as a potential fix for the agency’s woes. When it delivered its interim findings earlier this year, the 12-member panel was pointed in its criticism of NNSA, calling the creation of the semi-autonomous agency a “failed experiment,” but the panel is believed to have favored a more measured approach to revamping the agency’s governance structure rather than a more radical move out of the Department of Energy or to the Department of Defense.
In an interview with NS&D Monitor earlier this fall, Augustine said the group’s recommendations will come in three categories: specific fixes involving contracting and program management, cultural issues, and organizational questions. Augustine noted that Congress has emphasized the organizational questions. “We’ve said before that they’re not unimportant but they’re by far the least important in our opinion of the recommendations we’re going to make,” Augustine said. He said the recommendations involving cultural change at the agency were the “most difficult to deal with but often the most important.”
