New political leaders at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have tamped down on internal discord and improved the agency’s relationship with the Pentagon, but the Department of Energy nuclear weapons steward should appoint a senior executive to ensure progress does not end when those political leaders depart, the National Academies said in a new report.
NNSA Administator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, on the job for about a year as of February, “has worked toward healthier relationships with the Department of Defense (DOD) and with the rest of the Department of Energy,” according to the report published March 8, “Tracking and Assessing Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise.”
However, the “NNSA should quickly designate a senior executive as the accountable change management leader for the next few years,” the congressionally chartered group stated. “The change leader should drive management and governance reform with urgency and a cadence focused on mission success.” The report did not specify exactly who might qualify for the role.
Congress ordered the March 8 report in 2016 in reaction to the 2014 Augustine-Mies Panel on NNSA. The 2014 panel said the agency’s senior leadership had lost its focus on the nuclear-weapons mission, and that the NNSA bureaucracy and the contractors managing its national laboratories had a “dysfunctional” relationship.
In the middle of the decade, the new report reads, NNSA engaged only in a “transnational oversight” of weapons-lab contractors, from which agency headquarters in Washington was somewhat detached. Since the Donald Trump administration came into office, the report reads, the relationship between Washington and the labs has become healthier, driving what the report called “collaborative” oversight.
For military-NNSA relations, the National Academies report said that the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, published in February 2018, has given NNSA and the Pentagon a much-needed guiding star around which to rally.
Further improving inter-agency relations, the National Academies report said, is the NNSA’s “new Program Executive Office for weapons in Albuquerque, which works closely with DoD.”
Gordon-Hagerty got out ahead of the National Academies report last week in a webcast address from the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, during which she said the NNSA’s relationship with the Pentagon has never been stronger, and that she no longer distinguishes between the contractor and federal workforce.
