The No. 2 official at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this week briefed members of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board on the “staggering goal” of swelling the nuclear-weapon steward’s workforce by about 20,000 heads over the next six years.
Those hirings, mostly of contractors, would be spread across the NNSA complex, including its national laboratories and other sites.
“[W]e’re going to have to go through a major infrastructure modernization process,” William Bookless, NNSA principal deputy administrator, told the 16-member board Wednesday in a webcast presentation from Chicago. “For many of the things we do, there is no industrial base. We are the industrial base.”
In round numbers, Bookless said the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency has about 41,000 employees and contractors “working on the NNSA mission today.” As with the rest of the government, only a small fraction of those are federal employees.
“On the federal side, we only have about 1,800 federal employees that do oversight on this whole program,” Bookless said. “We’re going to have to add 400 more by 2025 to that federal workforce. Currently, 20% of our workforce is eligible to retire, and by 2025 40% will be eligible to retire.”
Bookless’ overall hiring headcount includes short-term contract employees, such as those needed for current and planned construction projects across the to-be-rebooted nuclear enterprise. Planned upgrades over the next 30 years, include upgrades and additions to NNSA facilities that process uranium, plutonium, tritium, and lithium.
Within that window, in the mid-2040s, the NNSA also expects to need more unobligated low-enriched uranium — the sort that doesn’t carry peaceful-use restrictions as spot-market uranium does — to create tritium in nuclear reactors. That could mean construction of a new domestic enrichment facility.
More immediately, the NNSA plans to start work in this fiscal year on a proposed two-state complex to produce plutonium pits — nuclear-weapon cores — suitable for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads. Congress, in dueling appropriations and authorizations bills, was still fighting about whether to approve that plan even as Bookless spoke this week.
The two-state solution involves upgrade to pit infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, along with conversion of the partially build Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina into a new and much larger pit factory than the one Los Alamos will get.
Bookless offered his comments about the NNSA’s “industrial base” only a week after Charles Verdon, head of the Defense Programs Office at NNSA headquarters in Washington, D.C., told lawmakers the agency is considering whether to reduce its reliance on outside vendors and manufacture more nuclear-weapon components in-house, as its parent and predecessor agencies did during the Cold War.
Verdon testified last week before a House Armed Services Committee panel about costly delays to a pair of weapon life-extension programs, the cause of which are commercial electrical components deemed not durable enough for decades of service in the deployed arsenal.
Bookless also told the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board on Wednesday that the NNSA is doing something different as it prepares its budget request for the 2021 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, 2020.
“One thing that we’ve done this year that is a market change from past practices is that we’ve included our our labs, plants, and sites in the development of our 2021 budget submission,” Bookless said. “So we are explicitly including their understanding of what is executable and what is needed.”
The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1. The White House typically publishes its budget request for the next fiscal year in February, though it is routinely late. After the budget request goes public, agencies privately begin planning the request for the budget year after that.
Usually, an agency hands over the first draft of its budget request to the White House Office of Management and Budget around Labor Day, so the 2021 budget Bookless discussed might already have left Department of Energy headquarters.
Also speaking to the board on Wednesday, Dan Brouillette, the deputy secretary of energy slated to take over the agency following Secretary Rick Perry’s reported departure in November, said DOE is still asking House Democrats to back down from their plan to give the NNSA less money than the White House requested for 2020.
In an appropriations bill that passed the House this summer, the lower chamber approved $16 billion for the NNSA: 4% lower than requested, but a roughly 4.5% raise from current funding. The House preferred to fund the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, the part of the agency responsible for cleaning up nuclear-weapon sites, at a higher-than-requested level. The NNSA is the bill-payer, in the House’s preferred scenario.
“We’re going to be working closely with the House to try and turn that around a bit and let them understand the importance of … the weapons program,” Brouillette told the committee.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved more 2020 funding than requested for both the NNSA and the Environmental Management office: about $17 billion and $7.5 billion, respectively. However, the full Senate has yet to vote on its version of DOE’s 2020 budget, which the upper chamber’s Appropriations Committee approved in mid-September. Fiscal 2020 began Tuesday; the federal government is operating on a stopgap budget through Nov. 21 while Congress attempts to finalize spending levels for the coming year.
Last week, Perry added eight new members to the Secretary of Energy advisory panel, including a former executive with the online matchmaking service Tinder, a former whiskey executive, and the president of the California Institute of Technology. The board provides independent advice about program management and execution to the energy secretary.
The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board met days after a White House deadline for agencies including DOE to close at least a third of their federal advisory committees. That indicates the DOE-chartered group evidently survived the purge. A DOE spokesperson did not reply this week to a request for comment about which committees got cut.
