The Government Accountability Office said the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should draft tighter life-cycle cost and schedule estimates for its nonproliferation programs: something the Energy Department’s semiautonomous nuclear-weapon agency said is difficult to do, given the nature of the work.
The NNSA should “require DNN [Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation] programs and subprograms to follow life-cycle program management, such as requiring life-cycle estimates and measuring against baselines,” Congress’ investigative arm said in a report published Thursday.
The GAO noted the NNSA does provide partial cost and schedule estimates for its nonproliferation programs, but that it does not typically estimate how much a program will cost and how long it will take to complete.
NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz neither agreed nor disagreed with the recommendation, but said it is inherently difficult to estimate total costs and schedules for the Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation operations, in part because this work requires so much cooperation with foreign governments.
In short, Klotz said, trying to create an exact life-cycle cost estimate for these programs might be more trouble than it is worth.
“The majority of international activities … operate with an unusually high level of uncertainty that would inherently result in range estimates so broad as to provide no appreciable benefit from expending resources on such calculations,” Klotz wrote in a Sept. 14 reply to the GAO’s then-unpublished report.
The NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation office “addresses the entire nuclear threat spectrum by preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons or weapons-usable materials, countering efforts of state sponsors of terrorism or terrorists to acquire such weapons or materials, and responding to nuclear or radiological incidents,” according to the agency’s fiscal 2018 budget request.
For fiscal 2018, the White House proposed cutting NNSA’s nonproliferation funding by 4.75 percent to about $1.8 billion. A House appropriations bill approved in August proposed an even steeper cut, while Senate appropriators have approved only about a 2-percent reduction for the budget year starting Oct. 1.
