In his farewell memo last week, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board Chairman Sean Sullivan suggested he lost the confidence of the 120 staff members of the independent safety watchdog he led for a year and wanted to disband.
“Our fine staff deserves to be led by an executive the staff believes in,” Sullivan, a board member since August 2012, wrote in a memo to staff circulated by email Friday. Weapons Complex Morning Briefing acquired the text of the memo. He said board Vice Chairman Bruce Hamilton, who will take over as chairman, “will be that executive” upon Sullivan’s formal resignation on Feb. 2.
A DNFSB spokesperson in Washington, D.C., confirmed Monday the text is authentic.
Even before President Donald Trump made him chairman last year, Sullivan often favored a soft touch — or no touch at all — when it came to DNFSB oversight of active and legacy Department of Energy defense nuclear sites. This often set him at odds with his four fellow board members, who have sometimes pushed for more involvement rather than less at DOE facilities.
When Sullivan became DNFSB chairmn, he took that approach to the extreme and advised that Congress dissolve the agency entirely, or fold it in a reduced scope into the Energy Department.
Congress has effectively shot down that proposal, authorizing the board to continue at roughly its usual annual funding of $30 million as part of the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law last year.
His farewell memo is not the first time Sullivan has discussed a lack of confidence in DNFSB leadership. The outgoing chairman cited that very problem as a motivation behind his December decision to install Katherine Herrera — a lawyer who was previously the board’s assistant general manager — as the DNFSB deputy technical director. In that position, Herrera helps manage about two-thirds of the DNFSB’s workforce.
