The Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday reported out two nominations to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) via voice vote.
The nominations of serving DNFSB member Joyce Connery and new nominee Thomas Summers now advance to the full Senate, which had not scheduled a floor vote at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Connery joined the board in August 2015 after being nominated by then-President Barack Obama, serving as DNFSB chair from August 2015 until January 2017. Connery previously worked for the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration and served two stints at the White House National Security Council, most recently as director of national energy policy from 2012 to 2015. If confirmed by the full Senate, Connery would serve a term ending Oct. 18, 2024. Her current term expired last October.
Summers, a former vice commander of the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, has been nominated for a full term ending Oct. 18, 2025. He is already waiting for a Senate floor vote to serve out the remainder of a board term that would expire on Oct. 18 of this year.
Both Summers and Connery were formally nominated by President Donald Trump on May 4.
The DNFSB is an independent health-and-safety watchdog for DOE defense nuclear sites, with about 100 employees and an annual budget of $30 million. While the agency has no actual regulatory power, it makes health and safety recommendations to which the secretary of energy must accept or reject.
The DNFSB has up to five members who serve staggered five-year terms. In addition to Connery, other current members of DNFSB are Chairman Bruce Hamilton and Jessie Hill Roberson, who have been nominated for terms expiring in October 2022 and 2023, respectively.
Lisa Vickers, a facility representative for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration Production Office at the Pantex Plant in Texas, was nominated to the DNFSB in January 2019. However, her nomination never made it out of Senate Armed Services. This past January, the panel returned the nomination the White House. She has not been renominated.
In January 2019, the White House proposed shaking up board membership, including adding two new members and pushing out then-member Daniel Santos, who resigned in March of that year. Congress also changed federal law last year to stop the longstanding DNFSB practice of allowing members to continue to serve after their terms expire.
