The heads of the Department of Energy’s multibillion-dollar nuclear arms and cleanup programs are slated to testify Wednesday in a Senate hearing that could shift the course of the weapons complex policies Congress writes into this year’s annual defense authorization bill.
The witness list includes Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who was confirmed last month as head of DOE’s $13-billion-a-year National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and James Owendoff, currently the top official at the agency’s $6.5-billion-a-year Office of Environmental Management.
The NNSA is the steward of the U.S. nuclear weapons, while EM oversees remediation of sites used during the Cold War arms race.
The two agency bigwigs are headed to the Senate Armed Services Committee strategic forces subcommittee at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday. Also scheduled to testify are David Trimble, director of the Government Accountability Office’s natural resources and environment branch, and Navy Adm. James Caldwell, who heads the NNSA’s Naval Reactors Office.
In the hearing, Gordon-Hagerty and Owendoff will face questions, suggestions, and perhaps outright demands from senators about the policies Congress should write into law as part of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act: the annual defense policy bill that lays out lawmakers’ vision for defense programs, including the civilian-run nuclear work managed by the Department of Energy.
The bill does not provide the funding for these programs. Rather, it lays out policy guidelines and spending ceilings for appropriations committees that do. It can be a powerful lever for shifting the course of an agency’s procurement strategy.
Gordon-Hagerty could face questions on the NNSA’s plans to shift production of plutonium pits — fissile nuclear-weapon cores — to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Owendoff might get an earful about cost and schedule overruns at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. Hanford is the largest and most expensive legacy nuclear cleanup in the country and has been bedevilled by difficulties building the Waste Treatment Plant: a planned facility for solidifying more than 55 million gallons of liquid waste left over from Cold War plutonium production. Hanford has also generated some bad publicity recently with the spread of radioactive contamination from demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
