Nuclear Watch New Mexico on Thursday said it had filed another Freedom of Information Act request aimed at getting the National Nuclear Security Administration to release fiscal 2015 performance evaluation reports (PERs) for the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.
As the nuclear weapons agency has not responded to a FOIA request on Dec. 22, 2015 to make the documents public, the watchdog organization said in a press release it is “demanding expedited processing and posting of these reports to an electronic FOIA reading room, as required by the 1996 E-FOIA amendments.”
Along with investigations conducted by Department of Energy branches such as the Office of Inspector General, the PERs offer the public an opportunity to see how DOE contractors are performing.
There have been some recent bumps for the NNSA’s facilities in New Mexico.
The Department of Energy last year said it would separate out the environmental management component of the LANL management contract after a nuclear waste container that originated at the lab was found to have caused the radiation release that closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. Lab manager Los Alamos National Security is currently conducting that EM work under a bridge contract, while its overall management contract will expire in September 2017.
The Sandia National Laboratories contract, meanwhile, is being put to bid after managing contractor Sandia Corp., a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, was found to have lobbied federal officials for a contract extension using federal contract funding, in violation of U.S. regulations. The current contract is due to expire in April 2017.
Nuclear Watch said the DOE’s semiautonomous nuclear weapons agency started withholding the PERs from public view in 2009. The organization’s request to the Department of Energy’s Office of Hearings and Appeals for access was dismissed on the basis that the reports held proprietary information. The organization ultimately sued to obtain the fiscal 2011 reports for the eight NNSA sites; the agency quickly began releasing those and then voluntarily released site PERs for the following three budget years, according to the press release. However, the NNSA has yet to make public its reports for fiscal 2015, which ended on Sept. 30 of last year.
“It is unconscionable that the National Nuclear Security Administration withholds information from the American taxpayer on how fat contractors who constantly bust budgets are paid, especially when these same contractors always have their hands out for yet more taxpayer money for nuclear weapons forever,” Nuclear Watch New Mexico Executive Director Jay Coghlan said in the release. “The question is, what do NNSA and its contractors have to hide? To answer that, Nuclear Watch will not only demand that the Performance Evaluation Report be publicly released, but that from this point on the reports be automatically posted to an electronic FOIA reading room as the law requires. The American taxpayer should not have to fight this battle year after year just to keep greedy nuclear weapons contractors accountable.”
A NNSA spokeswoman at LANL on Thursday referred questions on the matter to agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., where Shelley Laver, deputy director of public affairs, stated by email: “I don’t have any new information on the release of the PERs. Once the process has been completed, we will publish the evaluations.”
Laver in mid-March said she hoped the PERs would be released in a matter of weeks.
