WASHINGTON — The White House has someone in mind to fill a vacancy on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), the acting head of the independent nuclear-health-and-safety watchdog said in a public meeting here Thursday.
Acting Chairman Bruce Hamilton would not identify the potential nominee. The DNFSB has been without a fifth board member since February, when then-Chairman Sean Sullivan resigned after an ill-received proposal to dissolve the roughly $30-million a year agency, which makes safety recommendation for active and shuttered Department of Energy defense-nuclear sites.
The fifth member would have to be formally appointed by the White House, then approved by the Senate before joining the board. With only days left in the 115th session of Congress, there is little time to act on a nominee who has not yet even been reported to Capitol Hill. The 116th session that begins Jan. 3 might be a safer bet for action on that front.
Of the four sitting DNFSB members, one, Joyce Connery, is serving a term that expires in October 2019. The Donald Trump administration in October proposed keeping Hamilton and Jessie Hill Roberson on the board, and adding Lisa Vickers, a DOE site representative at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, as vice chair.
Add to that mix the mystery nominee, and current DNFSB member Daniel Santos, a Barack Obama appointee serving on an expired five-year term, is an odd man out.
Furthermore, Trump could in theory nominate someone who would be eligible to replace Connery as soon as Oct. 19, 2019, meaning the DNFSB next December might include only two of the people who sat on the board as of Friday. Alternatively, Connery could continue at the DNFSB for a while on an expired term, as members commonly do.
Hamilton dropped news of the incoming DNFSB nominee during an open board meeting convened to discuss a recently published National Academy of Public Administration report, which criticized the board for “underperforming” in its mission to protect the public from hazards at DOE nuclear sites. The report also said the board’s relationship with the Energy Department has fallen to “an all-time low.”
At Thursday’s meeting, all four board members agreed to respond to the report by bringing in what Connery called “outside help.” Where the help might come from will be decided later; the DNFSB has another meeting to discuss the academy report scheduled for Jan. 16.
However, the outside help will help the DNFSB do something it hasn’t before: personally involve the presidentially appointed board members in crafting a plan for improving board morale. In the past, Connery and Hamilton said, the DNFSB relied on full-time board employees to craft such plans. Some of those plans were never even presented to prior incarnations of the safety board.
Congress created the DNFSB in 1988. The board has no regulatory power over DOE, which is its own regulator at defense-nuclear sites. However, the board may make safety recommendations for active and closed nuclear sites — except naval nuclear reactor facilities — with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree.
The board has eight resident inspectors based nearby five DOE defense nuclear sites. These field personnel are aided regularly by Washington-based technical staff, who make up the bulk of the 100 or so heads at the agency.
In May, well before the academy report was released, the relationship between the DNFSB and DOE took a turn for the worse. That month, the Energy Department announced a new policy, Order 140.1., that would freeze the board out of some defense nuclear spaces, and limit interactions between DNFSB staff and DOE and its contractors. The DNFSB estimates the order could lock it out of 70 percent of the sites to which it now has access.
Even before the academy report threw the DNFSB’s problems into sharper relief, the board acknowledged something had to be done.
In August, by a margin of 3-1, DNFSB members voted to approve a proposal virtually identical to one hatched by Sullivan: cut full-time board employees to about 80 from roughly 100, and permanently station more DNFSB employees near DOE nuclear sites the board is empowered to inspect.
Congress blocked that plan in a fiscal 2019 spending bill, even though it was supported by all DNFSB members except for Connery. Connery chaired the DNFSB during the final Obama years and has said she would expand the board’s headcount and presence throughout the weapons complex, if she could.
