The White House wants federal agencies including the Department of Energy to kill off some of their Federal Advisory Committees by September, according to a presidential order published recently.
Federal Advisory Committees are nominally independent, government-chartered groups that provide advice to U.S. agencies. Either the president, Congress or agency heads can require an agency to create a Federal Advisory Committee. The Energy Department has about 20 such groups, fewer than half of which provide advice for nuclear programs.
President Donald Trump’s executive order last week gives agencies until Sept. 30 to eliminate at least one-third of the committees created by agency heads. The White House wants agencies to target those that are obsolete, have been replaced in function by some other type of group, or cost too much relative to the benefits an agency thinks the group provides.
For committees created by agency heads, agencies can request waivers for elimination from the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The budget chief can grant the waiver if she or he “concludes it is necessary for the delivery of essential services, for effective program delivery, or because it is otherwise warranted by the public interest,” the executive order says.
Among the DOE bodies requiring waivers would be the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, which includes the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and NNSA’s Defense Programs Advisory Committee.
The Energy Department in February renewed the Defense Programs Advisory Committee’s two year charter. The group provides classified advice behind closed doors about nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs managed by the semiautonomous DOE branch.
Agency spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment about their evaluation of the advisory committees.
Meanwhile, for committees created by Congress or the president, the head of the White House Office of Management will decide which should stay and which should go. The White House budget chief has to make those recommendations in a report due Sept. 1 to the chief executive, then ask Congress to cancel those committees in the administration’s 2021 budget request, nominally due in February.
In April, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators proposed a bill to strengthen ethics requirements for Federal Advisory Committees, including those set up by DOE.
