Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
7/18/2014
Figuring out what is wrong with the National Nuclear Security Administration may have been the easy part for the Congressional advisory panel on governance of the nuclear enterprise, but coming up with recommendations on how to fix the agency is proving to be a little more difficult. The 12-member advisory panel, chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine and retired Strategic Command chief Adm. Richard Mies, was supposed to deliver its final report July 1, but nearly three weeks after that deadline, it’s unclear when the panel will finalize its work.
The delay hasn’t yet begun to draw concern from Congress, but lawmakers and Congressional aides are eager to see the panel’s recommendations after its strongly-worded findings were released in an interim report and Congressional testimony in March. “We’d rather have quality than something that is rushed,” one Congressional aide told NS&D Monitor. “We want to make sure they have as broad of a consensus as they can achieve.” Augustine did not respond to a request for comment this week on the panel’s status.
Panel to Meet Next Week
NS&D Monitor has learned that the panel will meet for two days next week to discuss a draft version of the recommendations, which has proven to be much more difficult to prepare than the findings. An official with knowledge of the panel’s plans said the committee is hopeful to get a consensus on its recommendations, but that remains undecided as committee members wrestle with how best to fix NNSA, and also how to make their recommendations stick. “This is a much heavier lift,” the official said.
Another Congressional aide said there is an acceptance among lawmakers of the magnitude of the task facing the panel. “The advisory panel did an excellent job articulating the many problems with DOE and NNSA in its interim report, but they are now embarked on the most difficult part of their task: determining the best solutions,” the aide said. “The committee values strong, actionable, and well-considered recommendations that do not rely on individual personalities to achieve success and do not repeat the mistakes of the past. We hope the committee will conclude its work when it has reached its final conclusions, but recognize just how complex this problem is.”
A ‘Failed Experiment’?
The panel did not pull any punches when it unveiled its initial findings, and comments that the creation of the semi-autonomous agency was a “failed experiment” drew the ire of new NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz. In comments last month, Klotz said he “categorically rejects” the conclusion that the NNSA is a failed experiment, arguing that the agency has made significant strides in its Stockpile Stewardship and nonproliferation programs.
Nonetheless, the NNSA has been beset in recent years by massive cost overruns on major projects and safety and security lapses that have sapped its credibility with Congress, which led to the creation of the NNSA governance advisory panel. During testimony before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee earlier this year, Augustine and Mies did not hold back in criticizing the agency. Mies said the NNSA governance model is “fundamentally flawed” and Augustine said the agency “has lost credibility and the trust of the national leadership and customers in DoD that it can deliver weapons and critical nuclear facilities on schedule and on budget. Simply stated, there is no plan for success with available resources. NNSA is on a trajectory toward crisis unless strong leadership arrests the current course and reorients its governance to better focus on mission priorities and deliverables.”
Final Report Will ‘Reset’ Issue on NNSA Experiment
Speaking last month, Mies said the reference to NNSA as a “failed experiment” was a “mischaracterization” of the panel’s interim findings. “That was not what our report really said or intended to say,” Mies said. “What we said was it was a failed experiment in governance reform in that the NNSA Act which created NNSA, the implementation of that act, never achieved what it was intended to. … We acknowledged there were a lot of significant, world class achievements within NNSA and we don’t want to diminish or not recognize those attributes.”
He said the panel’s final report would seek to “reset” the issue. “Both Norm and I have talked personally to the Secretary, we’ve talked to Gen. Klotz to clarify; I think they understand where the panel is coming from,” Mies said. “The problem I can’t control is how the media treats some of these things and how they latch onto just sound bites and take things maybe out of context. I think the report to some degree is balanced in that we do try to highlight a number of successes without spending an undue amount of time on it and point out that it’s not a failed experiment totally in operations, it’s a failed experiment in governance reform, which is what we’re focusing on. The [NNSA] Act did not achieve what it intended to achieve.”
