The National Nuclear Security Administration has made progress in its governance of the U.S. nuclear security enterprise but will need to take more concrete steps to improve the federal-contractor relationship and reduce bureaucratic burdens, according to a new congressionally mandated report.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration in fiscal 2016 established the Panel to Track and Assess Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise to assess over the next few years the NNSA’s improvements in managing its eight sites across the United States – each supporting the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile through research, weapons design, production, and related work.
The topic was explored in recent years by the 2014 Augustine-Mies panel and the 2015 Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories report, both of which identified inefficiencies in the enterprise and the need to clearly define roles to prevent overlapping functions, reduce burdensome practices, and repair a deteriorating relationship between the NNSA and the management and operations contractors for its facilities.
Those reports identified duplicative federal requirements in various business services, human resources, and other administrative areas, and said DOE requirements often involved multiple levels of approvals, wasting contracting time and resources. The panels’ recommendations involved, for example, allowing DOE to oversee programs at the higher level while granting greater autonomy to the labs to implement policy free from the delays of federal approvals at each step.
These recommendations prompted Congress in the fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act to require DOE to develop an implementation plan for improvement. The latest report is the first of several meant to assess the NNSA’s progress through this plan.
The report noted that “the panel was impressed to see that longstanding governance and management issues in the nuclear security enterprise have received focused attention over the past 1 to 2 years” due to the direct involvement of the DOE secretary and the NNSA administrator.
In that time, the DOE has established a laboratory operations board working group to identify management principles for leadership to implement, and created a laboratory planning working group to improve project management, among other measures. The NNSA has issued a “Management System Description” to delineate the authorities of the agency’s different components, and is updating its governance model to determine the level of federal involvement at the sites depending on contractors’ ability to execute their mission.
However, the report said the “NNSA has not defined what success looks like as it works toward implementing the recommendations from previous reports, and it lacks qualitative or quantitative metrics to identify and measure change.”
The panel found that the relationships between the NNSA and its contractors “appear to have improved in recent years, thanks in part to the creation of several crosscutting boards and advisory groups,” but that ambiguity remains in roles and responsibilities.
The report highlighted the “excessive and uncoordinated oversight” of the nuclear enterprise by various entities, including DOE and NNSA themselves, the DOE Inspector General’s Office and Office of Enterprise Assessments, the NNSA’s field offices, state and local regulators, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and others.
“There is an inherent tension between enabling a contractor to carry out its work efficiently— where the contractor is responsible for planning and decision-making—and ensuring that funds are appropriately spent and that safety, security, and health are protected,” it said. To address the problem, the NNSA is centralizing and coordinating oversight activities at its sites by federal and independent entities to prevent duplicative reviews and activities, the panel noted.
The report offered several recommendations calling on the NNSA administrator to urgently clarify responsibilities and authorities in the NNSA-contractor relationship; develop criteria to help the enterprise recognize burdensome practices; and “define an effective mission-focused operating model” to promote culture changes throughout the enterprise in line with the recommendations of this and past reports.
The panel said the focus for its second semiannual report is being developed with the input of Congress and the NNSA. The panel will continue its study of the agency’s progress for four and a half years, with reports to be issued from 2017 through 2020.
NNSA spokeswoman Amy Boyette said Friday by email that the agency is reviewing the report’s recommendations and that “DOE and NNSA leadership are focused on achieving long term improvements in governance and management of the enterprise.”
“In addition to building a more collaborative and mission-focused culture, DOE and NNSA have initiated a number of efforts to clarify roles and responsibilities and to strengthen communication and partnerships across the nuclear security enterprise,” she said.
