Despite increased efforts to recruit new blood into a graying workforce, the Department of Energy’s $8-billion Office of Environmental Management continues to wrestle with staffing issues, a congressional watchdog said this week.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) “continues to be understaffed,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report published Thursday. The nuclear cleanup office had 263 vacant jobs at the end of fiscal 2023, about 20% of the office’s 1,272 available positions.
For jobs considered “mission critical,” EM’s vacancy rate was 18%. These include engineering and contracting positions, GAO said in the 111-page report. The report was called for by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.
For its part, EM agrees with the 10 recommendations made in the report and is already working to implement many of them, according to comments from Candice Robertson, senior adviser in charge of Environmental Management. The recommendations include implementation of leading industry practices, developing succession planning and a “multigenerational pipeline” of staff.
Environmental Management plans to implement the GAO recommendations by the end of 2027, Robertson said.
GAO is also recommending that Congress require Environmental Management to file a workforce report annually.
“EM’s workforce is also aging—44% of its staff will be eligible for retirement by 2030,” GAO said. On a site level, 60% of staff at the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico will be eligible to retire by 2030 as will 50% of federal staff at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah Site in Kentucky, GAO said.
EM’s average attrition rate was 10.6% for fiscal 2023, worse than DOE’s and the federal government’s average attrition rates of 8.1% over a 10-year period., GAO said.
Environmental Management lacks a “comprehensive or standardized approach for training or knowledge transfer,” GAO said.
The turnover problem also extends to Environmental Management’s upper managers, GAO said. “In Calendar year 2023, three of the top five EM leaders changed, and five of the eight site managers changed or announced their departure in early 2024,” GAO said.
While the office in charge of the world’s largest environmental cleanup made some hiring headway in 2023, It “continued to experience prolonged staffing shortages because of problems related to hiring,” GAO said. “Although EM has several mechanisms to retain staff, it does not apply them consistently or in a way that helps address current and future needs.”