Energy Department contractors are eager to tap into a portion of the $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill signed into law a week ago to provide paid leave to employees who cannot telecommute.
The federal contractor authority provision of the “CARES Act” empowers the energy secretary to ensure that contract employees whose work requires them to be on-site won’t fall into employment as DOE facilities reduce operations during the pandemic.
The Energy Facility Contractors Group (EFCOG) and other organizations pushed for this provision in the event the current crisis lingers for months. The contractors say having to later re-mobilize the workforce, and regain lapsed security clearances for DOE sites, would be time-consuming and costly.
At the sprawling Hanford Site in Washington state, for example, only 10% to 15% of the normal 11,000-person federal and contractor workforce is still working on-site. About 60% of the remainder are able to telework to support on-site activities, a DOE spokesperson said Thursday.
Most of the remaining contractor and subcontractor employees are for now being paid under stopgap modifications DOE made to contracts to help hold the workforce together in the short term, the federal spokesperson said.
In addition to nearly $100 million for the Energy Department’s Office of Science and semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to support research and development to help contain the fallout of COVID-19, the new law also provides $28 million to support remote access for DOE employees, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said in a press release.
There will also be continued payment for federal contractors and subcontractors who, due to COVID-19, are unable to perform work or telework “because of the nature of their jobs,” Brouillette stated.
“There are approximately 34,000 federal and contractor employees across the EM complex,” a DOE official said in a Friday email. The agency “has taken action on a site-by-site basis to maintain workforce readiness, including the use of partial stop work orders.”
The best ballpark estimate for the 16 nuclear cleanup sites managed by the DOE Office of Environmental Management is there are currently no more than 10 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Nationally, there were 239,000 cases as of Friday, with 5,400 confirmed deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hanford, which still listed no confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Thursday evening, will continue on minimal operations for the week of April 6, DOE site Manager Brian Vance said in a Thursday notice to employees. “While this is a challenging time for everyone, I ask that you each focus on being safe and healthy, whether at work on the site, at home, or in the community.”
Minimal operations are basically what is required to preserve the status quo and prevent site emergencies that could endanger workers, the public, or the environment. That operating status is largely the new normal around the DOE nuclear cleanup complex.
The situation at Hanford is probably typical of the vast majority of nuclear cleanup operations across the DOE weapons complex. Two sources this week guessed the on-site workforce most places is between 10% and 20%.
Effective later today, only about 2,500 of the estimated 11,000-member workforce at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will be reporting to work, the Energy Department said in a press release. This latest scale-back means the site will only conduct “minimal essential functions” – such as tritium operations, storage of nuclear materials, maintaining nuclear incident response crews, and Savannah River National Laboratory security missions.
This move at the Savannah River Site, which has two confirmed cases of COVID-19, was triggered by the Thursday shelter in place order from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, which takes effect later today. One-third of the SRS workforce lives in George, according to a site representative.
Days earlier, the Savannah River Site in a press release said its displaced non-teleworking contractors are being paid for up to 30 days under the same agency provision that applies during an extreme weather outage.
‘Uncharted Waters’
Contractors are anxious to learn more about when and how the Energy Department will enable them to provide paid leave to workers, such as mechanics, equipment operators, and others who cannot really work remotely.
“We are in uncharted waters,” one industry source said as vendors grapple with the economic fallout of the emergency.
While the Energy Department helped draft the federal contractor relief portions of the March 27 COVID-19 package, the White House Office of Management and Budget will help direct if OMB is just helping, who is actually directing the distribution, he said.
But Energy Communities Alliance Executive Director Seth Kirshenberg said the payments should get a green light swiftly based on the language of the legislation. The bill gives the energy secretary authority to modify contracts to allow an average of 40 hours per week paid leave through Sept. 30 for vendor employees who cannot telecommute.
Given the reduced on-site workforce and the prospect of delayed construction and demolition projects should the situation linger for months, is the question of how the disruption might affect Energy Department fee payments to contractors, the first source added.
The Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio last week confirmed its first case of COVID-19, and has temporarily reduced on-site operations. United Steelworkers Local 1-689 President John Knauff said by telephone Monday that probably 233 people out of a normal workforce of 800 people for remediation contractor Fluor-BWXT remain on-site. Major projects, such as preparing for demolition of the X-326 uranium processing building and the construction of the new On-Site Waste Disposal Facility, have probably been suspended.
The Energy Department did not immediately confirm that information. Until further notice, Portsmouth is conducting only essential minimum critical operations and maximizing the number of employees telecommuting among its 2,500-person workforce. The same goes for the 1,300 employees at the Paducah Site in Kentucky, as well those at the Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office in Lexington, Ky.
On Friday, the Office of Environmental Management Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee became the latest addition to “limited” operations. The office announced environmental tasks will be temporarily “limited to those necessary to put projects into a status where they will ensure the safety of the public, our workers, and the environment.” An Amentum-led contractor is winding down remediation of the East Tennessee Technology Park, the former site of the gaseous diffusion complex at Oak Ridge.
Oak Ridge Environmental Management has not yet reported any confirmed cases of COVID-19, although its NNSA neighbor on the site, the Y-12 National Security Complex, has identified several cases.
Also, within the past week, a subcontractor to the legacy cleanup vendor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico tested positive for COVID-19. Los Alamos on March 24, like its partner site, the Lawrence Livermore lab in California, announced it was also entering minimum safe operations.
At the same time, the Sandia National Laboratories reported two more confirmed cases, one each among the workforce of its Albuquerque and California sites.
Two more staffers at the Department of Energy’s Washington, D.C., headquarters have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total confirmed headquarters cases to at least three, the agency announced this week.
The two new cases at Washington headquarters are employees in the Forrestal Building: the main, but not the only, building in the National Capital Region that houses DOE headquarters employees. The employees have not been in the Forrestal Building or had physical contact with agency employees at work since March 19, according to DOE’s press release about the cases.
It was not clear whether the two people confirmed to have COVID-19 had been in physical contact with the first person at Forrestal confirmed to have contracted the disease. That person went on leave from headquarters on March 3.
ExchangeMonitor reporter Dan Leone contributed to this article.