The Senate Armed Services Committee is eyeing a drastic overhaul at the U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), including limiting its members to a single consecutive term and bringing on an executive director to improve management.
The measures, contained in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act approved by the committee in May and released last week, are a response to a November 2018 report on DNFSB operations by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA).
The agency, currently led by three board members while two spots remain vacant, is intended to be the health and safety monitor for Department of Energy nuclear sites around the country.
However, the Senate panel said, the NAPA report “paints a disturbing picture” of an organization that provides little value to the Energy Department amid deep interpersonal issues between board members. Authorizers noted that the board had itself requested the NAPA study.
“Consistent with several other independent assessments over the last 5 years, the NAPA study characterizes the Board’s recent contribution to the Department of Energy as ‘negligible’ and describes its ‘current subpar level and quality of output,’” the NDAA report says. “The report describes the relationship between sitting Board members as ‘often uncivil and unhealthy,’ and the environment as characterized by a ‘lack of collegiality’ and ‘mutual suspicion and distrust.’”
The DNFSB this week declined to comment on the NDAA language addressing its operations.
Meanwhile, employee morale is declining steeply, according to the Senate committee. The DNFSB has faced significant amounts of turnover and challenges in bringing on and keeping new staff, it said.
The Senate panel seeks to address those issues via a number of amendments to the Atomic Energy Act. The NDAA language, if passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump, would establish the position of executive director of operations, answerable directly to the DNFSB chairman. The chairman, with concurrence from the other board members, would be authorized to organize staff “as the Chairman considers appropriate to accomplish the mission of the Board.”
The NDAA would specify that a board member, as of next April 1, could not serve two consecutive terms or remain on in an expired term. The National Academy of Sciences would be assigned to prepare a list of qualified members for the board, if the legislation becomes law.
“Finally, if the President is unable to submit a nomination to fill a vacancy on the Board within 180 days, the provision would require him to submit to the committee an explanation of the reasons for that inability and a plan to submit such a nomination within the following 90 days; this required process would be repeated until the nomination had been submitted,” the committee said.
The defense policy bill would authorize $29.5 million in funding for the DNFSB in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. That matches the amount requested by the agency and the funding level set in the multi-agency House “minibus” appropriations bill that covers the DNFSB.
The House on Wednesday approved its minibus, which could hit the floor after Congress’ annual July 4 recess, the chamber’s Rules Committee wrote in a notice published this week. The House’s draft version of the National Defense Authorization Act does not appear to propose reorganizing the DNFSB.
The Senate planned to bring its version of the NDAA to the floor of the upper chamber on Monday.
Congress established the DNFSB in 1988. The agency today has about 110 employees, including resident inspectors at DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pantex Plant in Texas, Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee.
The board has no regulatory authority, but makes safety recommendations with which the energy secretary must publicly agree or disagree.
Board members serve five-year terms, with reappointment allowed. They can currently stay on after the expiration of a term until a successor is nominated and confirmed by the Senate.
The three current DNFSB members are: Chairman Bruce Hamilton, Joyce Connery, and Jessie Hill Roberson. Hamilton and Roberson are currently serving on expired terms.
Vacancies were opened by the resignations of then-Chairman Sean Sullivan in February 2018 and board member Daniel Santos in March.
The White House has laid out a plan to bring the board back to five members, keeping Hamilton, Connery, and Roberson on and nominating two new members: Thomas Summers, former vice commander of the U.S. Air Force’s 91st Missile Wing, and Lisa Vickers, former DOE site representative at the Pantex Plant.
The White House nominated Summers and Vickers in January. The Senate Armed Services Committee to date has not taken action on the nominations.
DOE Order 140.1
In the NDAA report, the Senate panel also called for the U.S. comptroller general to prepare a report on a controversial DOE order on its interactions with the DNFSB.
The Energy Department in May 2018 issued Order 140.1, under which it would speak with “one voice” to the DNFSB. That includes directing agency contractors to filter questions from board inspectors through the department, and ruling out consideration of DNFSB safety recommendations that apply to agency employees and contractors.
The DNFSB has been vocally critical of the order, which board members say would prevent its personnel from accessing certain locations at DOE nuclear facilities and from preparing safety recommendations. Connery has said staff has already been shut out of meetings at certain sites.
“The committee notes that the legislation establishing the Board, section 314 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (Public Law 83–73; 42 U.S.C. 2286c(a)), provides that ‘[t]he Secretary of Energy shall fully cooperate with the Board and provide the Board with ready access to such facilities, personnel, and information as the Board considers necessary to carry out its responsibilities,’” the NDAA report says. “Therefore, the committee directs the Comptroller General of the United States to review DOE Order 140.1 and report on how DOE’s implementation of the order has affected the Board’s ability to meets its statutory responsibilities.”
The comptroller general, who heads the Government Accountability Office, would brief congressional defense committees on the matter no later than March 15, 2020, and then issue a report at a later date.
Separately, New Mexico Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall (both D) this week proposed three amendments to the NDAA to ensure the DNFSB can carry out its work.
One amendment would freeze enforcement of DOE’s Order 140.1 until the Government Accountability Office submits a report on the order’s impact on the DNFSB’s ability to carry out its mission. The other proposed NDAA amendments emphasize the DNFSB’s “full authority to protect health and safety of the public and workers with full access to DOE facilities and information,” and would make clear that DNFSB members can serve up to two terms, according to a joint press release from the two senators.
“These measures will address widespread concerns about the DOE’s information-sharing order, which would weaken the DNFSB’s watchdog role and diminish its power to access vital information needed to conduct its safety oversight responsibilities,” Udall said in the release.
New Mexico is home to DOE’s Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
