The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is still looking for a successor to its first executive director of operations, who left in August, the board said in a recent report to Congress.
“The board is actively recruiting to fill that vacancy in 2023,” according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s 33rd Annual Report to Congress, dated March 23.
Joel Spangenberg left the newly-created operations post at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) after fewer than two years. Spangenberg, a member of the senior executive service, left the safety watchdog, in order to become the No. 2 boss at Selective Service System, where he had worked previously.
The DNFSB, charged with providing independent advice and recommendations on nuclear defense installations to the Department of Energy, created the post at Congress’s direction. The operations director job was created in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act to help cure management and morale issues at the board. Congress called for appointing an operations boss to address organizational weaknesses cited in a 2018 report by the National Academy of Public Administration.
The congressional report describes DNFSB as a “micro-agency.” The board, approved for up to 130 full-time staff positions, requested $47.2 million in fiscal 2024, up from $41.4 million, approved by Congress in fiscal 2013.
In 2022, DNFSB issued a total of 30 letters to DOE laying out the results of board reviews and related concerns, according to the report. Over half of the letters “addressed issues that had either remained unresolved for an extended period or had demonstrated a pattern of repetition; nearly half of the letters addressed safety issues in the operation of existing defense nuclear facilities; and one third of the letters explicitly discussed concerns with weaknesses in DOE’s oversight of its contractors.”
The board continues to closely follow National Nuclear Security Administration plans “to safely establish a war reserve plutonium pit production capability” at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as well as plans for the Savannah River Site Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina, according to the report.
