The absence of senior leadership at the Trump administration’s Cabinet agencies threatens to leave contractors without clear policy direction on matters including the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons and cleanup complexes, executives said Tuesday. There is no imminent end in sight to this dilemma, they acknowledged.
Panelists at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit spoke two days before the Senate finally confirmed former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as secretary of energy. But now Perry must establish his team of deputies, assistants, and program managers, including the assistant secretary in charge of DOE’s remediation of its Cold War nuclear weapons sites. The National Nuclear Security Administration, the semiautonomous agency in charge of the department’s active nuclear arms programs, is also waiting for a new permanent boss.
“Unless they start getting some of these people in these positions that you can go and talk to, I don’t know that we’re going to have a real clear sense of policy direction,” Eric Knox, senior project director for AECOM’s nuclear and environment branch and a former DOE senior adviser, told the audience.
Knox specifically cited DOE’s MOX project as an example of this challenge. The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility is being built in South Carolina to convert 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The Obama administration DOE sought to kill the project, asserting it had found a much cheaper and faster option, but Congress continued to fund construction.
South Carolina lawmakers have lobbied the incoming Trump administration to sustain the facility, but the White House’s position has not been made public. It could point the way when it rolls out the broad outlines of its fiscal 2018 budget plan, expected this month, or might hold off until releasing its full proposal by May.
The MOX project is managed by CB&I AREVA MOX Services. AECOM, though, has a wide footprint across the DOE complex, from working with AREVA and other contractors in SRS liquid waste manager Savannah River Remediation to leading the team that manages the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The Senate has now voted on all but two Trump Cabinet nominees: Agriculture Secretary-designate Sonny Perdue and Labor Secretary-designate Alexander Acosta. But the process has been slower than in the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations – to the clear frustration of Trump, who on Friday derided Democrats on Twitter for failing to approve his entire Cabinet.
There are still hundreds of appointed positions across the federal government waiting for a nominee and then Senate confirmation. At DOE, that list includes NNSA administrator, NNSA principal deputy administrator, the agency’s deputy administrators for defense programs and defense nuclear nonproliferation, and assistant energy secretary for environmental management (EM).
Some of these jobs remain vacant, while others have been filled with interim officeholders. For example, DOE veteran Sue Cange is currently the acting EM assistant secretary. Obama administration NNSA chief Frank Klotz has also stayed on, but no one is saying how long that will continue.
Knox and other panel speakers did not offer much optimism for quickly filling in the ranks of sub-secretary agency leadership.
“If it’s taking us this long to get though each Cabinet-level secretary, what’s it going to take when we get down to the deputies and what’s it going to take when we get down to the others, exponentially more and more folks who need to go through the confirmation process,” said Rob Hood, vice president for government affairs at CH2M Hill and a member of Trump’s national security transition team. “I’m afraid we’re going to get into the fall before we know these things,” he added.
Delays in putting these people in place also can complicate the carrying out of policy when it is eventually established, Hood said. Agency deputies help vet executive orders or legislative proposals as they are enacted, he noted. The assistant secretaries will also be key to fleshing out the details and justifications for agencies’ broad budget plans, said Melissa Burnison, director of federal affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The White House and Congress have a number of priorities that could take precedence over agency staffing – finishing spending plans for the current budget year, developing the fiscal 2018 budget, and advancing (or opposing) Republican plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
“So the people on the Hill have a lot to do and a lot to consider, and so I think it’s with that backdrop of competing priorities that we in our industry that focuses on the DOD, DOE markets, I think that there’s going to be change, some of it’s probably going to come pretty quickly and some of it’s going to be a little slower,” Knox said.
But The Budget …
On a separate panel Wednesday, senior representatives with contractors that manage three NNSA facilities said they are more concerned about resolving the budget situation for the rest of the fiscal year than about the leadership question.
Klotz has made clear that the site contractors know what is expected of them and are prepared to carry out their plans during the transition period, said Michelle Reichert, deputy enterprise manager for Consolidated Nuclear Security, which manages the NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and the Pantex Plant in Texas.
“The [continuing resolution] provides more concern for us right now,” she said, echoing the message from panelists from Savannah River Nuclear Solutions and Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies.
The second continuing resolution of this budget cycle, due to expire on April 28, leaves departmental funding levels at levels from the prior fiscal year. The short-term fix means greater uncertainty for contractors about how much funding their programs will ultimately receive – potentially less than anticipated. For example, DOE requested $575 million for construction of the Uranium Processing Facility at NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee for fiscal year 2017, but it is stuck with annualized funding of about $430 million under the continuing resolution.