The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) has plenty of facilities that are more than a half-century old and, since fiscal 2020, the cost of upkeep has more than doubled to $950 million yearly, according to a government watchdog.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Tuesday it is recommending several improvements to the way EM collects data on its maintenance needs at these old facilities and prioritizes repair plans.
GAO also said DOE’s nuclear cleanup branch should better communicate potential cost-saving ideas to Congress.
The report titled “Better Data and Project Prioritization Vital to Managing Aging Infrastructure and Communicating Needs” was mandated by the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. GAO’s performance audit occurred from November 2024 to May 2026.
The Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Tim Walsh “should better incorporate more reliable information from EM sites in the Master Asset Plan, such as site project prioritization decisions for infrastructure maintenance projects, to better reflect site maintenance needs,” GAO said in the report.
The Environmental Management office agreed or at least partially agreed with all GAO’s recommendations.
EM concurred with the recommendation to correct and verify data in its Federal Information Management Systems scorecard process. The cleanup office also agreed to take steps to better document deferred maintenance and other upkeep needs. Both those recommendations should be addressed by the end of the year, according to EM.
But Environmental Management only partly concurred with GAO’s recommendation to make changes in its Master Asset Plan to better reflect maintenance needs. The Master Asset Plan already includes cost-benefit and risk-based analysis, according to the DOE response. EM will review its internal procedures to see if more specific site information is needed on priority decisions.
EM also told GAO it already shares much information with Congress on its infrastructure and maintenance needs, but will review its processes for potential improvements.
As of June 2025, Environmental Management reported more than $1.5 billion in repair needs across its about 4,300 operating facilities. Many of these facilities are between 50 and 70 years old, and well beyond their initial design life, GAO said.
The EM Master Asset Plan “contains 19 projects identified in a cost savings model that could use surplus funds to produce about $120 million in savings for EM,” GAO said. “However, EM has not communicated the benefits of completing these unfunded maintenance projects to Congress. “
“Two sites had the majority of repair needs and deferred maintenance for operating facilities,” according to the GAO report. “Hanford and the Savannah River Site. In contrast, many of the sites with relatively fewer facilities under EM responsibility showed low or no repair needs and deferred maintenance.”
The GAO report noted several sites have major infrastructure assets managed by other branches of DOE, such as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Office of Science.
In a GAO questionnaire, several sites said they anticipated increasing infrastructure and repair spending over the next five years:
The sites expecting an uptick in such spending are the Carlsbad, N.M., Field Office, Hanford in Washington state, Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Paducah in Kentucky and Portsmouth in Ohio, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state.
“Two sites scheduled for closure in the near future—the Moab [Utah] Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project and the Energy Technology Engineering Center[Calif.]—anticipate reducing infrastructure and repair spending in the next 5 years,” GAO said.
The remaining three sites—the EM Consolidated Business Center in Cincinnati,, Nevada National Security, and Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico—expect infrastructure and repair spending to remain flat over the next 5 years.