EM OFFICIALS PROVIDE INSIGHT ON SEQUESTRATION EFFECTS

With the clock running down before the across-the-board funding cuts known as sequestration are set to go into effect at the end of this week, officials with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management provided a glimpse yesterday of the potential impacts on DOE’s cleanup efforts. The sequestration process, which is set to go into effect March 1 barring Congressional action, will entail funding cuts of 5-7 percent this year to the main accounts that make up EM funding—defense environmental cleanup activities, non-defense environmental cleanup and uranium enrichment D&D. “When we get significant cuts, it means we slow down a lot with regards to progress and things grind to a halt significantly,” EM Deputy Assistant Secretary for Site Restoration Mark Gilbertson said at this year’s Waste Management Symposia. “Quite honestly, we’ve done a lot of planning and communicated impacts up through the system, but there’s so many variables at this point in time,” he said. In separate remarks yesterday, DOE cleanup chief David Huizenga said of sequestration’s potential impacts, “It’s painful because we’ve got the contractors and contracts in place and people are going to work every day doing a fine job and things are going to slow down unfortunately.”

 

EM has largely been silent to date on the potential impacts of sequestration on DOE’s cleanup efforts. Gilbertson said yesterday, though, that approximately 30 regulatory milestones across the complex could be at risk because of the looming funding cuts. “We need to have a dialogue with the individual regulators because not all of those milestones are equal and as we work with stakeholders and regulators we’ll come together to decisions as to what we need to slow down and what we need to speed up in the program,” he said. Gilbertson also said that EM has developed “some ranges” as to potential workforce impacts, but “we haven’t gotten specific commitments from contractors as to what is going to happen.”

 

Earlier this month, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee released a report on the potential impacts of sequestration across the federal government, including EM. The report also said that approximately 30 milestones could be at risk, as well as warned that a significant number of workers at Hanford and the Savannah River Site could face furloughs and that a number of projects, such as material processing at Savannah River’s H-Canyon facility and waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could be suspended. Even with such potential impacts, EM officials stressed yesterday that safety would be maintained in the event of sequestration. “The one thing we won’t compromise on is keeping the program in min-safe,” Gilbertson said. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition and Project Management Jack Surash said, “Let me just assure everyone that we are very intensely and actively planning [for] the threat of a sequester, and should that happen we will have our arms around the workforce, the programmatic, the regulatory impacts that could result.”