There might be some adjustments to the recently completed shakeup of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) in Washington, D.C., the agency’s No. 2 nuclear cleanup official said Wednesday.
“There’s going to be tweaks that need to be made at some point,” Mark Whitney, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, said in prepared remarks to the government-chartered U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which gathered here Wednesday for its annual summer meeting.
In a brief interview with Weapons Complex Morning Briefing after his remarks, Whitney confirmed that Stacy Charboneau, former head of DOE’s Richland Operations Office at the Hanford Site in Washington state, had relocated to Environmental Management headquarters to assume her new post of deputy assistant secretary for the Field Operations Office — a capacity in which she has direct line responsibility for the managers of DOE’s major cleanup sites across the country, along with EM technology development operations.
Whitney was noncommittal about the sort of tweaks that might be needed in a reorganization that has already mashed seven organizational stovepipes into three — albeit without any layoffs or demotions.
“Any time you have a new organization, there may be some things you didn’t think about,” Whitney said in the interview, adding that DOE is now “focused on clarifying roles and responsibilities” in its newly reorganized Office of Environmental Management.
Whitney, who has been the public point man on the reorganization, maintains the move gets EM back to a focus on field centers from which it had strayed.
Besides the Field Operations unit, DOE created two other senior management units within EM: Regulatory and Policy Affairs and Corporate Services. Frank Marcinowski leads the former, while Candice Trummell is in charge of the latter.
Marcinowski was previously acting associate principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management at EM headquarters in Washington. Trummell, a former EM hand of five years, spent most of the past year as deputy chief of staff for Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.
With a roughly $6 billion annual budget, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management employs about 1,400 civil servants nationwide. That includes roughly 160 in Washington and about 110 in Germantown, Md., some 30 miles northwest of the Capitol.
