Three former heads of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories joined in support of the National Academy of Sciences panel that called for significant work to repair the relationship between the labs and the NNSA, telling a House subcommittee yesterday that burdensome oversight was on the verge of suffocating science at the institutions. “In my view, the laboratories are under severe stress in their ability to perform these missions and they’re increasingly constrained by federal oversight and the manner in which it is implemented,” said former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director George Miller, who testified along with former Los Alamos Director Michael Anastasio and former Sandia National Laboratories Director Paul Robinson before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. “Doing oversight a different way is really what we need to do. Not transactional, but do it in a performance-based way,” Anastasio said. “There are plenty of accountability mechanisms in place already in our current contracts to hold us accountable. We should be accountable. But do it in way that doesn’t audit everything.”
The conclusions of the laboratory directors mirrored the findings of the NAS report, which called the relationship between the NNSA and the labs “broken” and “dysfunctional.” Former Deputy Energy Secretary Charles Curtis, a member of the NAS panel, said the issue amounted to a lack of trust that led to stifling oversight from the NNSA. Curtis, study co-Chair Charles Shank and Government Accountability Office official Eugene Aloise also testified at the hearing. “It’s kind of a strange equation that we provide the nation’s most vital secrets, we entrust those to the scientists and engineers to perform this vital mission, but then we don’t trust them in the execution,” Curtis said. “By not trusting them in the execution, we introduce costs and inefficiencies that have been documented time and again.” Aloise, however, said the issue was not necessarily one of inefficient oversight. “We agree that excessive oversight and micro-management of contractors is not an efficient use of scarce federal resources, however, in our view the problems we continue to identify in the enterprise are not caused by excessive oversight, but rather by ineffective oversight by NNSA and DOE, Aloise said, citing continuing problems with construction management, safety and security, and the management of cost data across the complex.
The venue was different, but new Livermore Director Parney Albright also said the relationship between the labs and the NNSA was “badly broken,” suggesting that a big part of the problem was the large federal staff at the site offices. “This thing has grown to a point where you almost have a lot of momentum for detailed transactional oversight … just because you have this large marching army that really, that’s what they’re there to do. Until that gets fixed I think we’re going to have this problem,” Albright said in comments yesterday at the Fourth Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
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