The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management still has much work to do on oversight of contracts and operations, the Government Accountability Office said this week in its annual update on high-dollar, “high-risk” issues.
The DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which seemed to get a more generous review, “has continued to show leadership commitment to improving contract and project management,” the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) said.
Nevertheless, both DOE silos have dozens of issues that still need to be sorted out, the congressional watchdog said.
For fiscal year 2020, DOE’s estimated environmental liability was $512 billion, which is up from $505 billion last year — an increase more or less in line with the rate of consumer inflation.
Environmental Management (EM) published a “strategic vision” last year for the next decade of cleanup, but has not produced a strategic plan that incorporates the principles of risk-informed decision-making, GAO said.
The GAO said it reported in February 2019 that DOE has more than 70 agreements that contain hundreds of milestones for cleanup work at 16 nuclear properties, but the agency has failed to do root cause analyses on missed deadlines.
“In addition, frequent turnover in EM leadership over the last decade has hampered EM’s ability to sustain focus on addressing the root causes of these challenges,” GAO said. The office has had “six different leaders in the last 5 years — each with different priorities.”
The current acting assistant secretary for DOE environmental management, William “Ike” White, has been in charge of operations at the cleanup office since June 2019.
Three big issues on the Environmental to-do list are adopting leading practices for operations, improving cost and schedule estimates and filling staff vacancies at the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office that oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, according to GAO. The latter might hamper the agency’s ability to manage capital asset projects at the disposal site, GAO added.
While the cleanup office has adopted the End State Contracting Model, which DOE expects to increase contractor accountability, GAO said it is still too early to measure its effectiveness. The Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Co. contract awarded in December 2019 was the first major agreement under the model and the work only began last month. The National Academies of Sciences will report on the DOE office’s project management later this year, GAO added.
Meanwhile, GAO said, the cleanup office lacks a long-term plan for its efforts to retrieve nuclear waste from underground tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The DOE also has not ensured that Bechtel, the contractor for the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford, completed required audits of subcontractors, increasing the risk of firms passing unallowable costs onto the government.
Key for the National Nuclear Security Administration is ensuring that the integrated schedule in development for pit production complies with best practices, providing better schedule estimates and enacting management controls and coordination of programs and activities.
GAO also dinged the National Nuclear Security Administration for failing to fill by December 2020 some 200 new federal staff positions Congress allowed it to create in 2019. The agency requested permission to increase its headcount to meet what it characterized as critical unmet needs.
The congressional investigator also criticized the nuclear-weapons agency’s schedule for the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead life-extension program, writing that the National Nuclear Security Administration’s insistence on cranking out a first production unit of the warhead by 2025 “may unrealistically constrain the program’s schedule and introduce unnecessary risks.” GAO did acknowledge last July that the agency’s preliminary cost estimates for W80-4 substantially met the criteria for a reliable cost estimate.
