Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
2/13/2015

The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management contract management will remain on the Government Accountability Office’s High-Risk List for another two years, the government watchdog agency announced this week. GAO unveiled its list two years after it partially removed the agencies from its infamous rolls in what appeared to be a sign of progress, noting that not much progress had been made this time around. The GAO excluded projects under $750 million from its concerns two years ago and said DOE met three of five criteria for removal from the High-Risk List. “This year, we did not observe similar progress in DOE’s management of major projects,” the GAO said. “EM and NNSA struggled to stay within cost and schedule estimates for most of their major projects.” DOE contract management has been on the GAO list since 1990.

In its update to the list, the GAO said EM and NNSA met one of the five criteria for removal: strong leadership commitment to improve contract and project management. The GAO said DOE did not have enough people and resources to correct contract and project management deficiencies, hadn’t monitored and verified the effectiveness of corrective measures, hadn’t demonstrated progress in implementing corrective actions designed to improve performance on major projects, and only partially met the criteria for having a corrective action plan. The GAO said the Department’s corrective actions, which include a working group report of 21 recommendations released in December, “seem well intended” but said they are “also part of an ongoing cycle of announcing new corrective actions, declaring them successful, and then identifying more actions.”

 In a statement, the Department of Energy noted that it is moving to address its contract and project management issues. “The portfolio of large capital projects undertaken by the Department of Energy is not only unique from other projects in the public and private sector, but each DOE project is truly one-of-a-kind, with uncommon challenges,” a DOE spokesperson said. “Secretary [of Energy Ernest] Moniz has made project management a priority for his tenure and is instituting changes to improve the Department’s performance on projects across the DOE enterprise on several tracks. As Secretary Moniz has said, the Department is attacking these problems head on. We are recognizing the problem, being transparent about the process, and implementing new improvements to help get the mission of the Department accomplished with both budget and schedule discipline.”