Targets in the End State Contract Model the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office started using in fiscal 2020 are often ill-defined and the program needs better record-keeping and oversight, a congressional watchdog said this week.
Those are among the takeaways from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report publicly released Wednesday on the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) use of this type of agreement.
The report, “DOE Needs to Better Use End State Contracts to Achieve Intended Results,” makes six recommendations for improvement.
The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2023 directed GAO to do a study on EM’s end state implementation. This week’s report makes a half-dozen recommendations on improving end state data and management. EM agreed at least in part with most of them, but disagreed with how GAO arrived at some of its “cost growth” conclusions.
In DOE comments included in the report, DOE said “the complexity of EM’s mission can often result in requirement changes.”
The DOE nuclear cleanup branch rolled out the end state model starting in fiscal 2020 and it “uses task orders for contractors to achieve a stated outcome, or ‘end state,’ to move sites toward completion, manage cost and schedule performance, and reduce DOE’s environmental liability,” GAO said in the report.
In other words, the program was designed to give DOE and contractors leeway to fast-track cleanup as was done at the Rocky Flats and Fernald facilities in Colorado and Ohio respectively, GAO noted. It was rolled out during Anne Marie White’s tenure at the helm of Environmental Management during the first Donald Trump administration.
Eight of the 15 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites overseen by EM have some sort of end state contract or task order, according to the GAO report.
At the end of March 2025, EM had awarded 57 task orders employing the end state model, GAO said. But roughly half of them, 29, had defined end state targets. The rest “were for support work or cleanup work that did not yet have a defined end state.”
“The extent to which EM reduced costs for these [defined] task orders is unclear because of inconsistent documentation,” GAO said. “Further, EM headquarters did not provide adequate oversight to ensure task orders achieved end states. Without this oversight, EM cannot assess how well it is meeting program goals.”
In the report, GAO indicated manpower shortages sometimes undermined the cleanup office’s ability to oversee end state contracts. “Further, EM site officials—such as at Hanford—said their capacity to conduct the necessary oversight was limited due to staff shortages, GAO said. “EM headquarters officials told us that the planned reorganization of EM and potential movement of contracting staff to a different office could affect future oversight plans.”
“EM did not fully use contract incentives to manage costs,” GAO said. “As a result, post-award changes to task order requirements led to over $500 million in cost growth.”
“GAO previously found that EM experienced challenges implementing end state task orders and that stakeholders had concerns about fair pricing for cleanup work because of lack of competition among contractors,” the congressional watchdog said. “Since 1990, GAO has designated DOE contract management as a high-risk area.”
The performance audit ran from September 2024 to July 2026. During its research GAO reviewed contract task orders, met with Environmental Management bosses and made visits to the Hanford and Savannah River cleanup sites.