May 29, 2014

GOVERNANCE PANEL: NNSA EXPERIMENT HAS FAILED

By ExchangeMonitor

The Congressionally appointed panel on National Nuclear Security Administration governance hasn’t come up with any recommendations yet, but the co-chairman of the committee made it clear yesterday at a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing that the current governance structure for the agency is not working. The panel’s co-chairmen, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine and former Strategic Command chief Adm. Richard Mies, offered a sometimes-scathing assessment of the semi-autonomous agency as they provided an interim report to Congress on their work, with Augustine suggesting that the “NNSA experiment … has failed” and Mies noting that the NNSA governance model is “fundamentally flawed.” Augustine added: NNSA “has lost credibility and the trust of the national leadership and customers in DoD that it can deliver weapons and critical nuclear facilities on schedule and on budget. Simply stated, there is no plan for success with available resources. NNSA is on a trajectory toward crisis unless strong leadership arrests the current course and reorients its governance to better focus on mission priorities and deliverables.”

Augustine said the panel is still trying to determine what the appropriate governance structure is for the agency. A potential move to the Department of Defense has been suggested, as has a shift to a fully autonomous agency or a move back within the Department of Energy. “Under the current structure, at least as it’s being carried out, it’s clear that it doesn’t work and it’s probably going to be very difficult to fix,” he said, adding: “The list of options is not great.” Organizational change also is unlikely to completely fix the agency’s problems, Augustine noted. “The changes we will recommend undoubtedly will be difficult to implement regardless of where the enterprise is located within the government’s structure, since the fundamental problems are cultural more than organizational,” he said. “Organizational change, while not unimportant, is only a small portion—the easy portion—of the revisions that must be made. Previous efforts to reform and previous studies calling for action have largely failed due to lack of leadership follow-through, a lack of accountability for enacting change, and, we might add, the lack of effective, sustained top-level demand for change from the national leadership.”

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