The late-July security breach at the Y-12 National Security Complex will be a hot topic on Capitol Hill next week as two House committees are scheduled to hold hearings about the unprecedented break-in. The House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee scheduled a hearing for Wednesday on the topic last month, and the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee said yesterday it would hold a hearing at 2 p.m. Thursday. Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman and NNSA Principal Deputy Administrator Neile Miller are scheduled to testify at the House Armed Services hearing, while Poneman, NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino, DOE Health, Safety and Security chief Glenn Podonsky, DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman and an official with the Government Accountability Office will appear before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee at 10 a.m. Wednesday. A classified briefing will take place following the House Armed Services hearing. “The committee has serious concerns about the Y-12 incident and the sole oversight responsibility to make sure there is a full accounting of what happened, why, and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” committee spokesman Claude Chafin said in a statement to NW&M Monitor. “To the extent these matters can be dealt with in unclassified session, they will be.”
In contrast to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee have pushed to reform the NNSA, drafting legislation that would allow greater reliance on contractor assurance systems and performance-based oversight and eliminate DOE-HSS oversight of the agency. In a statement released in early August, Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, resisted suggestions that the amount of oversight was to blame for the security breach. “The number of oversight employees has been going up steadily for almost a decade,” Turner said. “It’s clear that’s not a solution, as simple as it appears, because we’ve tried it and yet this latest incident still happened. Contractors must be held accountable for their failures. That’s the way to ensure the highest standards are met.” However, his counterpart on the panel, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), said the “baffling failures in security readiness” at Y-12 provide a clear example for why oversight of the agency should not be scaled back.
