The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday approved a bill that could reduce the National Nuclear Security Administration’s autonomy within the Department of Energy.
With a pandemic raging in the final four months of an election year, the bill may not become law before the next session of Congress begins in January and kills all pending legislation. Yet even if the bill dies, the committee’s resounding bipartisan appetite for curbing the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) administrator’s influence will go down as one of the bigger DOE policy markers that the 116th Congress threw down in an open forum.
H.R. 8159, the ‘‘Department of Energy Organization and Management Improvement Act,’’ passed on a loud voice vote at the end of an eight-hour remote markup, hosted online. Committee leaders praised the bill, which “removes a restriction in the NNSA that inhibited mission-support personnel from working department-wide on behalf of the secretary [and] clarifies that all National Nuclear Security Administration and contractor personnel, as with all other departmental personnel, are responsible to and subject to the authority, direction and control of the secretary of energy,” Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the committee’s ranking member and a co-sponsor of the legislation, said during the markup.
That means allowing headquarters-based executives, including those in the NNSA general counsel and chief financial officer roles, to do what the secretary of energy wants them to do, Walden said. As part of NNSA’s current semiautonomy, the sub-agency has its own general counsel, procurement, and public affairs staff, among others.
“This maintains all the benefits of NNSA’s structure so the NNSA administrator can focus more on effectively executing his or her operational responsibilities, and serves to ensure the secretary can more effectively be held accountable for all the functions of the department,” Walden said.
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee, urged his colleagues to vote for the legislation. If the bill hadn’t come up for a vote so close to the end of a long meeting, “I’d call for a roll-call vote and make this 53-0,” Upton said.
That makes a strong showing of confidence in GOP support for committee Chairman Frank Pallone’s (D-N.J.) drive to rein in what he again called the “rogue” NNSA.
Pallone has been irked both by last winter’s intra-Energy Department controversy about the NNSA’s budget request — which President Donald Trump resolved in the NNSA’s favor in early January after pressure from influential conservative allies in Congress — as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee’s attempt to give the Pentagon veto power over the secretary of energy’s annual NNSA budget proposal.
Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette favored requesting a lower budget for NNSA than the roughly $20 billion the White House eventually sought for the agency. NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty backed the higher request, citing needs uncovered by a year-long study that the agency performed on itself.
The House committee’s just-passed bill “upholds the important longstanding principle of civilian, not military, control over the nuclear weapons stockpile by greater integrating National Nuclear Security Administration personnel under the authority of the Secretary of Energy,” Pallone said Wednesday. “It’s critical that the secretary of energy, regardless of administration, have clear control over this agency that has repeatedly gone rogue in its efforts to undermine these principles and the secretary’s authority over it.”
NNSA headquarters in Washington did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday, but the agency — and Gordon-Hagerty herself — has repeatedly said last winter’s unusually publicized DOE budget debate was only the usual, and appropriate, intra-agency back-and-forth.
“To clear the record, NNSA continues to work in lockstep with the Department of Energy to develop its budget requests and execute its vital national security missions,” Gordon-Hagerty wrote in a statement after the first time Pallone accused the NNSA of going rogue. “There is no daylight between myself and Secretary Brouillette regarding opposition to proposed legislation that would make the Department of Defense the final arbiter of NNSA’s annual budget, thereby violating the Department’s standing as a distinct and equal Cabinet-level agency.”
