Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
3/6/2015
National Nuclear Security Administration chief Frank Klotz told House appropriators this week that he is not in favor of changing the name of the Department of Energy as a Congressional advisory panel recommended last year, but declined to say whether he supports one of the more extreme recommendations of the panel: moving the semi-autonomous NNSA back under DOE. “I think the Department of Energy sounds just fine,” Klotz told Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the ranking member of House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, at a hearing March 4. After the hearing, he added: “I think the Department of Energy captures regardless of what the governance structure is, captures the full range of what the Department does. It’s short, it’s succinct, it’s direct. Everyone understands it. Moreover it’s timeless.”
The Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, which was chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine and former Strategic Command chief Richard Mies, called on DOE to be renamed the Department of Energy and Nuclear Security as part of recommendations to strengthen the NNSA. It also called for NNSA to be renamed the Office of Nuclear Security and for the agency to be reabsorbed by DOE. Klotz said the NNSA planned to weigh in formally on the panel’s recommendations March 17 in a report to Congress.
He emphasized, however, that DOE had already begun implementing many of the panel’s recommendations. “Many of the recommendations called for things which under [Energy] Secretary [Ernest] Moniz’s leadership we’re already implementing in terms of increasing the discipline, and the rigor, of our approach to program and project management,” Klotz told NS&D Monitor after the hearing.
DoD Official: ‘Relationship With NNSA Has Been Very Good’
Frank Kendall, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said Pentagon officials were pleased with the current way NNSA is organized. “I think our relationship with NNSA has been very good. It’s been very collegial. We’ve worked very closely together to try to address problems together,” Kendall said at a March 4 Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing. “I think how the Department of Energy organizes itself and how the Congress chooses to have that organization in place, we will find a way to work together and get the job done in any arrangement. But I think the current arrangements are working fine, from our point of view. I think my colleagues in the Defense Department would agree with that.”
Klotz: NNSA Moving to Risk Management Culture
Klotz said the NNSA was also moving toward more of a risk management culture rather than a risk averse culture, which was one of the recommendations of the panel. “We will always focus on ensuring safety. But at some point there has to be a management of the risks and exploring various alternative courses of action about how you mitigate risks,” Klotz said. He said NNSA management was focused on “empowering our people to say if they have a better approach on how to deal with a safety concern that they explore all the options, that they be fully vetted and they don’t necessarily need to jump at the first recommendation that comes up.”
The NNSA drew criticism from Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.), the former top Democrat on the energy spending panel, for its problems with cost overruns and schedule delays on major life extension programs and large infrastructure projects, as well as a host of other issues. “I’m very disturbed as I go through some of the issues and questions we would like to see covered today,” Visclosky said. “Whether it’s uranium enrichment under the now so-called Centrus, whether it’s laboratory overhead, whether it’s laboratory directed research and development, whether it’s excess facilities, I was at first struck these were simply Xeroxed questions from another decade. I would urge you to be very deliberate and very demanding of your staff and people at NNSA to fix some of these problems that have been longstanding for well in excess of a decade to a decade and a half.” He added: “I understand you’ve been in your position less than a year but I’m appalled we continue to cover the same ground here year in and year out with all the bright, competent people under your direction.”
Kaptur Concerned About Performance Issues
Kaptur also questioned the agency’s performance. “When we look at the amount of money spent over the years, it doesn’t appear there is inadequate funding,” she said. “But with the cost overruns and so forth and in so many accounts, something happened to performance.” Klotz said the NNSA was “focusing like a laser beam” to solve its problems. He said establishing program managers not only for life extension work but for its major commodities like uranium, enriched uranium, plutonium and tritium was designed to shore up performance. Klotz said the creation of the Office of Acquisition and Project Management three years ago “brought a level of expertise, experience and discipline to the process of project management and acquisition that we probably didn’t have in the NNSA or within the DOE.”
He also said the agency was working to strengthen its project management capabilities, both through recruitment and through staff augmentation from the Army Corps of Engineers. “Within the Department and within the NNSA in particular there was not what we would refer to as regular order in the way in which other departments, the Department of Defense, address the whole question of acquisition and project management,” Klotz said. “The tools and the discipline and the process which they go through to ensure that cost and schedule are met, from having various alternatives that are analyzed to cost estimation to the actual program and project management, which are both science and art, and that didn’t exist.”
Klotz also noted that the NNSA had been taken off the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List for projects under $750 million. “We are starting to make progress in this area. We still have a lot of work to do,” he said. “We still have a lot of bench strength we need to build within our organizations but I think we’re on the right path.”
