Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office.
What has DOE’s Cold War nuclear cleanup program gotten out of President Donald Trump’s White House so far? At 100 days in, the tally stands at one new secretary of energy (plus the promise to nominate a deputy soon) and looming budget ambiguity.
What the program hasn’t got with roughly 7 percent of Trump’s first term in the rear-view is a nominee to lead the Office of Environmental Management (EM). That puts this administration behind the pace set by Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who both had nominated a full-time assistant secretary for environmental management by this point in their first terms (though neither got one confirmed in their initial 100 days as commander-in-chief).
That makes acting environmental management boss Sue Cange more likely to stay on into the summer. Obama needed until May to get Ines Triay instilled at the top of the EM org chart, while it took Bush until July to secure Jessie Hill Roberson’s place there. Keeping Cange in the top spot for now might sit well with industry, members of which have praised her long experience in the DOE weapons complex.
Multiple sources familiar with the administration’s thinking have said Trump plans to fill vacant agency posts from the top down, including at DOE. The administration took a step on April 3 when it announced its intent to nominate lobbyist and former DOE policy man Dan Brouillette as deputy energy secretary.
Intention, however, does not equate to actually delivering a deputy DOE secretary nomination to the Hill: something that, again, Obama and Bush had already done by this point in their first terms.
Meanwhile, a source in Washington said former Oak Ridge site contractor John “Rick” Dearholt, who this spring got and then lost a job interview with Perry for the top EM job, has fallen somewhat out of favor at DOE headquarters.
Dearholt did not reply to requests for comment this week. He did attend at least one DOE networking event in Washington in the waning weeks of Trump’s first 100 days.
The top EM job is the only one in the office that requires Senate confirmation. While the Trump administration lifted its ban on federal hiring toward the end of its first 100 days, the White House has said it may leave existing vacancies in the bureaucracy open.
Despite the administration’s lack of progress nominating a permanent EM leader, the biggest source of angst at the office could actually be the fiscal 2018 budget the Trump administration has proposed.
The White House’s proposed 2018 budget of about $6.5 billion for EM is some $500 million more than the 2017 budget. While that’s the largest inflation-adjusted budget for the office in nearly a decade, some Environmental Management personnel are nervous the White House’s proposal, if approved by Congress, would only amount to more work with less funding to pay for it. That is according to one source close to the office who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
In March, the Trump administration released a preliminary budget blueprint that prescribed the $500-million increase for EM in the budget year starting Oct. 1. The funding was to be used in part for “addressing excess facilities to support modernization of the nuclear security enterprise,” according to the blueprint.
Excess facilities include those the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) does not need for active nuclear weapons programs, but which the semiautonomous agency still maintains at its own expense. While EM must eventually take on responsibility for tearing down these facilities, the office has historically argued against doing so without an accompanying funding increase from Congress.
“In the past, EM fought NNSA on taking facilities without NNSA being responsible for some of the work,” said the source, who cited conversations with EM personnel. But during Trump’s first 100 days, “this does not seem to be happening.”
Meanwhile, new Energy Secretary Rick Perry has spent plenty of the first 100 days beating the drum for the administration’s all-of-the-above “America First” energy policy, which includes nuclear waste only insofar as nuclear power plants produce it.
However, Perry has has also made time to visit, or at least correspond, with lawmakers whose jurisdictions include both defense and civilian nuclear waste.
These include House appropriator Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), whose district includes DOE’s Oak Ridge site; Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a champion of the agency’s Portsmouth site in Piketon; and Energy authorizer Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who this week held a hearing on a 45-page draft bill he crafted to help DOE restart its application to license Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a dual-stream civil-military nuclear-waste repository.
Perry also recently sent another strong signal that the Trump administration is girding for a long fight with Nevada over Yucca.
On Tuesday, Perry told Shimkus “the importance of resuming the licensing process became even clearer during my recent tour of the Yucca Mountain site.” Perry made a pilgrimage to the hotly contested corner of Nye County, Nev., a few days after the Trump administration proposed spending some part of $120 million in fiscal 2018 to resume DOE’s Yucca license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Obama administration canceled DOE’s Yucca license application in 2010.
Lake Barrett, the former head of DOE’s defunct Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told Weapons Complex Monitor the Trump administration’s first 100 days have been “unconventional” overall, but “exceptionally clear and effective” with regard to the future of Yucca and U.S. nuclear waste.
Still, the onetime DOE official said he was “concerned with the administration being able to get ‘boots on the ground” with DOE personnel, and contractor teams in place to implement all the critical detailed work that has to be done” at Yucca.
Along with spent nuclear fuel from U.S. power reactors, Yucca would, if constructed, be the final destination for defense high-level waste from EM cleanup, rendering redundant the Defense Waste Repository proposed by the Obama administration during its final days in power.
Also during the first 100 days, three major Environmental Management procurements fell about a month behind schedule.
Transition to a new contract for demolition and remediation of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky was to begin March 23. Likewise, DOE had planned to start transitioning to a new legacy cleanup contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico on April 2, according to the agency’s final solicitations for the work. Both cleanup contracts would run for 10 years, including options.
Likewise, DOE announced Thursday it would keep Savannah River Remediation as the prime liquid waste contractor at the Savanna River site in South Carolina for another six months, through Dec. 31. The contract was supposed to expire June 30, but DOE said it needed more time to evaluate the bids it received for a follow-on pact.
If the change in administration had anything to do with these delays, nobody’s confirming it. DOE started much of its work on these procurements well before election day, let alone inauguration day. Still, industry sources have acknowledged some minor lethargy in the Environmental Management office’s procurement apparatus for most of Trump’s first 100 days.
In summation, other than sending a signal that it might squeeze more juice from EM by giving the office responsibility for some excess NNSA facilities, the Trump administration did not really put its signature on the nation’s Cold War cleanup program during its first 100 days.
Stay tuned though; there are 1,360 more days to go.