WASHINGTON, DC. — In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday, Vice Admiral Scott Pappano, President Donald Trump’s pick for principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, was asked by Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) if he thought the agency’s workforce should increase.
“What you’re going to be tasked with, you and others, is going to require a huge infrastructure investment,” Wicker said. “Am I correct, you’re going to need more workforce, by a great deal, to get this done?”
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) also expressed concerns over the agency’s workforce, saying the staff level is down 8 or 9% since January. Ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) workforce, which was at 2,000 before getting cuts from the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency, is now 1,650.
Pappano told Wicker in person that he would need to “look across the enterprise blueprint” to “figure out where the barriers are to get that [infrastructure investment] done with urgency,” and look into “the workforce that goes along with that.”
Meanwhile, in Pappano’s prepared remarks, he said that “in terms of workforce, the biggest challenges facing NNSA are recruitment and retention of highly skilled technical employees.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) specifically asked Pappano how he would address the challenge of recruitment and retention, to which Pappano replied he would “advocate for the men and women in NNSA and the laboratories,” understanding it’s a “unique skillset” and that he would try to do everything he could to “attract, recruit, train, retain” those workers. Former Rep. Brandon Williams, Trump’s nominee to be NSNA administrator, said similarly in his confirmation hearing in early April.
The principal deputy administrator is the second highest position in the NNSA, under the administrator or the undersecretary of energy.
Also of note, King told Pappano he has “not been overly impressed, I guess I would say, with the execution” of programs such as pit production. Pappano told King he shares King’s “concern for urgency.”
Section 3120 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act put into law that NNSA produce 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where plutonium pits were first produced during the Manhattan Project in 1945. Acting NNSA Administrator Teresa Robbins said at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit in January that the goal was now to have the “capability” to make 30 pits at Los Alamos “in or near 2028.”
