The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) ordered 2,000 custom lapel pins at a cost of about $5.45 each from Medalcraft Mint, of Green Bay, Wis., to mark the agency’s 20th anniversary.
The NNSA did not specify, in its award to Medalcraft Mint, the people to whom it plans to distribute the pins. There are enough for all of the agency’s current federal employees, and then some, in the order.
Congress partially split the semiautonomous NNSA off from the broader Department of Energy two decades ago, over the objections of the Bill Clinton administration. The agency got its own procurement department, its own legal and communications offices, and an administrator for senior nuclear weapons managers to report to, instead of reporting to the secretary of energy.
Twenty years later, with a federal workforce of nearly 1,750 and around 44,000 contract employees, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty touts the agency as an “Atomic Energy Commission 2.0.” The allusion to DOE’s robustly funded, fully independent predecessor agency, which controlled defense and civilian nuclear programs during the Cold War, draws the occasional arched eyebrow from former commission workers and nuclear-complex watchers.
But a fifth of the way into the new millennium, the NNSA’s performance has evidently validated Congress’ trust. Members of the Armed Services committees in both chambers have in recent years fended off repeated attempts from some lawmakers to put the NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs back under the secretary of energy’s direct control.
In its time, the NNSA has transitioned from closing down U.S. nuclear weapons production infrastructure in the wake of the Cold War, to helping Russia prevent the wholesale plundering of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex, to facing the music about the cost and effort required to bring production infrastructure back online in order to perform the slate of nuclear weapons refurbishments laid out by the Barack Obama administration in 2016.
In Gordon-Hagerty, who started in February 2018, the administration also got its first female boss. If she retired tomorrow, she would be neither the shortest-serving nor the longest-serving administrator.
It would take a while before she could surpass the record set by former administrator Thomas D’Agostino, who served nearly five-and-a-half years in the top spot. Then-President George W. Bush appointed D’Agostino, who served most of his time at NNSA in the Obama administration.
The first NNSA administrator, John Gordon, was the shortest-tenured at just over two years. Gordon died in April.
