Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
10/3/2014
The National Nuclear Security Administration needs to be integrated with the rest of the Department of Energy not only because of its important national security work with the nuclear weapons stockpile but also because of its nonproliferation and emergency response work, outgoing Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman said during remarks at the Wilson Center in Washington this week. The comments by Poneman come as several panels are studying the NNSA and its governance structure, and while Poneman declined to offer specifics as he prepared to leave his position, he hinted that he believed the semi-autonomous agency should remain intertwined with DOE. “The NNSA remains absolutely critical to us in terms of both the preservation of our deterrent—safe secure and effective—and the critical role it plays in emergency response—they did a fabulous role in Fukushima—and all the stuff in nonproliferation and locking own nuclear materials. But it does also need to be integrated in a way that … we need to work that seam of the energy piece and the national security and nonproliferation piece,” he said.
Poneman is formally leaving DOE this week after serving as Deputy Secretary for five years. His replacement, former White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Arms Control Liz Sherwood-Randall, will take over as Deputy Energy Secretary Oct. 6, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a message to employees this week.
NNSA Governance Panel Close to Releasing Recommendations
A 12-member Congressionally mandated panel examining the governance of the NNSA is close to releasing its final recommendations. Co-Chairman Norm Augustine told NS&D Monitor last month that it was being debated whether to release the panel’s final report before or after the mid-term elections in early November. NS&D Monitor previously reported that the panel is preparing to call for the authority of the NNSA to be strengthened within the Department of Energy as a potential fix for the agency’s woes. Congress, which convened the panel as a solution to disagreements between House and Senate authorizers over efforts to reform NNSA, has called on the panel to be “bold” in its recommendations. The panel unveiled its initial findings earlier this year, calling the creation of the semi-autonomous NNSA a “failed experiment.”
Augustine said the group’s recommendations will come in three categories: specific fixes involving contracting and program management, cultural issues, and organizational questions. Augustine noted that Congress has emphasized the organizational questions. “We’ve said before that they’re not unimportant but they’re by far the least important in our opinion of the recommendations we’re going to make,” Augustine said. He said the recommendations involving cultural change at the agency were the “most difficult to deal with but often the most important.”
