The top two lawmakers on the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee aren’t fans of a House plan to move management of two major National Nuclear Security Administration projects, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility and the Uranium Processing Facility, to the Pentagon, and they expressed their discontent in a recent letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). The Senate Armed Services Committee began marking up the FY2013 Defense Authorization Act yesterday; provisions in the House version of the bill would move management of the multi-billion-dollar projects. But Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) suggested that the Pentagon doesn’t have experience building one-of-a-kind nuclear facilities and the proposal would pit the projects at against other military construction projects in the Pentagon’s budget. “We believe NNSA must do a better job managing large construction projects, but the solution is not shifting responsibility to another agency,” Feinstein and Alexander wrote.
Plus, Feinstein and Alexander have their own plan to improve management of the projects, which includes quarterly Congressional oversight sessions involving federal and contractor officials as well as the Government Accountability Office and increased use of Pentagon expertise. “Senator Feinstein and I are committed to aggressive oversight of the NNSA construction process,” Alexander said during a Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the FY2013 Military Construction/Veterans Affairs bill Tuesday. “We believe these big energy projects have been growing too much in their cost.”
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