Alissa Tabirian and Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
11/13/2015
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed a new version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2016, sending it to President Barack Obama, who is expected to sign the legislation. The new bill that authorizes $607 billion in defense spending was passed in the House last week following an agreement between Congress and the White House that cut $5 billion in previously authorized defense funding. Following Obama’s veto of the prior version of the NDAA over objections to the use of overseas contingency operations funds, the president on Nov. 2 signed legislation that increases defense and domestic spending caps for two years and raises the debt limit through March 2017.
In total, the bill would authorize $5.1 billion for defense environmental cleanup, approximately $100 million less than Obama’s fiscal 2016 funding request. The legislation would also require Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz by March 31 to draw up a plan to transfer oversight for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s decontamination and decommissioning facilities from NNSA’s associate administrator for nuclear security to the Department of Energy’s assistant secretary for environmental management by March 31, 2019. That plan would comprise D&D facilities deemed nonoperational as of Sept. 30, 2015. The legislation would also require the energy secretary to issue a cost-benefit analysis of whether defense nuclear facilities that require D&D should be kept in cold shutdown to await demolition or whether cleanup should be accelerated to save long-term storage costs. This report would be required every even-numbered calendar year, starting on March 31, 2016 and ending on March 31, 2026.
The energy secretary would also be required to submit root cause analyses to the two congressional defense committees when “certain programs” experience a significant cost overrun.
Moreover, the bill would require the energy secretary to select an “owner’s agent” to assist with oversight of the still-unfinished Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state. That third party would report specifically to the secretary, who would then incorporate any additional views and submit the report to Congress.
WTP has drawn recent public scrutiny over reported issues such as development deficiencies, most recently with a team of experts finding hundreds of design flaws that together could pose a serious risk to the operation of a key facility within that plant, according to a report leaked in August.
Alongside award-fee evaluations of DOE nuclear facility management and operations contracts conducted in 2016, and any even-numbered year thereafter, the bill would require an assessment of the adequacy of emergency preparedness of WTP, including “an assessment of the seniority level of employees and contractors of [DOE] that participate in emergency preparedness exercises at that facility,” states the congressional report released alongside the revised bill. Although the congressional report language alludes to an assessment of DOE employees, the report also states that such evaluations would focus on the “performance and participation of the management and operating contractor employees and not on senior employees of the Department of Energy, since the laboratory award fee is based on performance of the contractor employees.”
Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.) highlighted NDAA provisions benefitting New Mexico in statements released Tuesday. These include a technology transfer initiative that creates off-national-lab-campus microlabs to give academia and local communities “direct access to equipment, facilities, and personnel of national laboratories,” Heinrich’s statement says. The statements also note a provision that allows national lab directors to appropriate 7 percent of their lab’s budget to the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program, which supports national security projects and recruitment and retention of staff at the labs.
Congress must now pass an omnibus appropriations bill to avoid a government shutdown when the current continuing resolution expires on Dec. 11. However, Senate Democrats have blocked the fiscal 2016 defense and energy and water appropriations bills – the latter funds national defense nuclear weapons activities – in an effort to stall spending bills until a long-term budget deal is reached.
