The top Republican on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee said yesterday he is still expecting major changes to the National Nuclear Security Administration following the expected release next month of recommendations from a Congressional advisory panel on governance of the nuclear enterprise, despite new Administrator Frank Klotz saying Tuesday that he rejected the characterization of NNSA by the panel as a “failed experiment.” Speaking at the Capitol Hill Club yesterday, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said he was not surprised by Klotz’s comments defending the agency against interim findings from the Congressional advisory panel on governance of the nuclear enterprise, but he said he was confident Klotz would not shy away from taking action in an attempt to fix the agency. “You don’t go in there as the new guy running the place saying it’s already gone to heck,” Rogers said, later telling NS&D Monitor after his speech: “From my conversations with him, he is going to be very receptive to what the advisory committee recommends. While I think he’s trying to be a leader and keep his workforce thinking positive and optimistic, I think you’re going to see him do big, bold things. [Rep.] Jim Cooper [D-Tenn.] and I spent a lot of time with him. He’s a smart guy, very capable. I don’t think he’s going to be limiting himself to the easy.”
Former Strategic Command chief Richard Mies, the co-chair of the advisory panel, responded to Klotz’s comments a day later, calling the reference to NNSA as a “failed experiment” a “mischaracterization” of the panel’s interim findings. “That was not what our report really said or intended to say,” Mies said at the Energy Facility Contractors Group meeting yesterday. “What we said was it was a failed experiment in governance reform in that the NNSA Act which created NNSA, the implementation of that act, never achieved what it was intended to. … We acknowledged there were a lot of significant world class achievements within NNSA and we don’t want to diminish or not recognize those attributes.”
Mies acknowledged, however, that NNSA has “some obvious hurdles to overcome both on the Congressional side, the OMB side, outside of DOE,” noting that the biggest change that has to happen in NNSA is “cultural.” Such a change, he said, would “enable DOE to engender more trust which I think is the element that has really handicapped DOE in their relationships with their customers and their stakeholders and particularly the Congress. To rebuild that trust I think takes time and long-term commitment.”
Jobs