Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, offered a defense of his controversial package of National Nuclear Security Administration reform provisions that are part of the House-passed FY2013 Defense Authorization Act in a speech to the Energy Facility Contractors Group yesterday, as well as a warning. “If these reforms don’t work—or vested interests stand in the way—I and many of my colleagues are receptive to the more drastic reforms we have heard talked about,” Turner said, referencing the possibility that semi-autonomous NNSA could be completely moved out of the Department of Energy. “One way or another, we will not allow DOE’s suffocating and entrenched bureaucracy to continue to slowly strangle the weapons program.”
In an effort to increase efficiency and productivity at the agency, language authored by Turner in the authorization bill would increase the autonomy of the NNSA, eliminate DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security from the weapons complex, move the agency toward performance-based oversight and way from transaction-based oversight, push the agency to streamline directives and regulations, and shift management of major construction projects to the Department of Defense. The provisions have met resistance from Democrats in Congress, unions and the Obama Administration, but Turner said the reform was especially necessary as the agency moves to modernize the nation’s weapons complex and arsenal. “Every dollar that goes toward redundant, burdensome, and non-value-added bureaucracy is a dollar that is only hurting the mission,” Turner said. “NNSA must become what its original legislation intended it to be: a lean, effective, agile, and well-managed organization that is focused on meeting the nuclear security needs of the country. Not on meeting the needs of the bureaucracy. For the sake of our nuclear deterrent—not to mention our national fiscal crisis—we need to start addressing these long-standing, well-documented problems.”
Turner called the reform language a “starting point” and suggested that he and other Republicans are open to other reform proposals, both from the Senate, which did not address most of the reform provisions in its version of the authorization bill, and the Administration. Turner and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) sought proposals from the Administration on its own reform package in a May 18 letter. NNSA Principal Deputy Administrator Neile Miller told NW&M Monitor yesterday that the Administration would respond to the letter from Turner and McKeon, but she also defended the agency’s own efforts at reform. That includes efforts to shore up project management, consolidate the management and operating contracts at Y-12 and Pantex, streamline directives and regulations, and create a more unified agency by reorganizing the site office reporting structure. “I know the stuff we’re doing. We don’t actually need legislation to do anything that we’re doing,” Miller said. “We have a lot of stuff we not only have done, are doing, and will be doing. I think managing an organization outside the organization is a bit difficult, and questionable.” During her EFCOG speech, she suggested that change was already beginning to take root at the agency, but she said it’s most noticeable from inside the agency. “The case I was making is there is actually quite a lot that has changed. If you’re sort of not that close to the management of it, how would you know? What you know is the individual pieces that various people who have one concern or another bring you. So you have a reaction to that. I can understand that but I don’t think that makes for how you then manage an organization.”
