Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
1/16/2015
While only two years remain for the Obama Administration, the White House appears to be moving forward with a second nomination for the sole remaining vacant Under Secretary position at the Department of Energy that would oversee the Office of Environmental Management. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said late this week that “we will be coming forward with another very, very well qualified nominee” for the Under Secretary of Energy for Management and Performance position. Moniz did not go into detail as to who is being considered for the position or when the nomination would be announced.
The Under Secretary for Management and Performance position was created in the summer of 2013 as part of a broader reorganization of DOE that also entailed combining the Under Secretary of Science and Under Secretary of Energy into one position, among other changes. Along with EM, the new Under Secretary for Management and Performance oversees the Office of Legacy Management and several other support offices. DOE’s third under secretary position covers nuclear security and also serves as head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. “So now we have three under secretaries, each of whom, in my view, is assigned clear responsibility for the three major mission areas of accomplishment—energy and science, nuclear security and management and performance. So elevating that with an enterprise-wide view has been central,” Moniz said this week in remarks hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration.
The White House initially nominated NASA Chief Financial Officer Beth Robinson for the Under Secretary for Management and Performance position. While she twice cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Robinson’s nomination was never taken up by the full Senate for consideration, and last summer the White House withdrew her nomination. “I must say we were disappointed that we had an outstanding nominee who after getting tired of waiting for the Senate withdrew, but we’ve had a very good deputy under secretary to establish the organization,” Moniz said.
Project Mgmt. Changes to Provide ‘Situational Awareness at the Highest Levels’
Moniz also reiterated DOE’s latest steps to improve project management, which include what Department officials have described as a strengthened Energy Systems Acquisition Advisory Board (ESAAB) and the creation of a new Project Management Risk Committee consisting of senior project managers, both of which will be tasked with performing more frequent reviews of projects. The ESAAB, which is led by the Deputy Secretary of Energy and includes senior Department officials, will now meet quarterly and examine all projects with a total cost of at least $100 million. Previously, the board met when a project reached a specific Critical Decision point. The new Project Management Risk Committee will meet biweekly to examine projects and consist of senior project managers, including one from DOE’s Loan Program office. “I think we have what will prove to be a very effective system for situational awareness at the highest levels of the Department going forward relying upon our key project people,” Moniz said.
DOE has been working for years to improve its project management capabilities, with both EM and the NNSA having come under heavy scrutiny for cost-and-schedule increases seen on major projects. In early 2013, the Government Accountability Office partially removed EM and NNSA from its biannual “high-risk” list, narrowing its remaining concerns to EM’s and NNSA’s major construction projects and high-value management and operating contracts. DOE’s latest efforts to further improve project management are based on the recommendations made by a Contract and Project Management working group Moniz commissioned in the summer of 2013. In a report released last month, the working group identified as areas in need of improvement insufficient front-end planning, inadequate funding, a lack of sufficient independent oversight and “unclear ownership” of projects within the Department.
Outlining his views on DOE’s previous project management difficulties, Moniz said, “I think there were, in my view, insufficient mechanisms for really working enterprise-wide to understand risk, understand opportunities, understand good practices. Having said that, I do think we should keep in perspective that a lot of projects have happened very, very well. We wouldn’t be off the GAO high risk list if that weren’t the case. There clearly have been some major problems with the very, very big one of a kind projects.”
DOE Also Looking for Increased Accountability From Contractors
Along with increasing accountability within DOE for major projects, the Department will be looking for increased accountability from its contractors that perform the work going forward, John MacWilliams, a senior advisor to Moniz, said at this week’s event. “Not only do we have to focus within the Department on improving our own processes and structures, we have to then be able to communicate all the way through the implementation chain to the contractors. … We do need to increase accountability, and accountability means fee. It means the ability, on the one hand, to lose fee, material amounts of fee and we recently had a situation [do] that,” MacWilliams said in an apparent reference to Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the managing contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which recently earned only approximately 10 percent of the fee available for FY 2014 because of performance issues.
MacWilliams went on to say, “There also should be an opportunity for good performance to realize benefits. I’m obviously coming from the private sector—I certainly believe in reward for performance—but there has to be accountability, and we’ve had situations where we keep rebaselining projects and somehow there’s no recognition that costs are spiraling and fees keep getting earned. So we need to change that.”
