By George Lobsenz
Without any prior public review or comment, the Energy Department has launched a safety and security “reform” plan that seeks to improve operational productivity by eliminating “low-value, burdensome” rules and giving its contractors more flexibility to “tailor” requirements to their liking without “excessive” federal oversight.
The plan is outlined in a March 16 memo from Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman to top DoE officials that says the department’s Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS)- -the office responsible for independent oversight of DOE field offices and contractors–will lead the effort aimed at “streamlining requirements and eliminating directives that do not add value to safety and security.
“Success will be measured through near-term relief from specific low-value, burdensome requirements as well as longer-term streamlining of requirements that will lead to measurable productivity improvements,” Poneman added.
The five-page memo, which was disclosed by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog group, does not provide any examples of the types of safety and security regulations that are targeted for elimination.
However, the memo makes clear that key decisions on safety and security requirements and oversight are to be made by DOE line management and contractors–who are also responsible for meeting operational deadlines.
“To facilitate effective mission accomplishment, decision-making authorities are pushed to the lowest appropriate level of contractor and federal management, considering hazards, risks and performance history,” Poneman said. “Authority and accountability for safety rests with line management, including responsibility for oversight.”
The memo has a virtually identical statement about giving DoE line management responsibility for security decisions and oversight.
As for HSS, the memo provides a less-than-aggressive role, saying: “HSS’s approach to safety regulatory oversight and enforcement supports line management’s efforts to affect the conduct and priorities of their contractors.”
Poneman’s plan appears to respond to repeated complaints by some DoE contractors–and some outside review panels focused on the department’s nuclear weapons complex–that many DOE safety and security regulations are too prescriptive and impose too much red tape, leading to costly operational delays. More broadly, the critics have suggested that DOE is too risk-averse and that contractors are subject to suffocating and redundant oversight.
Poneman’s memo echoes some of those critiques, saying at one point that the reform plan seeks to ensure that contractors will be “provided the flexibility to tailor and implement safety programs in light of their situation without excessive federal oversight or overly prescriptive departmental regulations.”
The memo contains a similar line about allowing contractors to tailor security requirements and develop their own “risk- and performance-based protection strategies.”
However, the new plan comes against a backdrop of continuing safety problems at several DOE sites, most notably, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous DOE agency that runs the department’s nuclear weapons complex.
While Poneman’s memo calls for giving contractors more flexibility on safety, NNSA’s site office at Los Alamos recently wrote a memo–also disclosed by POGO–castigating the lab’s operator for recurring safety problems and failure to take effective corrective actions.
“Active and aggressive management of event investigations, corrective actions, and effective reviews do not appear to be occurring,” said the Jan. 20 memo to Los Alamos National Security LLC (LANS), which operates Los Alamos for NNSA. “Management commitment to improving the safety oprogrammatic operations is not universally evident across the site.”
POGO officials said Poneman’s new plan would only lessen safety oversight of LANS and other DOE contractors.
“This confirms our worst fears,” POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian said in a statement. “Without adult supervision, we can be sure the labs will be even less serious about safety and security.”
More fundamentally, auditors with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) two years warned the department against giving prime authority on nuclear safety to DoE and NNSA program offices and site officials.
In particular, the auditors noted that that DOE line management and contractors have an inherent conflict of interest in balancing safety and security against operational efficiency. This is because the tougher the safety and security measures taken, the more likely it is that operations will be delayed and more money will be needed for safety and security–potentially preventing line management and contractors from meeting the operational deadlines by which their performance is judged and their pay is determined.
Interestingly, by empowering line management and contractors to make safety decisions, Poneman’s memo shows the Obama administration is embracing the same safety oversight philosophy adopted by DoE under the Bush administration–an approach that was sharply criticized by the GAO in an October 2008 study.
The GAO report, requested by three congressional Democrats, found that HSS failed to provide effective independent oversight of nuclear safety at DoE sites because it lacked on-site inspectors and in-house expertise needed to spot safety problems.
The GAO said HSS’s shortcomings were “largely attributable to DOE’s decision that some responsibilities and resources of HSS and prior oversight offices more appropriately reside in the program offices.
“…DOE views HSS’s role as secondary to the program offices in addressing recurring nuclear safety violations. Nearly all these shortcomings are in part caused by DOE’s desire to strengthen oversight by the program offices, with HSS providing assistance to them in accomplishing their responsibilities.”
GAO also said that as long as DoE self-regulates on nuclear safety, the department “needs HSS to be more involved in nuclear safety oversight because a key objective of independent oversight is to avoid the potential conflicts of interest that are inherent in program office oversight.”
DoE’s plan also clashes with long-standing safety philosophy in the nuclear industry, which calls for safety oversight to be conducted by officials separate and apart from line managers at nuclear plants.
And the same conflict of interest between operational goals and safety has haunted DooE’s past, with the department over the last decade acknowledging that it put nuclear weapons production ahead of the health of its nuclear weapons workers during the Cold War by knowingly failing to spend money or time on measures to protect workers from excessive radiation and toxic exposures.