DOE Employees Request Congressional Investigation

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has received a letter addressed to Congress from “current and former DOE employees” (pdf) calling for an investigation into persistent mismanagement at the NNSA’s Los Alamos Site Office (LASO). Their concerns include understaffing, cronyism, constant and haphazard reorganizations, and inadequate training of employees. The letter draws from a wealth of knowledge and experience, and the issues raised deserve to be taken seriously:

The "we" who have authored this letter constitute a group of current and former employees of the Los Alamos Site Office (LASO) and the New Mexico DOE Complex. As a group our personnel have a sum of more that 100 years of experience. We can say with confidence that we have never in our careers, either in public service or the private sector witnessed such gross mismanagement as seen at the Los Alamos Site Office.

Last year, the University of California won, along with Bechtel, a questionable competition to continue their mismanagement of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with the stated purpose of correcting the problems that they, in part, created. The NNSA initiated a “pilot program” shortly thereafter that handed over contract oversight responsibility to the contractor itself. This program rendered the Site Office virtually powerless to correct problems and it’s at the root of many of the issues discussed in the letter to Congress.

The "pilot program" makes little sense considering the track records of the contractors. The University of California already had a proven history of mismanagement at Los Alamos before the DOE decided to open their contract to competitive bidding. Bechtel, UC’s current partner, not only has its own checkered contract history, but has often used its political clout to actively dodge accountability.

Thus it's no surprise that safety and security debacles continue unabated:  the partial blinding of an employee with a laser, incidents of losing classified information (e.g., CREM DE METH), americium contamination in four states that cost the governement $1 million in clean-up costs, and a nine-month shutdown of the lab due to lax security and safety that cost taxpayers roughly $500 million.

The employee letter states:

Given past problems, one must question why the LASO was thought to be the appropriate site for implementation of a pilot of reduced contractor oversight as a way of doing business. Why select a site that is-known to have had a history of serious management problems and serious problems with business systems. Audits and review of other documentation will verify the lack of a viable business system at LANL.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman last fall, POGO also addressed the Site Office’s “pilot program.”

The problem is clear: the lack of qualified safety basis experts in the Site Offices; the fact that DOE does not verify whether the safety directions created by the federal DOE overseers have been implemented by the contractor; and the decision-makers at DOE Headquarters do not support their people in the field when there is a conflict between the contractor and DOE. For instance, Headquarters assured the Los Alamos site office that it would get additional staff to work on safety verification.  However, that additional staff was never provided. Furthermore, former Los Alamos safety director Chris Steele was transferred because of complaints from the contractor, who said he was being too tough on them. The solution is not self-policing by the contractor: it is to have a sufficient number of adequately-qualified safety experts, and the support for those experts from DOE Headquarters. Oversight of contractors is an inherently governmental function.

On January 30 of this year, POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian testified before a House subcommittee once again reiterating that the situation has yet to improve. She stated, “In fact, I fear things may actually be getting worse. Not only has NNSA has failed to correct security issues, but the agency has determined that it wants even less oversight of Los Alamos and has implemented a new pilot program in which oversight has been handed over to the contractor itself.”

Many of the DOE employees’ concerns are widely known and pre-date the “pilot program.” Retired Admiral Henry Chiles, presiding over a Security Workforce Panel, released a report in 2004 (pdf) that documented personnel problems within NNSA, particularly those related to understaffing. The following year, retired Admiral Richard Mies led an independent review of NNSA security operations at the national laboratories. His subsequent report (pdf) also detailed an extensive lack of proper training, oversight, and accountability.

Yet while paying lip-service to these and other reports’ recommendations, the DOE and NNSA have failed to correct the underlying problems. At the same hearing where POGO’s Brian noted that the situations may be getting worse, NNSA Acting Administrator Thomas D’Agostino persisted in the belief (pdf) that improvements were already underway. His conclusion:

We have received a number of reports from the Government Accountability Office, the DOE Inspector General, and the DOE Office of Independent Oversight. Like the Chiles and Mies studies, we have addressed the recommendations in these reports and have made major improvements.

The recent letter from “current and former DOE employees” proves D’Agostino’s conclusion to be false. POGO supports their request for a congressional investigation into the matter. The “pilot program” has been a disaster and should be terminated immediately. The entire senior management staff should also be held accountable for LANL and LASO's failures.

-- John Pruett

Comments

[Craig]

Oversight of the contractor running a DOE site is a Federal responsibility, but running the contractor's safety program is not. Chris Steele was not the Los Alamos Lab Safety Director, he was just in the DOE Oversight role for safety, just like an OSHA office director has oversight for enforcement of federal safety rules at a private company (i.e., Ford, Boeing, IBM, etc) but they are not running the company's safety program. DOE has so blurred the lines of responsibilities as to make real oversight and accountability of safety management by contractors impossible. Responsibility for contractor employee safety oversight and enforcement at DOE/NNSA sites needs to be stripped from DOE/NNSA and returned to OSHA (federal or state) and NRC.

[Larry L.]

UC does not run Los Alamos Lab. A for profit private company - Los Alamos National Security, LLC - now runs the lab. UC is a partner in this company, but the employees are no longer UC employees nor does the Lab Director report to the UC President. UC ran the lab as a not for profit and only got about $8 million a year to manage a 10,000 employee site with a $2.2 Billion annual budget. While the lab's budget remains the same, the new company now gets $80 million a year to do the same job UC was doing. Only the US Govt could justify this shell game to the taxpayers.

Bottom line is the new contract arrangement is a huge fraud on the Lab employees and taxpayers. Moving the Lab (and soon its sister lab - Lawrence Livermore National Lab) from "not for profit" UC management model to a "for profit" corporate model and forcing it to be a separate entity from its parent company has been a complete mess. Stripping the lab employees of their UC employment, benefits, and various state employee protections has destroyed morale at the Lab, except for the new "executive class" and their huge corporate paychecks. At Livermore Lab its has done even more damage by forcing unnecessary, unexpected, and negative changes to the management of safety and security - especially the loss of the state run UC fire department and dedicated UC police department investigation unit assigned to the Lab.

Congress should immediately step in and suspend the contract awarding process for Lawrence Livermore Lab. Congress should direct the GAO to review and assess the new management model at Los Alamos Lab. Congress should direct DOE/NNSA to keep UC management in place at Livermore Lab until all of the independent assessments of the effectiveness and impacts of the new Los Alamos Lab management structure/contract have occurred. Based on the findings of these assessments/reviews Congress should direct DOE/NNSA to rewrite the Livermore Lab Request for Proposal (RFP) so it does not force UC (or any bidder) to create a fake front company to bid on Livermore Lab, and start the contract bidding process over from scratch. Congress should not allow the huge problems created by the ill-conceived NNSA RFP and subsequent change in the management model at Los Alamos Lab to also destroy the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.