D

Summaries of the Study’s Four Interim Reports

EXCERPT FROM THE SUMMARY OF THE STUDY’S FIRST REPORT¹

Many previous reports have emphasized the importance of defining and implementing clear roles, responsibilities, authorities, and accountability within the nuclear security enterprise. Those studies found that overlapping and poorly defined functions and authorities have fostered inefficient and overly risk-averse procedures and cultures within DOE and NNSA. Furthermore, they noted that the lack of clear allocation of responsibilities between the M&O contractors and their federal sponsors has contributed to a significant deterioration in their relationship.

The existence of burdensome practices that limit the efficiency of work in the nuclear security enterprise has also been noted by many previous reports. Elements in the field are subject to oversight by a multiplicity of parties and policies—not only those of DOE and NNSA, but also those of the DOE Inspector General, DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessment, the relevant NNSA field office, program offices at NNSA, and other federal and nonfederal agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Defense, state and local regulators, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and so on. The resulting excessive and uncoordinated oversight—through management processes and through inspections, audits, reviews, site visits, and data calls—fuels inefficiencies, per past reports. Balancing the burden and value of necessary oversight has not been approached systematically, and it could be.

At a higher level, addressing the issues noted in reports such as that from the Augustine-Mies study required the nuclear security enterprise to embark on a program of large-scale change. Experience with change in many organizations has shown that successfully achieving and sustaining improvements to

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¹ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration, 2017, Report 1 on Tracking and Assessing Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 2–4.

effectiveness, efficiency, and culture across the nuclear security enterprise will require sustained effort and an iterative process. Many management and governance changes have been recommended for DOE and NNSA over the years by many experts and committees, and yet sustained effective change has not been achieved. The FY 2016 NDAA noted that correcting the long-standing governance and management problems afflicting NNSA and the nuclear security enterprise would require “personal engagement by senior leaders, a clear plan, and mechanisms for ensuring follow-through and accountability.”² Thus, an approach that explicitly prioritizes sustainable change is necessary to the accomplishment of NNSA’s mission, especially in partnership with its M&O contractors.

In this beginning stage of its study, the panel was impressed to see that long-standing governance and management issues in the nuclear security enterprise have received focused attention over the past 1 to 2 years. The direct involvement of the DOE Secretary and NNSA Administrator has been very valuable and absolutely necessary for this endeavor. In particular, the establishment of an NNSA Office of Policy to serve as a nexus for change management is an important element. It is critical that this momentum be sustained—a challenging requirement given the transition in top leadership and future uncertainty regarding funding and priorities. In fact, for the purpose of clarifying roles, responsibilities, authorities, and accountability—a task that is foundational to addressing other governance and management challenges—the panel believes greater urgency should be demonstrated. For example, although the need for clarification was identified in 2014 or earlier, a new governance construct was not released until 2016, after which a working group was established to resolve implementation details, which is ongoing. Further, an important open question is whether these initial changes are having the desired effect. This first report can assess only the very beginning of what may be a long trajectory.

The panel arrived at the following findings and recommendations, which are numbered here as they are numbered in the full report:

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² National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, H.R. 1735, 114th Cong. (2015–2016).

EXCERPT FROM THE SUMMARY OF THE STUDY’S SECOND REPORT³

While the panel sees promise in several of the [NNSA] activities it reviewed, it strongly concludes that those activities are not rooted in an adequate foundation of strategic thinking. With the release of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review and the appointment of a new NNSA Administrator, NNSA is faced with an excellent opportunity—and challenge—to move from a tactical to a strategic approach for executing

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³ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration, 2018, Report 2 on Tracking and Assessing Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 1–3.

the critical mission of the enterprise. This report calls for NNSA to create two plans expeditiously: (1) an integrated strategic plan for the entire nuclear security enterprise, focused on mission execution, and (2) a more complete and better grounded plan to guide the ongoing program of governance and management reform. The emphasis in both cases must be on creating a strategic vision that is clearly connected to mission. This is not a call to develop new processes and reports per se, which should follow only once clear and well-rationalized direction has been set.

One of the goals of the strategy should be to ensure that the strategies of the various organizations in the enterprise are integrated and aligned. The strategy should focus on mission-related issues but should also address management issues such as those raised in the Augustine-Mies report. The Administrator should “own” the resulting strategy and take responsibility for promoting it throughout the enterprise by articulating what it means for each organization and encouraging discussions that lead to a shared vision and culture.

Ongoing governance and management improvements should continue while the enterprise strategic plan is being developed. The panel found, however, that the current implementation plan that is meant to steer governance and management reform is inadequate for that task:

An adequate plan to steer governance and management reform should include the following elements:

1. A well-articulated statement of the intended concept of operations and goals (e.g., mission focus, simplicity, and clarity, as well as alignment of resources, organizations, and incentives) and what the intended result will be;
2. A plan for how to achieve the goals and intended results;
3. Active commitment to the goals and vision by senior-most leadership (at both NNSA and DOE);
4. A plan for how to accomplish the change, including centralized leadership and decentralized implementation;
5. Active involvement and engagement of personnel across the enterprise in planning and achieving the change;

6. Regularly scheduled reviews of progress against predetermined measures of effectiveness—with a visible cadence and a sense of urgency—that are conveyed across the enterprise and course corrections to be made as needed to accomplish the preset goals; and
7. A plan for communication and reinforcement of the desired attributes of the change through training, leadership activities, performance reviews, and ongoing continuous improvement programs.

This implementation plan and the activities described in it will combine to create a path toward major change.

Of the many actions under way to improve governance and management, the new process to improve site governance appears quite promising:

However, overall the efforts to reform governance and management are greatly hampered by a lack of data and other objective evidence:

The panel makes one specific recommendation regarding data collection, both because knowledge of workforce attitudes is fundamental and because relevant survey information may already exist:

These recommendations should be acted on quickly and aggressively.

EXCERPT FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE STUDY’S THIRD REPORT⁴

The past year brought important changes to NNSA and the nuclear security enterprise. The 2018 release of the Nuclear Posture Review provided a renewed clarity of purpose, and ambitious goals and timelines, which in turn led to an increase in overall funding. A new Administrator was sworn in late in February 2018, as was a new Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs (NA-10) more recently. The Administrator has taken a number of steps that appear to have placed NNSA on a promising path toward remedying the governance and management problems that have been flagged by so many reports. She has pushed energetically for partnership and mission focus throughout the enterprise, modeling healthy relationships between the government and its management and operating partners, which in turn may be reducing some transactional oversight. She has worked toward healthier relationships with the Department of Defense (DoD) and with the rest of the Department of Energy. In accordance with the panel’s 2018 recommendation for better strategic planning, she is working to improve practices in that area. It now appears that the building blocks for essential change are slowly coming together.

However, the panel remains concerned with the lack of urgency, metrics, and institutionalization; progress is heavily dependent on the individuals involved. NNSA leadership has yet to put in place the institutional structures needed for further progress and to sustain success, starting with documentation and directives. Some of this is in preparation but not available for the panel’s examination. NNSA has yet to identify the metrics that will be needed to monitor and drive progress over time.

The management and governance reforms needed in NNSA constitute a culture change, and culture change requires consistent, sustained leadership in order to take root and to last. An appointed focal point for change management other than the Administrator is essential for NNSA.

The panel makes the following recommendations in this report:

In addition to these new recommendations, the panel’s recommendations in its first two reports are still relevant and timely. The change management leader should revisit those recommendations and the panel’s other guidance as a foundation for action.

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⁴ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration, 2019, Report 3 on Tracking and Assessing Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 1–2.

EXCERPT FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE STUDY’S FOURTH REPORT⁵

As it approaches its conclusion later this year, the Panel to Track and Assess Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise, established by Congress in 2016, offers three recommendations to sustain the improvements seen to date across the enterprise … That enterprise consists of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plus a large, distributed system of laboratories, production plants, and other sites that are staffed by personnel working under management and operating contracts.

The first two of these recommendations deal with leadership. As noted in a number of external studies over two decades—more than 50 by one count⁶—the nuclear security enterprise has long been criticized as being poorly governed and managed. For example, the congressionally mandated report A New Foundation for the Nuclear Enterprise (hereafter, the “Augustine-Mies report”), released in November 2014, concluded “The existing governance structures and many of the practices of the [nuclear security] enterprise are inefficient and ineffective, thereby putting the entire enterprise at risk over the long term.”⁷

As noted in the panel’s previous report (issued in February 2019), the release of the Nuclear Posture Review in 2018 and increasing budgets provided a renewed impetus to the enterprise, along with a heavy workload and ambitious timelines. The current NNSA Administrator was sworn in early that year, and she hit the ground running. Her strong leadership of the enterprise included an emphasis on improving governance and management. She has pushed for, and modeled, much of what is needed to change culture and ensure a well-managed enterprise.

However, the panel is well aware of the scale of this challenge and the multiyear timelines required for culture change such as the ongoing reform of governance and management. The panel worries that today’s state of progress is fragile and very dependent on the top leadership team, the installment of which was a necessary precursor to change. The current NNSA Administrator has for 2 years pushed energetically to adjust NNSA’s governance and management of the enterprise, but the panel is very conscious of the fact that the average tenure of NNSA Administrators over the past 20 years has been just 3.7 years. Recognizing the value of greater continuity of leadership in such a complex and technical organization, the Augustine-Mies report⁸ recommended that the NNSA Administrator’s position should be changed to a fixed-term position. After reviewing the rationale presented by the Augustine-Mies report, considering other positions in the federal government that have fixed terms, and discussing options with select individuals with knowledge of such positions, the panel agrees that a change in the position’s term should be made.

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⁵ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration, 2020, Report 4 on Tracking and Assessing Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 1–3.

⁶ Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories, 2015, Securing America’s Future: Realizing the Potential of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories: Final Report of the Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories, https://energy.gov/labcommission/downloads/final-report-commission-review-effectiveness-national-energy-laboratories, p. vi.

⁷ Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, 2014, A New Foundation for the Nuclear Enterprise: Report of the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, http://cdn.knoxblogs.com/atomiccity/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2014/12/Governance.pdf, p. ix.

⁸ Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, 2014, p. 28.

This recommended action might also minimize gaps between confirmed Administrators (which have averaged 247 days over the past four transitions) by reducing the chance of those transitions occurring during the months following a Presidential Inauguration, when substantial delays are most likely to occur. Even though Acting Administrators provide leadership between confirmed Administrators, gaps are undesirable. The second recommendation regarding leadership involves steps the Administrator should take quickly to help ensure that current progress in government and management is institutionalized.

In 2019, NNSA released three strategic documents to guide its work, including a framework for governance and management. Subsequent discussions between the panel and at least two dozen senior NNSA leaders indicated their unanimous support for the Administrator’s main messages about governance and management, and the associated culture that is desired. That culture will be characterized by a spirit of “One NNSA,” in which all members of the enterprise understand their role in achieving the mission and working together with a shared purpose—their roles and responsibilities are clear, they practice risk management rather than risk avoidance, and the guiding principle for management will be “Getting to Yes,” while ensuring the safety and security of the enterprise.

During 2019, multiple steps have been taken toward institutionalizing the desired governance and management changes, which is heartening. What has yet to occur—not surprisingly, given the magnitude of the desired culture change—is for the new principles to be fully operationalized. That is a multistep process of communication, codification (in some cases), and translation of general principles into guidance that is useful to the day-to-day actions of people at all levels throughout the enterprise. Given the fact mentioned above about the relatively short average tenure of NNSA Administrators, the panel remains concerned (as it was a year ago) about the pace of progress and limited sense of urgency, the lack of metrics, and the remaining need for institutionalization. Progress is still heavily dependent on the top individuals who are pushing for change.

Accordingly, the panel makes the following recommendation:

The panel envisions that the challenge of institutionalizing high-level governance and management changes—of driving those messages down into the entire enterprise workforce and adjusting processes and written guidance so that the desired culture becomes ingrained—will require effort from managers across the enterprise. So the role of the accountable change management leader is to motivate, delegate, and monitor, not to shoulder all the tasks. The change leader also needs to keep attention on attaining the desired culture; operationalizing and documenting new practices must not become ends in themselves.

Additional thoughts about the change management leader’s responsibilities are found in the panel’s third report.⁹

Following the 2018 release of the Nuclear Posture Review, there has been a rapid increase in workload across the nuclear security enterprise, especially in connection with life-extension programs and the development of plutonium pit production capabilities. The panel felt it was important to check whether these highly visible activities, with their ambitious timelines, are having undesirable effects on the ability of the nuclear security enterprise to carry out the long-term research that sustains and builds the more generic science and engineering (S&E) capabilities needed by the enterprise. That long-term research is not normally tied to a specific near-term deliverable, but strong S&E capabilities create new options for addressing near-term deliverables while also providing tools that will be important to the enterprise further in the future.

Through three site visits in 2019 to the NNSA laboratories, panel members participated in free-ranging and frank discussions with over 90 researchers at varying levels of seniority. These interactions overall showed that research to support those S&E capabilities continues to receive attention and priority, and that the laboratories’ scientists and engineers continue to produce valuable work. However, a primary observation arising from these visits is that near-term demands and some administrative issues are stressing this work by severely limiting the time that researchers can devote to deep and sustained creative thinking. Moreover, top research leadership at the three laboratories did not seem to fully recognize the amount of stress felt by those researchers. Accordingly, the panel makes the following recommendation:

In addition to these new recommendations, the panel’s recommendations in its first three reports are still relevant and timely. The change management leader should revisit those recommendations and the panel’s other past guidance as a foundation for action.

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⁹ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration, 2019, Report 3 on Tracking and Assessing Governance and Management Reform in the Nuclear Security Enterprise, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., p. 24.