Executive Summary

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. (See Box ES.1 below for the panel’s statement of task.) 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 count¹—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.”²

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 report³ 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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¹ 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-energylaboratories, p. vi.

² 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?_ga=1.83182294.1320535883.1415285934, p. ix.

³ Ibid., p. 28.

Recommendation. Congress should consider amending the National Nuclear Security Act to convert the position of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator to a fixed term, still as a Presidential appointment subject to Senate confirmation. (Chapter 4)

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:

Recommendation. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator should promptly designate a career senior executive as the accountable change management leader for the next several years. That person’s responsibilities should include development and dissemination of documents that operationalize and institutionalize the desired governance and management practices and culture change more generally. These documents should be released within 6 months. The change management leader should actively monitor progress toward institutionalization of these changes. (Chapter 2)

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.⁴

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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, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, p. 24.

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:

Recommendation. The Directors of the three laboratories, with National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) assistance as needed, should periodically assess the environment for work that sustains the enterprise’s core science and engineering (S&E) capabilities. This assessment should include input from the researchers engaged in that work, and identify steps needed to strengthen the environment. (Chapter 3)

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.