Executive Summary
Congress directed1 the Secretary of Energy to enter into an arrangement with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) to provide advice on enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of defense environmental cleanup activities managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM), particularly with respect to program and project management practices (see Box 1.1 in Chapter 1). This advice is provided in two National Academies’ reports, a Phase 1 report (NASEM, 2021) and the present Phase 2 report.
The “overarching” finding and recommendation from this Phase 2 report, provided in Chapter 6, focus on the cleanup program’s growing liabilities and steps that should be taken to reduce them.
OVERARCHING FINDING: The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) has spent about $200 billion over the past three decades on cleanup, yet unmet cleanup liabilities have increased to more than $400 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2021. At the most recent annual appropriations level (about $7.9 billion for FY2022), the cleanup mission will not be completed for another six decades. DOE-EM’s inability to extinguish cleanup liability is attributable to at least the following six factors: (1) technical challenges in executing the cleanup mission; (2) constraints created by the requirements and preferences of multiple federal, state, and local stakeholders, including longstanding, inflexible agreements in need of updating to reflect current
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1 National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, Public Law 115-232.
technical understanding of site characteristics, cleanup status, and future cleanup strategies and ultimate site uses; (3) lack of clearly defined strategic goals, objectives, and outcomes for completing the overall cleanup mission and assessing progress; (4) DOE-EM’s short-term, risk-averse focus on planning and implementing cleanup tasks absent a longer-term strategic portfolio-management framework; (5) cleanup program funding uncertainties and restrictions; and (6) frequent gaps and changes in top-level DOE-EM management and changes in DOE-EM reporting relationships within DOE.
OVERARCHING RECOMMENDATION: Several actions should be taken by Congress, the Secretary of Energy, and others to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the cleanup program and reduce cleanup liabilities:
- Congress should (1) authorize clearly defined strategic goals, objectives, and outcomes for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management’s (DOE-EM’s) cleanup program; (2) authorize and require DOE-EM to implement the committee-recommended portfolio-management framework for site cleanup; (3) provide flexibility in spending levels across cleanup sites so this framework can function more effectively and efficiently; and (4) enhance accountability for performance by requiring DOE-EM to provide regular reports on progress in implementing this framework and estimating its impacts on future cleanup liabilities.
- The Secretary of Energy, working with the administration and Congress, should (1) establish more predictable multi-year funding levels for the cleanup program and (2) improve the continuity of DOE-EM leadership and DOE-EM reporting relationships within DOE.
- The Secretary of Energy, working with federal and state regulators and with the support of the administration and Congress, should review, update, and restructure site-level regulatory agreements as needed.
The other recommendations in this report focus on project management, contracting, and technology development (Chapter 3); project outcomes and prioritization strategies (Chapter 4); and portfolio management and contractor oversight (Chapter 5). They call on DOE-EM and others to
- Incorporate procedural requirements for compliance with the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act into DOE Order 413.3B (Recommendation A-3, Chapter 3).
- Implement the recommendations from a previous National Academies report for improving technology development across the cleanup program, focusing initially on reducing costs and schedules for cleaning up Hanford tank wastes (Recommendation A-4, Chapter 3).
- Develop outcomes-based performance measures for achievement of site end states and extinguishment of site cleanup liabilities (Recommendation B-1, Chapter 4).
- Incorporate schedule performance measures into project baselines, including a change-management process and metrics to track and document schedule slippages (Recommendation B-2, Chapter 4).
- Develop performance-based measures to quantify the schema in the DOE-EM Program Management Protocol (Recommendation B-3, Chapter 4).
- Adopt clear and consistent definitions of portfolio, programs, and projects consistent with Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act guidelines (Recommendation C-1, Chapter 5).
- Expand the definition of “projects” to include all capital asset projects (as defined in OMB Circular A-11) and manage them using DOE Order 413.3B (Recommendation C-2, Chapter 5).
- Develop and implement a portfolio-based strategy for managing the cleanup program that reflects the national priorities of the cleanup mission (Recommendation C-3, Chapter 5).
- Strengthen the contractor evaluation oversight system under the End State Contracting Model (Recommendation C-4, Chapter 5).
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