WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE: D.O.E.’S MISMANAGEMENT OF NUCLEAR CLEAN-UP FACILITATES DENUCLEARIZATION AGENDA

(Washington, DC): At 2:00 p.m. this afternoon, the
Senate Armed Services Committee will examine one of the Clinton
Energy Department’s dirty little secrets: Under Hazel O’Leary,
the program for cleaning up the detritus of the nuclear weapons
complex’s fifty years of production has become a black hole — a
chronically mismanaged account into which untold billions are
being diverted at the expense of the weapons program with
precious little to show for it.

A series of reports critical of Mrs. O’Leary’s Environmental
Management (EM) program have been issued over the past year. The
General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office and,
most recently, a February 1995 study by the Department’s own Task
Force on Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy
National Laboratories, have raised serious questions about EM’s
execution of its ambitious clean-up objectives. For example, the
GAO noted that “DOE has received about $23 billion for
environmental management since 1989,…little clean-up has
resulted.” CBO reported last May that DOE “has been
criticized for inefficiency and inaction in its clean-up
efforts…[and] has been severely criticized because of the small
amount of visible clean-up that has been accomplished.” The
Task Force study, headed by industrialist Robert Galvin, found
that “these conclusions are shared by many senior DOE
personnel, both within and outside the program.”

The Task Force went on to critique the EM program for
exhibiting a “syndrome common to large bureaucracies: risk
aversion.” It found that this syndrome:

“has become widespread and severe in the EM program.
Its symptoms are an unwillingness to alter familiar behavior
patterns, to stick with unproductive or failing procedures,
to enhance tendencies for excessive resource allocation and
regulation and to oppose innovation. It is an important
element in sustaining unproductive patterns of work.”

The chairman of the Galvin Committee’s subcommittee on
Environmental Management Programs was Dr. Henry Kendall, an MIT
professor and Nobel Laureate. The Department of Energy
nonetheless responded to this critique by asserting that it was
“weakened by flaws in information and analysis,” a
function of “incorrect assumptions or misconceptions about
the National Laboratories’ role in the Environmental Management
program.” Dr. Kendall, Mr. Galvin and Thomas Grumbly, the
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management are to
appear together at today’s Senate hearing.

The Bottom Line

As the Armed Services Committee struggles to establish
whether vast sums are being wasted by the Department of Energy in
the name of environmental clean-up, it must take up a related,
and far more momentous, question: Since the budget for the Atomic
Energy Defense Account (the so-called “053 Account”)
represents essentially a zero-sum game between the DOE Defense
Programs and Environmental Management activities, to what extent
does Mrs. O’Leary’s tendency to throw money at the EM program
contribute to — if not provide the pretext for — her grievous
under-funding of the Department’s responsibilities for
maintaining a viable nuclear weapons complex?

Make no mistake about it: That is precisely the agenda of Dan
Reicher, Secretary O’Leary’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a former
executive director of the radical Natural Resources Defense
Council, and other avowed anti-nuclear activists among the
Department’s senior management. The Center for Security Policy
urges the Committee to examine with care this and other troubling
aspects of the Clinton Administration’s
“denuclearization” agenda. ⁽¹⁾

(1) For more on this irresponsible agenda,
see the attached column by the
Center’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., published in today’s Washington
Times.