New agency is proposed to run weapons labs

A new federal agency should be formed to take over and manage the nuclear weapons laboratories, an independent task force commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration has concluded. The panel, organized as a task force of the Henry L. Stimson Center, an arms control think tank, determined that NNSA, the semi-autonomous weapons arm of the US Department of Energy (DOE), can no longer afford to maintain the labs’ scientific infrastructures by itself as its budget steadily declines and with no new weapons design or manufacture on the horizon.

The proposed new agency would spread responsibility for the labs’ upkeep among the various departments that use them, the task force said. The existing contracting arrangements through which the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence agencies, and others pay for research performed at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories and at the Nevada Test Site are “short-term” and “piecemeal,” and they provide neither sufficient resources nor overarching missions for the labs, the panel said.

“Science on the cheap is no longer a viable model for the labs,” said Donald Kerrick, the task force cochair and a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration. David Overskei, a consultant and task force member, said that the amount of work that the labs perform for other agencies is considerable, second only to the weapons program itself, and “far exceeds” what they do for other DOE programs.

The Stimson report is the first of several analyses due to be completed this year that could have far-reaching implications for the NNSA. The Obama administration has ordered DOE and the DOD to weigh the costs and benefits of shifting control of the NNSA to the Pentagon. A congressional commission chaired by former defense secretary William Perry is expected to release its recommendations for a new weapons policy within weeks. And the DOD is preparing a revised policy that will spell out the role that it sees for nuclear weapons in the current strategic environment.

Two key lawmakers—Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), who chairs the strategic forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee—have announced their opposition to relocating the NNSA. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has on several occasions deflected questions about his views on the matter. But Chu does insist that the labs not be separated from the rest of the DOE weapons complex if any reorganization does occur. Historically, the weapons complex has deliberately been kept outside military control.

The Stimson panel, whose operation was partially funded by the NNSA, said that the NNSA never achieved the degree of autonomy lawmakers envisioned when it was formed in 2000 in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee affair and other security lapses at Los Alamos. As a result, the labs now must cope with two bureaucracies instead of one. Task force cochair Frances Fragos Townsend, former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush, said she was “absolutely stunned by the hurdles the labs had to overcome” with the DOE bureaucracy. The task force found that the labs have often circumvented the NNSA’s micromanagement by going straight to Congress.

For their part, DOE and the NNSA are increasingly squeezed by the budgetary requirements for maintaining the scientific skills and infrastructure necessary to meet nuclear weapons needs set by the Pentagon. The labs require both top-down coordination and a political consensus for their weapons mission, the report says, but their leadership has increasingly been stifled by the constraints and red tape that the NNSA has imposed.

Townsend said the panel quickly rejected the idea of moving the NNSA to the DOD for fear that the nuclear mission would receive less attention if it became entangled in the Pentagon bureaucracy. But the task force’s proposal to create a national security applications agency, which would manage the labs, could create an even more unwieldy governance structure for the labs. The task force recommended that each major user of the labs—including the Justice and State departments—contribute to core operations funding, and that the new agency be governed by a board comprising a senior official from each of the user agencies, to be chaired by Vice President Biden.