Editorial: Axing NNSA Should Be Among Options

It’s past time to take a hard look at what to do with the U.S. agency that manages the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.

In a rare bit of bipartisan common sense, New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat, and Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who is retiring at the end of the year, have introduced an amendment to the pending Defense Authorization Bill seeking to establish an advisory panel to take just such a look at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Udall wants the panel to come up with ways to reform the NNSA, which is responsible for the security of the nation’s nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation and naval reactor programs. It oversees the U.S. nuclear laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Together they employ about 20,000 people here.

The New Mexico labs and other NNSA installations have been plagued with untenable cost overruns, spiraling budgets and bureaucracies mired in red tape.

Cases in point:

⋄  A recent report from DOE internal auditors put the DOE on the Inspector General’s “watch list” for its inability to find cost-effective ways to modernize the aging nuclear weapons complex infrastructure.

⋄  A badly needed new plutonium lab at LANL was shelved after its cost estimate escalated from $800 million in 2007 to as high as $6 billion in 2010.

⋄  A new security system at LANL’s Technical Area 55, where plutonium research is done and nuclear bomb parts are made, doesn’t work. The seven-year $213 million project was scheduled to be finished early next year. Instead, it will be delayed indefinitely. The cost to fix it: a mere $41 million.

If the bipartisan panel is established, one option it should consider is eliminating the NNSA, which Congress established as a separate agency within the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000 after several scandals and security breaches.

Although Udall’s amendment is not aimed at dismantling the NNSA, New Mexico’s other senator, Jeff Bingaman, who is retiring at the end of the year, says that idea is worth considering.

“I’ve always had problems with the NNSA as another level of bureaucracy between the secretary of energy and the labs,” Bingaman told the Journal earlier this month. “It doesn’t give me any heartburn to think that we would revisit the decision to set up the NNSA. I think it would make some sense.”

The agency’s track record is appalling. Not only is it a questionable duplication to the DOE, it has turned the nuclear weapons complex into a bureaucratic quagmire that defies attempts at efficiency. Its inability to move forward with essential projects is itself a threat to our nuclear security.

Congress should approve the panel but demand a report with clear recommendations that either put this turkey on the chopping block or figure out how to make it earn its feed.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.