Government Executive - Authors - Douglas P. Guarino

Report: Two Years After Y-12 Break-In, U.S. Nuclear Security Still 'Chaotic'

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 16:49:42 -0400

Two years after an 82-year-old nun was able to infiltrate a nuclear weapons site in Tennessee, the U.S. approach to securing such facilities remains "chaotic," a government report released this week suggests.

The report to Congress by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office quotes unnamed National Nuclear Security Administration officials describing the agency's current approach in this manner. "Dysfunctional" is another adjective the unidentified officials have used to characterize the situation, according to the report.

For their part, GAO analysts said the agency's lack of a "clear vision" since the July 2012 incident -- in which the nun and two fellow peace activists went undetected as they approached stores of bomb-grade uranium -- could prove problematic.

"After the Y-12 security breach, NNSA took a number of actions designed to improve its security performance and oversight but did so without first developing a clear vision and path forward for its security program and an implementation strategy, including milestones and responsibilities for carrying them out," the GAO report states.

"For example, NNSA initiated actions to reinstate [Energy Department] security directives, which it had previously replaced with its own security polices; [and] started, then discontinued, a security inspection program and reorganized its headquarters security office twice," the report says.

However, without a clear "road map," the agency "risks putting in place short-lived or ineffective responses to its security problems, on which GAO and others have reported for more than a decade," the report adds.

Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday issued a statement about the GAO report, which also examines NNSA security efforts prior to the Y-12 incident.

"The report confirms the committee's concerns that the 2009 and 2010 security reform efforts, while making some operational and efficiency improvements, may also have increased security risks," the lawmakers said, adding that committee leaders share GAO concerns about a lack of a clear plan going forward.

"We will continue our oversight of DOE and NNSA's security reforms, including GAO's recommendations, to make sure any security improvements can be sustained," according to the statement, issued jointly by Reps. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Tim Murphy, R-Pa.

Upton serves as Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, while Murphy heads the panel's Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. The panel has generally differed with fellow Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee about how best to respond to the Y-12 break-in.

NNSA officials agree with the GAO recommendations, according to the report. They told the study's authors that they have already begun an effort to create a "security road map" for their agency, which they hoped to complete by December.

The GAO authors said the agency response was "encouraging," but added that NNSA should develop an implementation strategy for the road map and regularly monitor its progress.

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Senators Drafting Bill That Could Extend Life of Chemical Security Program

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:01:21 -0400

Senators are working on a bill that could extend the life of a controversial chemical security program, but details still remain under wraps.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee was to mark up what it is calling the "Protecting American Chemical Facilities from Attack Act of 2014" on June 25, but consideration of the measure was ultimately deleted, without explanation, from the agenda of a committee business meeting that day.

A spokeswoman for the panel, which is chaired by Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.), declined to provide details regarding the legislation and how soon it might be unveiled.

Carper's committee held a hearing on the Homeland Security Department's Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards on May 14. During the hearing, Carper said a bill approved in April by the House Homeland Security Committee could serve "as a model for [his panel's] work on this issue between now and the end of the year."

The House legislation is backed by DHS officials, largely because it would provide multiyear authorization for a program that thus far has been renewed annually through the congressional appropriations process. DHS officials have said uncertainty stemming from year-to-year renewals has made it more difficult to regulate chemical facilities.

The House bill does not include provisions that would give the department the authority to require specific security upgrades at facilities. So-called "inherently safer technology" requirements are favored by labor union officials, environmentalists and some Democrats, but are opposed by Republicans and industry officials.

The House legislation would also continue an exemption for water treatment facilities that has been criticized by some Democrats and activist groups. An interagency report released by the Obama administration last month urged Congress to end the exemption.

Carper, during the May 14 hearing, did not indicate whether a Senate bill might include additional provisions meant to address any of these controversies, but he did acknowledge some of the CFATS program's perceived shortcomings.

Last year's fatal explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas "showed that, in some cases, the Department likely isn't aware of some facilities that should be submitting information to the program but are not," Carper said.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office "and other experts have also expressed concern that the department's method for assessing risk for a chemical facility is incomplete," Carper noted.

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Staffers at Nuclear Regulatory Commission Report Backlash After Dissent

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 17:33:13 -0400

Seventy-five percent of Nuclear Regulatory Commission employees who participated in an internal survey said they received poor performance reviews after registering formal objections to agency decisions, a report made public Wednesday says.

For employees that object to policy, technical or administrative statements contained in agency documents working their way up the NRC management chain for approval, the agency has a formal "non-concurrence" process meant to ensure that the concerns of those staffers are heard.

According to the survey, which was conducted last year by the NRC Office of Enforcement, many of those surveyed about their own experience submitting formal objections through the program believed there had been negative consequences to doing so.

In addition to the three quarters of survey participants who reported poor performance reviews after raising objections, 63 percent felt they were excluded from work activities and 25 percent thought they were passed over for promotions.

Meanwhile, 25 percent said they were verbally abused by their supervisors or colleagues after submitting a formal objection, and only 32 percent said their views were fully considered before a decision was made.

The enforcement office report says the NRC inspector general's office was able to substantiate several of the claims of poor performance reviews after raising objections. "Regardless of whether negative consequences actually occurred, staff recognizes that the perception of negative consequences can have a chilling effect on employees and can potentially inhibit them from raising concerns," the report adds.

Speaking at a congressional hearing Wednesday, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said he was concerned that safety and security issues raised by NRC employees are not being adequately considered as the agency grapples with how to revise its regulations following the onset of the Fukushima disaster in 2011.

"Especially post-Fukushima, it's very important that we get this culture to change," Markey said.

In addition to the survey results, Markey said that, during the past year, his staff "has heard from an increasing number of whistleblowers from many different offices at NRC. … They feel that when they step forward to report safety, security or other problems, they are systematically retaliated against."

The commission made the 2014 report public Wednesday evening after Markey cited it during the morning hearing.

NRC spokesman David McIntyre suggested that not all formal staff objections end badly. He noted that Joseph Giiter, chief of the agency's risk analysis division, filed such an objection to a January NRC staff paper regarding how the agency would handle requests from nuclear power plants looking to have their licenses renewed for a second time.

Giiter still holds his management job after objecting to the official staff position that such aging reactors should not have to conduct new assessments of potential risks associated with their continued operation, McIntyre said.

The commission faced fierce questioning on a number of safety and security issues Wednesday, including on whether it would stop exempting shuttered nuclear power plants from certain emergency-planning and security regulations.

In a letter to commission Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane last month, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Markey and three other senators noted that retired U.S. atomic power plants still have significant amounts of nuclear waste at their sites, and likely will for the foreseeable future.

The senators raised concerns that the commission has already exempted 10 such plants from certain emergency rules and questioned whether it was wise to do so in light of the Fukushima disaster and the threat of terrorism. They noted that the commission is expected in the near future to consider applications for similar exemptions from four additional sites.

One of those sites is the San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Diego, which shut down last year amid concerns that it had been operating with defective parts. During Wednesday's hearing, Boxer read from the facility's exemption request, which she said is seeking to "discontinue off-site emergency planning activities" for the surrounding community and "reduce the scope of onsite emergency planning" at the site itself.

According to Boxer, part of the request is to discontinue evacuation planning for the area. "They're basically asking to be let off the hook," she said.

Boxer's staff held up an aerial photo that showed a recent wildfire coming within a half-mile of the San Onofre site, and the senator raised concerns that future blazes could have catastrophic consequences if they reached the facility.

Reading from a 2003 paper co-authored by Macfarlane and two activists, Boxer said land contamination caused by a fire in a plant's spent fuel pool "could be significantly worse than Chernobyl."

Senator David Vitter (R-La.) sought to put the request in a different light, saying that an operational power plant is a "different animal" than one that has shut down.

For her part, Macfarlane said the commission would not exempt the defunct plant from all emergency planning requirements. But she and the other four presidentially appointed commissioners declined to go any further, saying NRC staff was still studying the request.

During the hearing, Boxer also hammered the commissioners over other recent safety and security decisions. Those included one in which they had elected not to require plant operators to speed up the transfer of nuclear waste from the spent-fuel pools and into dry-cask storage containers, which some experts argue are more secure and less vulnerable to fire. The commission voted 4-1 on the issue, with MacFarlane, a Democrat, casting the lone opposition vote.

The senator also released a legal analysis that she said showed the commission was improperly withholdingdocuments pertaining to the San Onofre plant. The analysis, written by a legal expert formally employed by the Congressional Research Service, seeks to rebut legal arguments made by the agency.

MacFarlane "demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of … Congress’s investigatory power in the … matter; misstates the authority of three cited cases dealing with the law on congressional intercession in agency decisionmaking; ignores the overwhelming contrary case law … that is applicable in this situation; and shows a lack of awareness of over 90 years of congressional investigations in which agencies have been consistently obliged to provide documents and testimony," the report by Morton Rosenberg said.

The analysis also argues that Boxer's Environment & Public Works Committee has authority to obtain the documents through "compulsory process."

According to Boxer, the panel will get the material "one way or another."

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House Bill Would Tap Into Nuclear Weapons Fund to Aid Veterans

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 27 May 2014 09:56:08 -0400

The version of the fiscal 2015 defense authorization bill that the House approved Thursday would cut some controversial nuclear weapons spending in a bid to help veterans.

The legislation -- which authorizes but does not appropriate funds for military-related items -- includes two related amendments offered by Representative Dan Kildee, D-Mich. Together they would cut $7.5 million out of the $643 million that the Obama administration requested for controversial efforts to extend the life of B-61 gravity bombs, many of which are stationed in Europe.

The two provisions also would take $7.5 million out of projects to refurbish the Navy's W-76 nuclear warhead -- more than half of the funding boost that the Republican leadership of the House Armed Services Committee had sought to authorize for the program. The bill would allow up to $266.3 million in spending on W-76 refurbishment, still $7.1 million more than the Obama administration requested.

The money -- along with $15 million that would be cut from the Navy's shipbuilding budget -- would fund two initiatives:

One would create "a training program to increase and improve financial literacy and training for incoming and out-going military personnel," according to the legislation. According to a statement Kildee provided to Global Security Newswire, this would help address a problem of "unscrupulous lenders" targeting service members.

The other would require the Pentagon to commission a third-party study meant to "identify deficiencies in the treatment of wounded warriors and offer recommendations to the secretary of Defense and Congress to improve such treatment," the measure states.

The House approval of Kildee's amendments comes amid furor on Capitol Hill over revelations about former service members who died while on a Veterans Affairs waiting list for medical appointments in Phoenix.

According to Kildee's staff, "at a time when our wounded service members are not getting the adequate care they deserve, it is a misplaced priority to spend more money on such nuclear refurbishment programs for outdated weapons systems, especially when the Pentagon has not even asked for it."

The House also approved, by a 224-199 vote, an amendment offered by Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) that would require the Congressional Budget Office to update its report on the projected costs of U.S. nuclear forces on an annual basis. The move follows a report earlier this year by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies arguing that the current plan for modernizing the arsenal is too costly to implement.

The Republican-led House Rules Committee, however, blocked floor debate on an amendment offered by Representatives Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.) calling for more in-depth analysis on the need to maintain all three components of the so-called nuclear triad.

The provision would have required the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office to study the justification and rationale for maintaining the three components, which include bombs that can be dropped by aircraft, along with ballistic missiles both at sea and on land. The measure would also have instructed the GAO study and to identify any excess costs that could be trimmed.

The House approved by voice vote an amendment offered by Representative Steve Daines (R-Mont.) -- whose home state hosts ground-based missile silos -- that would make it "the policy of the United States to operate, sustain and modernize or replace the triad" in its entirety.

The House bill also contains language, to which the White House objects, that would require that every intercontinental ballistic missile silo currently containing a deployed missile be kept operational.

At press time, all of the potential discrepancies with the House bill and the Senate version of the annual defense authorization bill were not yet clear. The Senate Armed Services Committee completed drafting its version of the bill on Thursday, but had not yet released the full text of the legislation.

One apparent difference is that the Senate bill would authorize $365 million for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program -- the entire amount that the Obama administration requested. The CTR program -- which secures and dismantles potential weapons of mass destruction throughout the world that are considered to be a threat to the United States -- would be cut by $10.5 million under the House bill.

Unlike the House bill, the Senate legislation would also provide $346 million -- $145 million more than the administration requested -- to continue construction of a controversial facility in South Carolina that would convert excess bomb-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel. The administration is looking to suspend construction of the facility while it explores other, possibly cheaper, methods of disposing of the plutonium.

Some lawmakers are questioning the administration's cost estimates, however, and have suggested it should be able to make a decision in less than the 18 months it has projected. Senate appropriators at a budget hearing earlier this month gave National Nuclear Security Administration officials two weeks to come up with new ways to make the original mixed-oxide fuel conversion plan cost less.

According to NNSA spokesman Derrick Robinson, administration officials did have a follow-up meeting with Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) last week. It was "a substantive conversation that discussed a range of options and challenges, which included a discussion of MOX costs and options," he said.

Robinson did not provide any revised cost projections.

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Nuclear Weapons Complex Reform Could Mean Pay Cut For Contractors

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 15 May 2014 09:55:21 -0400

The for-profit companies that run the U.S. nuclear weapons complex might have a pay cut in their future, though by how much and exactly when is still unclear.

For decades the complex -- which includes the national laboratories and other facilities responsible for developing and maintaining the nation's atomic arsenal -- operated on a non-profit basis. Taxpayer dollars sunk into it went directly toward scientific work related to weapons development and nonproliferation efforts.

Since the early 2000s, however, the sites have been run by for-profit, limited liability companies. A portion of the annual budget for each facility is set aside as an "incentive fee." The better the job a contractor does managing a facility's work in a given year, the larger the percentage of the total available incentive fee the company gets to take home.

Lately these contracts have been under increased scrutiny due to repeated cost overruns, delays and security failures across the nuclear weapons complex. In one of the most dramatic examples, an 82-year-old nun and two other peace activists in 2012 were able to infiltrate the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where bomb-grade uranium is stored.

Associate Deputy Energy Secretary Bruce Held has been questioning whether what he describes as "large fees" currently paid to manage the weapons sites are the best way to motivate all players involved.

Performance at the national labs might actually improve, the former CIA officer says, if less money went toward the fees meant to motivate the management companies that run the sites, and if more funds went directly to the scientific work that the facilities conduct.

"What motivates the people at the national laboratories is excellence in science and bringing excellence in science to the interest of the nation … They're not motivated by profit incentives," Held told Global Security Newswire in a recent interview. "They're human beings, they need a salary -- you can motivate them at the margins by giving them a pay raise or a pay decrease or something like that -- but their core motivation and what makes them tick is scientific excellence.

"So if I have a choice between a dollar of fee for the … contractor that runs it, or a dollar in lab-directed research and development and I want to motivate scientific excellence, I'd go with" the dollar in lab-directed research and development, Held continued.

It is not completely clear, however, how Held, who says he was coaxed out of retirement from federal service specifically to work on the contracts question, would reconfigure the current for-profit approach.

Held, who completed a 10-month stint as acting head of the Energy Department's semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration last month, advocates for moving toward a "public interest model." He suggests, however, that he and other officials working for Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz are still wrestling with exactly what that means.

One significant change that appears to be in the works is an effort to make the maximum fee potentially available to the contractor smaller, and to have much of that fee be based on a fixed amount.

For example, in fiscal 2012, Los Alamos National Security, a limited liability company formed by Bechtel, Babcock & Wilcox and the University of California, had the potential to earn up to $74.5 million for its management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, roughly 3 percent of the facility's $2 billion budget for that year.

Based on an annual performance evaluation, the government ultimately paid the company $59.7 million, 80 percent of what it could have earned with a perfect performance rating.

In the future, however, a facility like Los Alamos might be paid a fee that is only 1 percent of the site's budget, or closer to $20 million, an NNSA official explains. Most of that fee -- say, $18 million -- would be a fixed, guaranteed payment, meaning only a $2 million portion could be reduced due to less-than-stellar performance.

Another change Energy Department officials are pursuing is one where the fee amount would be fixed over the life of a multiyear contract, rather than having it renegotiated annually, said the NNSA official, who was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly and asked not to be named.

When fees are renegotiated annually "there's not an incentive to reduce your budget because the [larger the] budget, the more fee you get when you're basing your fee on the budget," the NNSA official said. "We're trying to incentivize them to find efficiencies and have a more efficient mission that drives savings."

Under this model, fees paid to the contractor would only be renegotiated on an annual basis if a facility's costs deviated from the president's budget request by more than 10 percent, according to the NNSA official. The semiautonomous Energy Department agency already implemented this change at its Kansas City Plant in Missouri in 2010 when it extended the contract with the Honeywell Corp. to run the facility, the official says.

Held hinted at some of these changes during his brief interview with GSN.

"Sandia [National Laboratories in New Mexico and California -- now run by Lockheed Martin] used to be a dollar a year," Held noted, referring to a prior arrangement in which the University of California and other organizations managed the national labs for a nominal fee.

"We're not going to get back to a dollar a year, but I think maybe we should do a fixed fee, not a percent of turnover. If you have percent of turnover, then you have an incentive to drive up your overall turnover rate."

When, and to what extent, these changes are to occur, is yet to be determined. Current contracts for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are in place until at least 2018, and they include options that could extend them as far out as 2026. The current contract for Sandia, the third major lab, is set to expire this year.

"Typically the best time to [make a change] is when you're awarding a new contract," the NNSA official says. "Once you're in a contract, it’s a negotiation with the contractor you have in place, so it would have to be a bilateral agreement … It's easier in a competition, of course."

How the contractors might react to any changes is still unclear, according to Held.

"We're already engaging" with industry, he said. "We're starting to talk to people but we're not quite there yet."

Los Alamos Laboratory Director Charles McMillan, who also serves as president of the Los Alamos National Security LLC, declined to say much about the issue after a Senate hearing last month, during which he raised concerns about laboratory budget cuts generally.

"I'm not really in a position to comment right now," McMillan told GSN. "I know Bruce [Held] is thinking a lot about those issues, and at some level this is an issue that the government is the one that has to make the decision."

Meanwhile, failures across the nuclear weapons complex -- which, in addition to the Y-12 break-in also include numerous delays and cost overruns to various projects -- have rekindled a long-simmering debate in Congress over how the facilities should be managed.

The Republican leadership of the House Armed Services Committee in recent years has favored legislation that would further limit the Energy Department's oversight of the facilities. Oversight by the department, which owns the sites, was previously scaled back by the creation of the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration in the early 2000s. That move followed a prior string of scandals across the complex.

Republicans on other House committees, along with senators from both parties, largely scuttled major legislative reforms in favor of creating a new congressional advisory panel to first study a broad array of governance issues facing the weapons complex. How to best structure the management contracts is on the agenda of the panel, whose final report is expected this year.

So far, the leaders of the so-called "Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise" have said it is clear that the "'NNSA experiment,' involving creation of the semiautonomous organization, has failed," in a general sense, but they have yet to offer any specific fixes.

Panel Co-Chairman Richard Mies, a retired Navy admiral, said, however, that the group has observed inconsistences in how contracts are structured across Energy Department laboratories, including those that work under its Office of Science and the NNSA sites.

"When you compare all the laboratories across the Energy Department there isn't a kind of standard template for how they're awarded -- what percentage is fixed fee, what percentage is award fee, how much of the fee is a percentage of their budget -- those kind of issues," Mies told GSN. "I think there needs to be some standardization."

Mies said that, in his view, the fee NNSA lab management contractors receive currently "is not exorbitant," however.

"The fee is three percent of the total budget," Mies said. "A standard utility makes a 10 percent profit …

"But there is this inequity where some labs are getting one percent of the budget -- other labs are getting a three percent fee," Mies added. "So, why the difference? Shouldn't there be more consistency and balance? Clearly the difference between fixed fee and award fee makes a difference, as well. We're looking at all of those issues to try to find some reasonable balance."

Panel Co-Chairman Norman Augustine said there are pros and cons to having for-profit companies involved in the management of the NNSA labs.

"With [a DOE Office of Science] lab, they can get a university, which is basically a not-for-profit institution," Augustine told GSN. "But when you're doing manufacturing and managing huge programs -- [those are] not things that universities are very good at.

"So that means you have to get the corporate world involved, and when you bring the corporate world in, they have shareholders they have to accommodate," Augustine added. "They also care about the national interest … but there has to be some reasonable balance and we hope we can strike that."

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Federal Report: Regulatory Confusion Contributed to Texas Chemical Disaster

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 17:46:20 -0400

Before violently exploding and killing 14 people last April, a Texas fertilizer plant first fell through multiple regulatory loopholes -- some real and some likely imagined, a federal advisory panel says.

In a release of some preliminary findings from its investigation into the incident this week, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board noted that under federal law, companies must report the use of chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency considers to be "extremely hazardous substances."

Ammonium nitrate, the substance believed to have caused the deadly 2013 blast, along with some other industrial explosions in recent years, is not on the EPA list, however, the board noted. The board is an independent federal body that investigates chemical incidents and advises regulatory agencies.

The West, Texas, facility did give notice of its use of ammonium nitrate -- under a separate requirement by the same federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act to report the use of those substances deemed "hazardous chemicals" by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But state officials, who are responsible for enforcing the law in Texas, determined -- incorrectly, according to EPA guidelines -- that the facility was exempt from the statute's requisite emergency-planning requirements, the board says.

"This disconnect between the federal and state agencies played a significant role in the lack of emergency planning at West Fertilizer, which left emergency responders and residents unprepared for what occurred on April 17," the board says in a presentation made in the Texas town on Tuesday. "The [board]'s investigation will attempt to address this issue in our final report."

The EPA risk management program -- a separate initiative established under the Clean Air Act -- demands that companies using certain chemicals take steps to prevent accidents from happening in the first place. However, ammonium nitrate is not covered under this program, either.

Following the West disaster, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, urged the agency to adopt a 2002 Chemical Safety Board recommendation to include the substance in the program, but it is unclear how the agency is responding to that request.

Boxer spokeswoman Kate Gilman on Wednesday declined to say whether the agency had complied with the senator's demand for a response by July 2013 regarding the status of the request. EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones did not reply to a request for comment by press time.

The Chemical Safety Board is also raising concerns that there are no federal requirements for volunteer fire departments -- which it says account for nearly 85 percent of all fire departments in the United States -- to develop site-specific pre-incident plans with the operators of chemical plants that handle hazardous materials. Some federal agencies and private industry groups have issued some voluntary guidelines, but they are vague, according to the board.

"Effective site-specific, pre-incident planning is needed to guide the firefighters on any initial and subsequent actions while on ground at a scene of a fire," the Tuesday presentation says.

The board's findings come as two separate debates on how best to improve the safety and security of chemical facilities are taking place on Capitol Hill and within the Obama administration.

A House subcommittee earlier this month moved legislation meant to extend the life of the Homeland Security Department's chemical-security program that -- for the first time in years -- appears to have the support of both House committees with jurisdiction over the issue.

Democrats and labor groups are raising concerns, however, that the legislation does not do enough to address some of the perceived problems with the department's Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards. Among the complaints are that the standards exempt water treatment plants and cannot require a facility to take any specific measures to improve safety and security. The West facility qualified for regulation under the standards, but Homeland Security officials were unaware of its existence at the time it exploded last year.

As a result of the incident, President Obama issued an executive order establishing an interagency working group that is considering possible changes to federal chemical safety and security rules. Industry officials are raising concerns that under the order, the Environmental Protection Agency might require companies to assess whether they can switch to the use of technology that is "inherently" safer.

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Reliance on Industry May Have Led to Texas Oversight Lapse, Official Says

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 13:10:14 -0400

A reliance on industry to provide information about facilities that handle dangerous chemicals might have contributed to the Homeland Security Department’s failure to regulate the site of a major explosion in Texas earlier this year, a DHS official suggested Wednesday.

“It is absolutely a shared responsibility,” David Wulf, director of the department’s infrastructure security compliance division, told Global Security Newswire. “Facilities that are in the business of dealing with … high-risk chemicals … have an obligation to do that reporting, just as I have an obligation to file our taxes with the IRS.

“The IRS doesn’t necessarily come out and look for us,” he added. “At the same time, we’re committed to doing all we can to get word out” that these reporting requirements exist, he said.

During formal remarks at a chemical-sector security conference, Wulf said DHS officials have “a pretty high degree of certainty that we have reached facilities that are members of the national trade associations” and informed them of their responsibility to comply with federal Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards, which require companies to submit site security plans if they handle a significant amount of dangerous chemicals.

He noted, however, that it appears that the West, Texas, fertilizer plant that exploded in April -- killing 14 and leveling nearby homes and businesses –--was not a member of such a trade group.

Since the incident, Wulf said, the department has “doubled down” on its efforts to reach facilities that qualify for regulation. It recently exchanged lists of known facilities with state agencies in Texas in an effort to identify sites known to the state but not to the federal department and vice versa. DHS officials have also renewed efforts to compare notes about relevant facilities with other federal agencies involved with chemical-safety regulation, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Wulf said.

The Homeland Security Department had previously attempted such information sharing with the EPA Risk Management Program several years ago when the CFATS program was just getting under way, according to Wulf. The initial effort was largely unsuccessful due to technical differences between the two agencies’ databases. However, this time around, the department has launched a more advanced information-technology program aimed making the exchange more useful.

The move appears aimed at addressing concerns that the Texas facility was not on the Homeland Security Department’s radar, even though other regulatory agencies were aware the facility had been handling significant quantities of dangerous chemicals.

A risk-management plan filed with the Environmental Protection Agency said the facility possessed up to 54,000 pounds of toxic anhydrous ammonia -- more than five times the CFATS threshold of 10,000 pounds. In addition, the plant last year reported to the Texas State Health Services Department that it possessed 270 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate -- more than 1,000 times the CFATS reporting threshold of 400 pounds.

On Thursday, Joan O'Hara, deputy chief counsel to the House Homeland Security Committee, told conference attendees the panel would host a hearing to further examine why the DHS program has not reached certain "outlier" facilities such as the Texas plant.

The West, Texas, incident has been the focus of the latest criticism directed at the DHS program. Prior to the incident, the initiative had faced more than a year’s worth of congressional scrutiny pertaining to a leaked internal memo that revealed a litany of management problems, including a failure to conduct onsite inspections and approve facility security plans.

On Wednesday, Wulf, who co-authored the memo, sought to portray the CFATS program as one that had “turned a corner.” He noted that as of last July, the program had given preliminary approval to only 50 site-security plans, conducted only 10 inspections and had not granted final approval to a single site-security plan since it was first authorized by Congress in 2007. One year later, the department has provided preliminary approval for “upwards of 500” site-security plans, has conducted more than 50 inspections and has granted final approval for 160 site-security plans.

The program has also completed 90 of 95 “action items” that the internal memo had identified as needed to get the program back on track, Wulf said.

Labor and environmental groups argue, however, that even if it runs smoothly, the DHS program lacks the legal teeth needed to ensure that domestic chemical security is adequate. They note that the law authorizing the program does not allow the department to require any specific security improvements and argue that the Environmental Protection Agency should use its own authorities under the Clean Air Act to craft more stringent rules.

In recent weeks, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has also pushed for stronger EPA action on chemical security. Boxer, who has oversight authority over the agency as chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has offered harsh criticism over what she says is an inadequate response to the Texas tragedy.

Republicans and major industry groups have long opposed further EPA involvement in the chemical security arena, arguing that the agency’s existing regulations -- along with those of the Homeland Security Department, Occupational Health and Safety Administration and various state agencies -- are sufficient.

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NNSA Defends Contract Extensions but Congressional Scrutiny Expected

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:41:28 -0400

The National Nuclear Security Administration is defending itself against charges that it renewed lucrative deals for undeserving contractors, but the issue is likely to come up at congressional oversight hearings in the coming months, sources say.

The semiautonomous Energy Department agency’s Fiscal 2012 Performance Evaluation Reports, released on March 1, contain evidence that NNSA officials made exceptions that enabled the extension of contracts pertaining to at least two nuclear arms research laboratories, according to watchdog organizations.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico said last week that earning at least 80 percent of an “at-risk incentive award fee is the threshold for eligibility for a one-year contract extension” at NNSA sites. The firm that manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico “received only 68 percent of its possible at-risk award fee of $46.5 million for the last budget year, primarily because of cost overruns that ballooned a security project from $213 million to $254 million,” according to a press releasefrom the organization.

Nonetheless, Neile Miller, then the agency’s top award determining official and now its acting chief, overrode a decision by NNSA site personnel and granted Los Alamos National Security a waiver that extends its contract through fiscal 2018, the group said.

A similar situation occurred regarding the contract of a consortium -- consisting of Bechtel National, the University of California, Babcock and Wilcox, the Washington Division of URS and Battelle -- that manages the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the group said.

Lawrence Livermore National Security earned 78 percent of its “available at-risk incentive fee, still short of the gateway of 80 percent,” the group said. “However, acting NNSA Administrator Neile Miller overrode that too, giving the lab contractor an extra $541,527 to help it meet the 80 percent mark and extending the management contract another year.”

A separate release from the California-based Tri-Valley CAREs complains that the exception is noted in a “one-paragraph addendum” to the fiscal year report that “does not provide a rationale” for the waiver. The group called for “greater oversight of taxpayers’ money and a more open and transparent contract process.”

Nuclear Watch New Mexico cited the spiraling cost of the Los Alamos security system for its Technical Area 55 as one of a number of NNSA projects in which expenses have exceeded projections.

The organization said that to avoid future cost overruns, the government should emphasize conservative life-extension programs for nuclear warheads that do not involve the creation of new military capabilities. In addition to costing more, introducing “untested changes to existing nuclear weapons” could “erode confidence in their reliability,” the group suggested.

Congress should also “pull the plug on exorbitant failed projects” such as Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility and an unfinished plant for turning nuclear-weapon plutonium into reactor fuel at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the group says.

Agency spokesman Josh McConaha defended Miller’s decisions and suggested that the watchdog groups might be missing the bigger picture.

“Contractors are given multiple assignments each year and each is important,” McConaha toldGlobal Security Newswire. “The ratings given the contractor must reflect all of the results for all of these activities and cannot be based on just one. Doing so would be short-sighted and leave out not just a lot of context, but a lot of important work.”

A congressional staffer who follows the issue said, though, the concerns raised by the watchdog groups are “valid.” The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said lawmakers will likely raise the matter during NNSA oversight hearings this year.

Congress has previously attempted to address lack of transparency and other issues between assessments for different NNSA sites.

The fiscal 2013 National Defense Authorization Act contains language requiring the NNSA administrator to “take appropriate actions to make available to the public, to the maximum extent practicable, contractor performance evaluations conducted by the administration of management and operating contractors of the nuclear security enterprise that results in the award of an award fee to the contractor concerned.”

According to the law, the performance evaluations should be “in a common format that facilitates comparisons of performance evaluations between and among similar management and operating contracts.”

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has also raised concerns about the extension of NNSA contracts for management of its facilities. Assistant Director Allison Bawden said last month that the inconsistent NNSA enforcement of contract terms could be problematic, the Nuclear Weapons Materials and Complex Monitor reported.

“What kind of message do these actions send to potential bidders on future … contracts?” Bawden said. “Will they take the contract structures as seriously?”

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Decision on NNSA Furloughs Likely Within First Month of Sequester

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:55:01 -0500

Acting National Nuclear Security Administration chief Neile Miller said on Thursday it might take one month before it becomes clear whether agency employees will have to be furloughed as a result of the federal budget sequester expected to take effect on Friday.

In a Thursday memo to NNSA employees, Miller noted that her “senior leadership team has been working very hard to implement cost-cutting measures across the enterprise in order to mitigate the effects of sequester, should it occur. In addition we are working closely with our lab and plant partners to assess potential impacts on those operations.”

However, while officials at NNSA headquarters “are doing everything we can to protect our work force and our critical mission, there remains the possibility of furloughs of both federal and contractor personnel may be required as a result of factors beyond our control,” she wrote.

Miller’s memo states that the semiautonomous Energy Department agency is “working to avoid or minimize furloughs of NNSA’s federal work force to the extent possible.” If furloughs become necessary, the agency would notify employees “as soon as that becomes a certainty” and at least 30 days in advance of action, pursuant to federal law.

The 2011 Budget Control Act requires the federal government to cut $85 billion in spending for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Congress and the White House were not expected to agree on an alternative plan ahead of the Friday deadline.

Miller told Global Security Newswire that NNSA officials should know more about possible furloughs of agency staff “within a month.” She said it would be up to private companies to determine when contract personnel might be forced to take unpaid time off from work.

B&W, the contractor at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, plans to spread potential furlough days for nonessential employees between April and October in an effort to minimize the impact on workers and disruptions at the facility, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported on Friday. President Chuck Spencer said the company would submit its plan to NNSA officials next week.

“From an operational standpoint, our first priority will be to maintain the systems at the site that allow us to operate safely and securely,” Spencer said. “Our next priority will be to accomplish as much work as we can under a reduced schedule. Some work that can be moved into next year would be rescheduled, and some discretionary activities would be eliminated.”

During a Feb. 14 hearing on Capitol Hill, Miller provided some insight into how sequestration would impact NNSA programs. She said certain efforts to extend the lives of aging nuclear warheads would continue, while others would be delayed.

“We will ensure that that there is no impact on the continuing life extension of the W-76 warhead, we must deliver that for national security reasons, but there will be delays to the B-61 life extension schedule and the W-88 Alt [370] schedule,” Miller said. The W-76 and W-78 warheads are carried by submarine-launched ballistic missiles while the B-61 gravity bomb is carried by a variety of military aircraft.

“Reductions across the board will include reductions to surveillance of the stockpile,” Miller said at the time. Safety upgrades being made to Plutonium Facility 4 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to concerns about seismic activity in the area will be delayed, she said.

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Recommended relaxation of remediation standards could increase cancer risk at dirty bomb sites

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:25:00 -0500

The report will likely suggest that a radiation dose to the human body of between 100 and 2,000 millirems per year is the target officials should keep in mind when deciding how to clean up after a “dirty bomb” or nuclear terror attack, according to S.Y. Chen, a senior environmental engineer at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Roughly 1 in 23 people would be expected to develop cancer from receiving a 2,000 millirem dose of radiation annually for 30 years, based on estimates from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, a private, nongovernmental organization whose work Chen cites as the basis for the recommendations. Approximately 1 in 466 people would be expected to develop cancer from an annual dose of 100 millirems over the same time period, according to calculations Global Security Newswire conducted using ICRP projections.

“It is just ethically indefensible,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told GSN. “Anyone proposing such a thing should go to jail.”

Normally, remediation of toxic U.S. properties is designed so 1 out of 10,000 people exposed to a site for 30 years would be expected to develop cancer in a worst-case scenario. One in 1 million people would be expected to develop cancer in the best possible situation.

Chen, chairman of the panel writing the new report, said he and his colleagues do not believe these guidelines -- established in the 1980s by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program -- must be followed after a terrorist attack.

The experience of the Japanese in the wake of last year’s earthquake- and tsunami-induced nuclear power plant meltdowns proves the need to consider economic factors in carrying out a massive cleanup, Chen told GSN in a recent interview. He argued the Superfund program was developed to deal with contamination that is more limited in scope and is not applicable to terrorist situations.

“Bring Superfund to Japan and see how it’s going to work. It will fail miserably,” Chen said. In the event of a dirty bomb or nuclear attack, “it won’t just be a Superfund-like community where several acres are contaminated,” he said. “Everywhere everybody will get disrupted big time. You have to worry about your jobs, you worry about business, you worry about your livelihood on a daily basis. So all of the sudden it’s no longer a contamination issue, it’s a bigger society issue that everyone has to cope with.”

Many Superfund sites are actually larger than what federal officials and other experts typically describe when they discuss how much land they would expect a dirty bomb to contaminate, however. Such a weapon would use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material over a relatively small area.

While an existing DHS guide that the forthcoming report is meant to supplement describes the probable affected area as ranging between “a single building or city block” to “conceivably several square miles,” Superfund sites often cover hundreds of square miles.

A major concern among watchdog groups is that the DHS guide, combined with the forthcoming report, will establish a precedent that will relax remediation standards not only for areas contaminated by dirty bombs, but also for the more routine cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities owned by the Energy Department and other sites with radioactive contamination.

In 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency drafted a similar guide that would have abandoned the Superfund approach to cleanup after a wide range of radiological incidents, including accidents at nuclear power plants and industrial facilities that use radioactive material. The Obama administration delayed action on the Bush-era draft; a revised version is now pending review at the White House Management and Budget Office.

Documents the agency released under the Freedom of Information Act show some EPA staff and state government officials objected to the proposed abandonment of Superfund guidelines.

Carl Spreng, a project manager at the Colorado Public Health and the Environment Department, told GSN the dose range Chen suggests as an alternative is “way outside” what state officials “would consider safe and have argued for many years.”

Read the full story here.

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DHS drops plan to screen chemical-plant workers for terrorist ties

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:31:00 -0400

Suzanne Spaulding, deputy undersecretary for the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate, confirmed during a congressional hearing on Thursday that the department had pulled the proposal late last week. The plan, under which chemical companies would have been required to submit information about people who have access to their high-risk facilities, had been languishing at the White House Office of Management and Budget since June 2011.

In April, a broad range of industry trade groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Chemistry Council, and the American Petroleum Institute — sent a letter to OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein urging him to reject the plan, which is part of the DHS Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Standards initiative. Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, federal agencies must seek approval from the White House when demanding information from companies.

The DHS plan would require companies to submit information — including name, date, place of birth, and passport and visa information — about “facility personnel and, as appropriate, unescorted visitors with access to restricted areas or critical assets” to their sites. The department would then check the data against the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database.

The intent of the DHS proposal was to prevent terrorists from gaining access to facilities that house chemicals that could be lethal if released into the environment. Industry officials argue, though, that the DHS effort is duplicative of other screening programs in which they already participate and would create costly paperwork without a tangible security benefit. Homeland Security estimates put the total operational and maintenance cost of the proposed requirement at $29 million and say it would likely affect about 1.3 million individuals, according to a June 2011 notice in the Federal Register.

Labor and environmental groups also opposed the DHS plan, raising concerns about privacy and suggesting it could ruin employment opportunities for people wrongly added to the FBI’s database, as well as for those who were never removed from the database after being cleared of any wrongdoing.

Spaulding on Thursday did not provide an explanation for why the department had withdrawn the plan, nor did she say how the proposal would be replaced. She told members of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee that the department pulled the plan in advance of the hearing so that she could discuss the issue with panel members. The hearing ended abruptly, however, when lawmakers were called to the House floor for a series of votes on unrelated issues.

Homeland Security officials declined to comment on the matter after the hearing.

Personnel screening is a component of Homeland Security’s Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Standards program. The program has been under fire from House Republicans since late last year when a leaked DHS memo detailed a host of problems with its implementation, including that it had failed to complete site inspections and approve facility security plans.

Republicans in the lower chamber also opposed the personnel-screening proposal, however. Now that the department has withdrawn the plan, it is unclear how it will complete implementation of the broader security effort that encompasses thousands of chemical plants.

An industry official argued that a key reason Homeland Security has been unable to completely approve security plans thus far is because it does not yet have a sanctioned method for conducting personnel screening.

“A lot of the failure to implement the program ties back to this barrier that has been around since June of last year,” Bill Almond, vice president for government relations at the Society of Chemical Manufactures and Affiliates, said, referring to the point at which the department submitted its controversial proposal for OMB review.

“Let’s hope [withdrawing the proposal] helps the department move forward,” Almond, who also opposed the plan, told Global Security Newswire. “If the department has a new program that they want to propose to OMB, they’ll need to do that relatively soon.”

By law, a new proposal would have to go through multiple rounds of public comment and win OMB approval before it could be finalized, meaning the process would be likely to take several months or even years.

Labor and environmental organizations, meanwhile, argue that the law underlying the DHS program is too lax. On Thursday, the groups, including the United Steel Workers, Communications Workers of America, and Greenpeace, submitted a formal petition requesting that the Environmental Protection Agency craft stricter chemical-security rules using its Clean Air Act authority.

Unlike the Homeland Security Department, EPA officials would have the authority to require facilities to use so-called inherently safer technology, meaning the government could force a plant to, when possible, use chemicals and systems that are less dangerous than those that might now be in place, the groups argue.

According to the petition for rulemaking that the groups submitted pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, “such requirements are necessary to protect the public against possible chemical releases, including those that may be cause by terrorist attacks, and are well within EPA’s existing authority under section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act.”

Industry groups strongly oppose such technology mandates, arguing that they are overly burdensome and unnecessary.]]>

House bid to merge Homeland Security WMD offices draws cautious praise

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:50:55 -0400

Plans for a possible merger between two Homeland Security Department offices responsible for monitoring potential threats from weapons of mass destruction is eliciting cautious praise from observers who hope such a move would help address concerns that some of the department's key detection technologies are not useful.

In a little-noticed section of the legislative report that accompanies the fiscal 2013 homeland security spending bill, the House Appropriations Committee calls on DHS officials to develop a plan to consolidate the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Office of Health Affairs.

The first team is tasked with monitoring radiological and nuclear threats, with the second team focused on chemical and biological threats, among other responsibilities.

Under the House proposal, the department would have six months from the enactment of the legislation to develop the plan for a potential merger that would take place the following fiscal year.

Before changes are implemented, the Government Accountability Office would review the Homeland Security plan and assess “whether and how proposed changes would improve DHS coordination … on WMD defense issues,” the legislative report says.

Unlike at other government agencies, Homeland Security Department “WMD programs continue to be spread across many offices with duplicative and overlapping functions,” the report states. “There is confusion, for example, over which components are the ‘lead’ in certain incidents involving [chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear] agents and also over which are responsible for research and development to detect those agents.

“As a result, DHS programs have failed to satisfactorily fulfill congressional and presidential mandates to develop robust capabilities to detect WMD threats aimed against U.S. interest,” the committee contended.

A Homeland Security Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the legislation.

The House panel argued that inside the department, coordination between the various offices responsible for WMD issues is “ad hoc and intermittent, with limited cooperation between certain offices and limited awareness of what each is doing in the WMD defense mission space.” As a result, Homeland Security views on WMD issues “are presented in divergent and sometimes conflicting ways in interagency meetings, impairing the Department’s cooperation” with other government agencies, the report reads.

“In light of historic budget cuts designed to restore America’s fiscal health, DHS must make use of limited resources as efficiently as possible to protect the homeland,” the committee said. “Responsible consolidations that make sense programmatically could improve DHS WMD defense programs and save taxpayer dollars.”

In the lawmakers’ view, the existence of separate offices for Domestic Nuclear Detection and Health Affairs is “particularly noteworthy.” They said that the two organizations “are charged with developing the core of the Department’s WMD detection capabilities” and “have faced similar dilemmas in developing better” detection technology.

In addition to providing cost savings, merging these two offices “could provide greater awareness and coordination within DHS and [other government agencies] by creating a more visible focal point to counter-WMD coordination and strategic planning,” the report states.

While the House Appropriations Committee approved the legislation by a 28-21 vote on May 16, the full chamber has yet to take up the measure. Assuming the GOP-controlled House approves the bill, it would then have to be reconciled with the Senate version, which the upper chamber’s Democrat-controlled Appropriations committee approved by a 27-3 vote on May 22. The Senate version contains no similar provision.

A Senate Appropriations Committee staffer told Global Security Newswire that lawmakers in the upper chamber have yet to endorse the House proposal to merge the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Office of Health Affairs. However, the aide said the recommendation that DHS officials have six months to study the issue -- followed by a Government Accountability Office review -- is “grounded and disciplined.”

“Are we going to [mandate a merger] in the fiscal 2013 bill? No,” the aide said, but added that the House lawmakers were calling for a “legitimate inquiry” on the matter. This aide and others spoke on condition of anonymity, lacking permission to discuss the issue publicly.

DHS officials themselves have looked in recent years at the possibility of merging various offices within the department that deal with WMD issues, said the Senate staffer. The department analyzed the matter while preparing to publish the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Report and Bottom-Up Review Report in 2010, but ultimately did not include any recommendations on the subject in either document, the staffer said.

Some observers support the House proposal to study ways to consolidate WMD programs, but are skeptical of a potential merger between the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and Office of Health Affairs specifically.

Retired Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, chief executive officer of the non-profit WMD Center, toldGSN that a better approach to consolidating DHS programs that deal with WMD issues would be to place the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office under the auspices of the DHS Science and Technology Office. Such a change might focus the nuclear detection office’s attention more heavily on the research and development of new nuclear detection technologies, rather than on efforts to deploy existing technology, he said.

Larsen contends that today’s DHS detection technology is inadequate. Rather than expend resources trying to use it, the department should instead focus on developing new technology, he said.

For example, a terrorist with an improvised nuclear device -- a crude weapon capable of catastrophic destruction -- could “shield it from our detectors with aluminum foil,” Larsen argues. “You don’t even need to use lead.”

To Larsen, it “doesn’t make a lot of sense” to merge the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office with the Office of Health Affairs. He noted that not all of the health office programs are related to WMD issues, such as its Workforce Health and Medical Support Division, which is focused largely on ensuring the occupational health of DHS employees.

Despite his reservations, Larsen said he is supportive of the House plan to study the issue, however.

Other experts say they support a potential merger between the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Office of Health Affairs, but are skeptical of a merger that would include the Science and Technology office.

Jeffrey Runge, who oversaw the Office of Health Affairs as DHS assistant secretary for health affairs and chief medical officer during the Bush administration, told GSN that it “makes a lot of sense” to combine the operational WMD programs under one unified team.

However, Runge said that including the Science and Technology Office in such a merger could have the negative impact of taking the department’s focus off the research and development of emerging technologies. He voiced concern about the possibility of deploying devices that may not yet be adequate.

“It’s a policy question -- should S&T be centralized or decentralized back into operational programs,” Runge said. “I favor the centralized approach.”

Runge pointed to BioWatch Generation 3 -- a DHS program aimed at developing devices that can detect biological threats in real time -- as an example of an initiative that has faced technical challenges.

One lesson he draws from that program is that the department should put more of an emphasis on developing better technologies rather than trying to use those that have not proven themselves to be effective. In some cases, initiatives like BioWatch Generation 3 that once were high priorities might have to be shelved, “as painful as it is,” said Runge.

The Senate Appropriations Committee placed restrictions on funds for BioWatch Generation 3 in its version of the Homeland Security fiscal 2013 spending bill, citing similar concerns.

While the bill provides the $39.9 million that the Office of Health Affairs requested for the program, a “provision is included in the bill withholding [$28.5 million] from obligation for Generation 3 until the [Homeland Security] secretary certifies to the committee that the science used to develop the technology is sound and warrants operational testing and evaluation,” the report accompanying the Senate legislation says.

An “October 2011 report by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Research Center determined that the usefulness of BioWatch is unclear,” the Senate committee said. “[The] next major phase of development should be undertaken only if the secretary determines that the system can reliably perform.

Therefore, requested funds are provided for performance testing and program management; however, funds for operational testing and evaluation shall not be obligated until the secretary certifies that it is prudent,” the report concludes.

Asked about the differing opinions regarding how to best consolidate the department’s WMD programs, a congressional aide familiar with the House plan said that while the focus is on a merger between the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Office of Health Affairs, the scope of the study is “not necessarily exclusive to just those two.”

In this vein, the House report calls on the department to “take a more holistic approach toward realignment by considering and describing any functions proposed to be transferred into the new Office from elsewhere in the Department to better align the WMD portfolio.” It also directs that “the secretary’s plan consider and detail the impacts of realigning certain functions outside of the new office,” including the Office of Health Affairs’ Workforce Health and Medical Support Division and the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office’s research and development activities.

The congressional aide said that the report language calling for the merger study was the result of bipartisan discussions that involved both the House Appropriations Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee.

Correction: This story originally ran with the wrong byline. Douglas P. Guarino wrote it.

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