Experts give thumbs-down to DOE reform proposals

Proposals to restructure the Energy Department are merely quick fixes that ultimately could create more problems than they solve, several witnesses testified at a joint hearing of two House subcommittees Tuesday.

A report by a special panel of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., recommended that a new semi-autonomous agency be set up within DOE to manage the nuclear weapons program. Several other proposals have also been floated on Capitol Hill in recent weeks. Some would keep control of the program within DOE, others would transfer nuclear weapons activities to the Defense Department.

Allegations of security lapses, poor accountability and project mismanagement at DOE are well documented, with reports from the General Accounting Office, the FBI, and internal DOE panels dating back as far as 1982. In recent months, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has launched an effort to reform the troubled agency by imposing new standards for accountability and performance. Still, some members of Congress think more dramatic moves are necessary.

"I believe the time has come to dismantle the DOE," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, at the hearing, held before the House Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power and Science Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.

But some members of Congress, academic experts, GAO auditors and industry watchdog groups say that measures such as those proposed by Rudman's panel would do little to solve DOE's long-term problems-and could in fact cause even more harm.

"Allowing [the Rudman Report] proposals to become law would be tantamount to using gasoline to put out a fire," said Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., arguing that an autonomous agency would create new problems and compound old ones.

GAO auditor Victor S. Rezendes said the various proposals are merely a "piecemeal approach" to solving DOE's broader structural problems. He urged Congress to consider each proposal's effect on other agencies, saying, "reorganization efforts that ignore the broader picture could create new, unintended consequences."

Previous reform efforts at DOE have failed because they did not look at the big picture, Rezendes said. Any reorganization effort should focus on the agency's core missions- energy policy, energy information, and research and development on energy supply.

Donald F. Kettl, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agreed that a single-minded focus on national security is the wrong approach. All of the restructuring proposals fail to identify how DOE's environment, safety and health protection missions will be linked to the national security goals, Kettl said. "National security is absolutely central to DOE's mission. However, national security is not what DOE does-it is how it must do it," Kettl said.

Maureen Eldredge, program director of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, a national network of organizations that work on nuclear weapons issues, said the current reform proposals are "a case of the cure being worse than the disease."

The idea of creating a semi-autonomous weapons program is counterintuitive, Eldredge said, because it would punish an insubordinate operation by giving it more freedom and authority. The proposal not only makes the weapons program less subject to DOE control than ever before, but it also threatens employee and public health, Eldredge argued. "Fifty years of experience has taught us that weapons production is incompatible with self-monitoring of environmental and safety practices," she said.

On the other hand, William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton University, said a semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency within DOE is "worth trying," as long as the agency isn't allowed to set its own agenda. Happer said he doesn't believe the proposal will solve all of DOE's problems, but that any change is better than the status quo.