Bruce Carnes

Energy
Bruce Carnes
Chief Acquisition Officer

Bruce Carnes credits his mother for any success he might have in his role as chief acquisition officer for the Energy Department. "I was nagged a lot by my mother," he says. "I'm pretty good at following up to make sure things get done."

Carnes says he is director of management as well as chief acquisition officer at Energy, "this week"-referring to his many changes in job titles during the past few years. His previous title was associate deputy secretary of the department. In his 29 years of federal service, starting at the Education Department, Carnes has been in and out of five agencies, including serving as chief financial officer in 2003 for the newly created Homeland Security Department.

Energy is different from the other government agencies he's worked for, Carnes says, because "nothing we do here is routine, from weapons to environmental cleanup. It's one of a kind, and no one has ever done it before. You're never certain what you're going to find when you start the cleanup. You may think you know what you're going to find, but you are often wrong."

His biggest challenge, he says, is determining what it will take to accomplish a particular job. "That's an issue we struggle with all the time," Carnes says. For that reason, he doesn't believe there's one right way to do a project. "We don't use the same hammer for every job," he says. "For some, we use fixed-price contracts. Others-for example, cleanups, which could take decades-we want to incentivize the contractors to move out smartly and not drag things out."