Anastasio For NNSA Panel

GOP Picks Former LANL, LLNL Director Anastasio For NNSA Panel Todd Jacobson – Nuclear Weapons & Materials Monitor May 3, 2013 Former Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Michael Anastasio has been picked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as the 12th and final member of the Congressionally mandated panel on NNSA governance, though there remains no clear timetable for the panel to begin its work. The choice of Anastasio was outlined in a notice posted in the Congressional Record late last week. The governance panel was created by Congress in the Fiscal Year 2013 Defense Authorization Act as a bipartisan compromise to address controversial NNSA reform language passed by the House that would have increased the autonomy of the agency while streamlining directives and regulations, eliminating oversight from DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security and moving the agency toward performance based oversight. Due to opposition from labor unions, the Administration, Senate Democrats, and even Republican leadership on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, most of the House-passed reform provisions were stripped from the bill in favor of the creation of the panel. The panel is required to finish an interim report by the end of June and complete its report Feb. 1, 2014, but funding issues have delayed efforts to get the panel off the ground and its members have yet to meet. Anastasio is the only former laboratory director on a panel largely dominated by former lawmakers and energy and defense officials. He headed up Livermore from 2002 to 2005 before taking over as the director of Los Alamos from 2005 to 2011. Anastasio shepherded the lab through the transition to private management by Bechtel-led Los Alamos National Security, LLC, at a time that the lab was trying to strengthen safety and security practices that had led to several embarrassing incidents. But during the end of his tenure, he advocated that the lab be given more freedom from sometimes burdensome federal management—one of the issues that the panel is expected to tackle. In 2011, Anastasio told a National Academy of Sciences panel that despite strides in the areas of safety and security, “I don’t see that trust level has changed in a significant way or a positive way.” He also suggested that the NNSA “spend more energy enabling our success and less energy managing us.” Democratic lawmakers also announced late last week that former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine will serve as the co-chair of the panel alongside former Strategic Command chief Richard Mies, who was selected earlier by Republican lawmakers to head up the committee. Other members of the panel include former New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson (R), former California lawmaker and State Department official Ellen Tauscher (D), former South Carolina lawmaker John Spratt (D), and former Ohio lawmaker David Hobson (R). Also included on the panel are former NNSA Naval Reactors chief Adm. Kirkland Donald, former Bush Administration national security expert Frank Miller, former Reagan Administration Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology William Schneider, former Deputy Energy Secretary T.J. Glauthier and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko.