The Department of Energy (DOE) is cleaning up nuclear waste from weapons production at 15 U.S. sites—at an estimated cost of over $400 billion. Much of this cost will be for work not directly related to the cleanup, like maintaining roads.
When setting site budgets, DOE categorizes activities as either cleanup-related—like treating contamination—or not. This helps DOE prioritize competing funding needs.
But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says DOE’s guidance doesn’t clearly define the categories, leading to the sites categorizing similar work in different ways and making it harder for officials to prioritize projects.
Officials at the 15 sites operated by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) are responsible for categorizing site activities during budget formulation. For this process, EM generally divides activities into two categories: (1) those that do not advance the cleanup mission, which GAO refers to as “base operations”; and (2) those that advance the cleanup mission, which are referred to as “progress.”
In fiscal year 2022, EM’s annual budget request for base operations across all of its sites totaled $3.1 billion, or 41 percent, of EM’s budget request of almost $7.6 billion.
GAO found that EM sites vary in how they categorize activities. Specifically, several sites placed similar activities in different categories because guidance did not include clear definitions.
According to officials in EM’s budget office, EM has issued guidance in the past for a more uniform definition of base operations, but EM sites have expressed concern, citing the unique aspects of each site’s activities.
According to senior EM officials, EM relies primarily on contract-based approaches to ensure that base operations are performed in a cost-effective manner. EM issued guidance that states that performance evaluation plans for contracts with incentives should incentivize efficiencies in base operations costs. However, at several sites, certain base operations are performed under firm-fixed-price contracts, a type of contract that does not typically include performance incentives. Federal internal control standards call for management to design control activities to achieve objectives and respond to risks. Yet GAO found EM has not assessed whether its contract-based approach is achieving the desired results.
GAO is recommending that EM develop budget guidance that clearly defines base operations and progress activities and assess whether its contract-based approach is improving the cost-effective performance of base operations at major cleanup sites. EM concurred with both recommendations.