The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is poised to move beyond what its administrator recently characterized as an outmoded system of requiring the contractors who manage major nuclear-weapon sites to earn extensions one year at a time.
“[T]he one-year contract for award terms were incredibly destabilizing at our labs, plants and sites because they couldn’t keep leadership,” Jill Hruby, administrator of the NNSA, said late last week in a virtual forum. “So we acted.”
Those actions in 2022 resulted in five-year extensions for Honeywell [HON]-led management and operations contractors at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and the Nevada National Security Site about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia, the lab contractor, and Mission Support and Test Services, the test site contractor, got five years worth of one-year options in one shot from the NNSA, which is pushing such changes as part of a its Enhanced Mission Delivery Initiative: a broad overhaul of contracting policies at its eight major nuclear-weapon sites.
Most NNSA weapon-site contracts include a five-year base period with options of various lengths after the guaranteed money. NNSA wants to move to five-year contracts with five-year base periods, a strategy detailed in the final report of the agency’s Enhanced Mission Delivery Initiative team. Defense Daily affiliate publication Exchange Monitor reported on the report in October. The NNSA has not made the report public.
Hruby’s remarks Thursday about the initiative — during a webcast question-and-answer availability hosted by the Washington-based Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance and the Hudson Institute — were among the first public comments about the major changes the NNSA plans for its relationship with industry.
Those changes could be baked into the contract the agency plans to put on the street some time in 2023 for the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
The NNSA is splitting up the joint management contract that now covers Pantex, the centralized weapons maintenance depot, and the Y-12 National Security Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the factory for uranium-fueled nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
While turnover from the Bechtel-led, joint-site incumbent Consolidated Nuclear Security is years off, the Pantex competition scheduled for next year and the Y-12 competition scheduled for 2024 could provide a window in how NNSA plans to provide both stability and accountability for the single-purpose limited liability companies that manage nuclear weapon sites.
In Thursday’s forum, Hruby said that long-term extensions do not leave the NNSA wholly without enforcement teeth.
Contractors “know if something seriously bad happens, we still have [the] ability to do contract changes,” Hruby said.
NNSA has a roughly $20 billion budget, most of which goes to the contractors managing the agency’s eight major nuclear weapons labs, plants and test site.
This story first appeared in Defense Daily affiliate publication Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.