By George Lobsenz
In findings that could complicate an already sensitive congressional debate on nuclear weapons spending, congressional auditors said yesterday that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) cannot say how much it spends to operate and maintain the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex, and that the lack of data undermines its ability to justify the $4.25 billion budget hike that President Obama has proposed giving the semi-autonomous DoE agency through fiscal year 2015.
In a report done for the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee and released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said NNSA could not track total weapons spending because the operating contractors at its eight sites use different accounting practices that are allowable under NNSA guidance as long as the contractors meet certain accounting standards and disclose their practices to NNSA.
However, while the differing contractor systems are allowed by NNSA, GAO said NNSA’s inability to track overall spending had enabled contractors to spend substantially more on operations of weapons facilities than allocated by Congress in the agency’s fiscal 2009 budget.
GAO’s disclosure of a budgetary black hole at NNSA raises potentially big problems for both the administration and congressional Republicans at a time when Congress is examining Obama’s high-profile request to sharply increase funding for NNSA to modernize and consolidate DoE’s aging nuclear weapons complex and refurbish Cold War-era warheads.
Many analysts say Obama has pledged the extra money for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex as a way to get Republicans to vote for his proposed new arms control treaty with Russia. Republicans say the weapons complex has been dangerously underfunded, and Obama has agreed that bolstering the weapons complex is necessary and will enable the nation to reduce its warhead arsenal under the treaty without compromising its security.
However, GAO’s findings could leave both the administration and Republicans groping for accurate cost figures at NNSA–and the agency unable to justify the big spending increases pending on Capitol Hill.
“To enable [its] arm reduction agenda, the administration is requesting from Congress billions of dollars in increased investment in the nuclear security enterprise to ensure that base scientific, technical and engineering capabilities are sufficiently supported such that a smaller nuclear deterrent continues to be safe, secure and reliable,” GAO said in its report.
“For its part, NNSA must accurately identify these base capabilities and determine their costs in order to adequately justify future presidential budget requests and show the effects on its programs of potential budget increases. Without taking action to identify these costs, NNSA risks being unable to identify the return on investment of planned budget increases on the health of its base capabilities or to identify opportunities for cost savings.
“NNSA lacks information that could help justify planned budget increases…,” GAO concluded.
The GAO report also is problematic for the administration in that it also undermines arguments that warhead cuts will allow NNSA over the long term to reduce the size of its weapons complex. GAO said that NNSA spending is relatively “insensitive” to the size of the arsenal because the agency must spend a set amount to maintain minimum weapons capabilities no matter how small the stockpile gets.
Most importantly, however, the GAO findings could significantly erode congressional confidence in NNSA’s ability to properly manage money.
Notably, GAO said that cost data obtained from six of NNSA’s contractors indicated that the total amount spent by the agency on site operations and maintenance “significantly exceeds” the $1.16 billion provided by Congress for site operations in fiscal year 2009 under an account known as “readiness in technical basis and facilities,” or RTBF.
GAO said NNSA sites make up the shortfall by assigning uncovered costs to various “indirect cost pools” that are funded by money provided by Congress for other non-RTBF weapons activities that include work that site officials believe to be related to RTBF activities.
As for the scope of the over-spending, GAO noted that the six sites that were capable of providing total spending on their weapons facilities were allocated $558.6 million by Congress for RTBF expenditures in fiscal 2009. However, GAO said those six sites reported actual RTBF expenditures of approximately $1.1 billion when funding from indirect cost pools and other founding sources was included.
GAO said Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Y-12 site in Tennessee were the two sites unable to provide total spending figures, but that officials at those sites agreed that their RTBF expenditures exceeded their congressional allocations for those purposes.
As for why LANL and Y-12 officials could not provide the spending figures, GAO said: “LANL did not provide this information because site officials could not determine the extent to which costs charged against indirect cost pools were associated with activities included in the RTBF operation of facilities work scope. Y-12 did not provide this information because, according to officials, while their management system is capable of identifying this information, it cannot do so readily with accuracy.”
GAO said NNSA also does not estimate the total cost of facilities operated to provide “stockpile services,” which Congress funded at $866.4 million in fiscal 2009. Rather, NNSA tracks stockpile services spending through various “functional activities,” such warhead engineering and quality control.
GAO said NNSA uses those functional activity estimates to develop its future-year budget requests, which are largely based on the extent to which prior-year budgets were sufficient to execute those functions. The problem, said GAO, is that tracking spending by functional activity provides little information on the costs of operating individual weapons complex facilities and programs.
Altogether, funding for RTBF operations and stockpile services accounted for nearly one-third of NNSA’s total weapons budget of $6.41 billion in fiscal 2009.
GAO said NNSA agreed with its findings and has efforts under way that–“if fully implemented”–would provide more detail on total costs to operate and maintain weapons facilities and to provide stockpile services.
However, GAO said NNSA was not planning to start collecting the additional cost information until 2011.