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??–???
1999
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–17]
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY REORGANIZATION
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARINGS HELD
JUNE 24, AND JULY 14, 1999
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
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One Hundred Sixth Congress
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina, Chairman
BOB STUMP, Arizona
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
STEVE BUYER, Indiana
TILLIE K. FOWLER, Florida
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
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LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
BOB RILEY, Alabama
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
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JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Andrew K. Ellis, Staff Director
Brian Green, Professional Staff Member
Ashley Godwin, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
1999
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HEARINGS:
Thursday, June 24, 1999, Testimony From President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board on Security Problems at the U.S. Department of Energy
Wednesday, July 14, 1999, Department of Energy Reorganization and Intelligence/Counterintelligence Issues
APPENDIXES:
Thursday, June 24, 1999
Wednesday, July 14, 1999
THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 1999
TESTIMONY FROM PRESIDENT'S FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE ADVISORY BOARD ON SECURITY PROBLEMS AT THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Spence, Hon. Floyd D., a Representative from South Carolina, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
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WITNESSES
Rudman, Hon. Warren, Chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Rudman, Hon. Warren
Skelton, Hon. Ike
Spence, Hon. Floyd D.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Rudman, Warren B., Memo to Hon. Floyd D. Spence
Science at its Best/Security at its Worst (A Report on Security Problems at the U.S. Department of Energy)
Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Report of PFIAB's Special Investigative Panel on Security Problems at DOE
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
Mr. Everett
WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 1999
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY REORGANIZATION AND INTELLIGENCE/COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ISSUES
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Spence, Hon. Floyd D., a Representative from South Carolina, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
Reis, Dr. Victor H., Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs, Department of Energy
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Reis, Dr. Victor H.
Skelton, Hon. Ike
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Spence, Hon. Floyd D.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted for the Record.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
Mr. Hostettler
TESTIMONY FROM PRESIDENT'S FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE ADVISORY BOARD ON SECURITY PROBLEMS AT THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Thursday, June 24, 1999.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 2 p.m. in room 2118 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Floyd D. Spence (chairman of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FLOYD D. SPENCE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. We expect others along shortly, but we thought that we might go ahead and get started.
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The committee meets this afternoon to receive testimony on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board's report concerning security problems at the Department of Energy. I want to welcome our witness, the Honorable Warren Rudman, Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and former distinguished Senator from New Hampshire.
Senator Rudman, I know that you have been very busy since the report. You are well rehearsed now on how to be before these various committees. I understand, on the Senate side, you had four at one time. We do it a little bit differently over here. We do them one at a time over here. But you know that a lot of people are interested in what your board recommends; and we have to be prepared for this kind of thing in conference, too, so we would be better served if we could have the benefit of your knowledge in this respect.
As I said, accordingly, your testimony is invaluable to us as we continue to work through the implications of the China-DOE espionage case while also considering the recommendations of the Cox committee, in addition to the one that you have been so instrumental in bringing forth.
In the wake of the Cox committee's revelations, the President asked what is now known as the PFIAB to assess the security threats to labs, the adequacy of the measures that have been taken to address it, and to make recommendations on further corrective actions. As Senator Rudman will discuss in more detail, the conclusions were that, first, the DOE's security and counterintelligence operations have been relegated to low priority status for decades; second, that organizational disarray, managerial neglect, and a bureaucratic culture of arrogance both at DOE headquarters and the labs contributed directly to security problems; and third, DOE has become a dysfunctional bureaucracy characterized by serious mismanagement and has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to reform itself.
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As a consequence, this report has recommended the creation of either an independent agency or a semiautonomous agency within DOE to be responsible for stewardship of the Nation's nuclear weapons. While I believe there is certainly room to discuss and debate the details of how to implement any such reorganization, the Board's unwavering recognition of a need for dramatic change and reorganization is right on the mark. Any organization responsible for protecting our nuclear weapons must be tightly managed and must have streamlined and unambiguous lines of responsibility and authority.
In my opinion, the Department of Energy reorganization, which Senator Rudman recently likened to a wiring diagram of Frankenstein's brain, has repeatedly demonstrated itself not able to ensure the Nation's most sensitive and important weapons and secrets. As Senator Rudman and the others have noted, recommendations for change and reorganization at DOE are not new. Concerns over DOE management and the stewardship of our nuclear arsenal has led me to author a provision carried in the Defense Authorization bill four years ago that simply asked the Secretary of Defense to report to the Congress on the steps that would be necessary for DOE's defense programs to be transferred to the Department of Defense.
Even though it was a reporting requirement, it was opposed by the Administration four years ago and, more recently, was violently opposed by the Administration when I considered offering it as an amendment to this year's Defense Authorization bill.
In the name of full disclosure, I know this is an idea that the Board you chaired does not support. My point is not to foster an argument over a specific proposal, but instead to recognize that proposals for change have been put forth in recent years only to die at the hands of a bureaucracy and the culture that your Commission report has rightly identified.
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Likewise and more recently, our committee colleague, Mr. Thornberry, offered a DOE reorganization provision currently contained in the Defense Authorization bill that is based on the principle of clearer lines of authority and responsibility. The gentleman from Texas has also been the driving force behind more comprehensive DOE organization legislation, some form of which is likely to pass the Senate in the days ahead. The gentleman is to be commended for his continuing efforts.
On the assumption that the Senate does pass DOE reorganization legislation, this committee will in short order likely be addressing the issue in conference. Looking ahead to these discussions, I certainly plan to approach the issue with an open mind, but with the bottom line that fundamental change is necessary and long overdue. Only aggressive action can address DOE's deep-rooted bureaucratic and cultural problems.
I look forward to working with all interested parties, including Secretary Richardson, to ensure that whatever steps are taken will, first and foremost, have as their primary objective a dramatic improvement in the Nation's ability to ensure the safety, security, effectiveness and reliability of its nuclear arsenal in the future.
At this point, I would like to recognize the committee's ranking Democrat, Mr. Skelton, the gentleman from Missouri, for any remarks that he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Spence can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
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Mr. SKELTON. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. I thank you also for calling this hearing. I join you in welcoming our distinguished witness, Senator Warren Rudman, to the hearing today. I look forward to his testimony on the panel report and his response to our questions.
Mr. Chairman, I don't want to take up a great deal of time at the outset, especially since we have precious little time to address a serious and complex issue, the protection of the national nuclear weapons classified information within the DOE complex, but I would like to share a few of my concerns if I may.
Today we have the opportunity to gain insights into this matter from a very credible source as we explore the options to help us deal successfully with this serious and most important issue. There is no doubt on my part that this long-festering problem belongs to both the executive and Congressional branches, and the panel report reminds us that this lack of security administration that has been the focus of a lot of attention over the past six months is not new. It has been addressed by many individuals and activities over the past 50 years. While reporting knowledge of reform initiatives currently being implemented by Secretary Richardson, it is painfully obvious that much more is needed to ensure the presence of appropriate and effective security policies and procedures.
I note that this is a complex and complicated issue, but we must find a solution that will balance the needs of scientific inquiry on the one hand and the protection of our national security interests on the other.
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Senator Rudman, I am impressed with your panel report, and I join the chairman in thanking you for your dedicated effort and the effort by your panel members and staff members in putting it together. I must admit that I am very much concerned about your assessment of the organizational culture and the potential for meaningful change in the Department of Energy. I am especially bothered, Senator, by your conclusion that the Department is incapable of reforming itself. If that is an accurate description of the organizational chart and the climate of the Department, Congress has no option other than to legislate needed reforms.
I am convinced that—while I don't want to rush into major changes that are not well thought out, I am convinced the time to act is now. Your presence here today will be instructive to the extent that we will be able to obtain direct information on your assessment of these critical nuclear security matters.
I thank you again for your efforts in this and for being with us today.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Senator Rudman, without objection, your written statement and any supporting materials will be submitted for the record, and you may proceed as you like.
STATEMENT OF HON. WARREN RUDMAN, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT'S FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE ADVISORY BOARD
Senator RUDMAN. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much and thank you for that very thoughtful opening statement.
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Mr. Skelton, thank you so much for your welcome.
Distinguished members of the House Armed Services Committee, it is always a privilege to appear before any committee of Congress, but for a former United States Senator it is a particular privilege to appear here today. I have worked with many of the members here over the years and I have always found it useful and constructive.
I have a short statement, about 10 or 12 minutes. I think that I would like to read the statement because it will answer some of the questions that I think will be posed by your members today.
I want to thank your staff very much for their outstanding cooperation with the PFIAB staff who have prepared me for the hearing to get some sense for what it is that you all are interested in.
Let me tell you, at the outset the PFIAB was a Senate acronym that was really not known to many people until the last few weeks. The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was established by President Eisenhower in 1953 and has been essentially in existence since that time. We are charged with the task of overseeing the quality and the quantity of U.S. Intelligence, foreign intelligence. We are normally tasked by the President and the National Security Advisor. We normally—well, this is the first time that anything PFIAB has done has ever been made public, and certainly the first time it was ever shared officially with the Congress. I say that because it gives you some idea of the seriousness of which the Administration approached the issue.
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When the President asked if I thought the PFIAB could do this with a small task force, I told him I thought that we could, but with the nature of it, it would probably have to require his waiving the normal privileges to allow us to share it with the Congress, which I thought was essential. He readily agreed, and that is why I am here today.
Let me say first that we had one major objective with this report. It was to write a report that would hopefully stick, something that would make a difference in the way that these labs have been handled over the years. I had our staff sit down and add up the number of reports that have been done on this very issue and found problems with security, counterintelligence, at DOE for the past 20 years.
The numbers, Mr. Chairman, are astounding: 29 reports from the GAO requested in the main by members of the appropriate committees in the House and the Senate, and 61 internal DOE reports and more than a dozen reports from outstanding special ad hoc panels established to look at the very issue that our report addresses.
Frankly, as you read the report, some people have commented on the blunt language. Mr. Chairman, we wanted to cut through the bureaucratic jargon, some of the wishy-washy language and tell it as it is. That is what we try to do without being offensive to anyone or any one individual. Our objective was to take the major issues one by one, address them directly, forcefully, and make recommendations.
Our charge from the President was to look at the history of security—past, present and future—and make recommendations based on our investigation. The investigation took approximately 90 days to complete, but I must say that we had a veritable gold mine of information to work with.
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I want to again publicly thank my colleagues, Ann Caracristi, from the PFIAB, the first woman to be the Deputy Director of the National Security Agency; and now retired Stephen Friedman who, after his retirement from the business world, has done a lot of intelligence work as a private citizen on behalf of this Administration; and of course, Dr. Sidney Drell, who is probably known to some of you, a world-renowned nuclear physicist, who is able to give us insight into these extraordinary labs and the great work that they do for this country.
I think the President deserves a good deal of credit. We had some very tough words in this report for his Administration, but he agreed to release it to the public and allow me to testify. Because, after all, even though I am a Republican, I am Chairman of an executive branch oversight board, and we work within that framework.
Let me first talk about restoring accountability. There is an old saying in New Hampshire, Mr. Chairman, and I expect maybe they say it in South Carolina and they probably also say it in Missouri; and that is that if it ain't broken, don't fix it. Well, I have a corollary to that. My corollary is that it may be broken so bad that you don't even try to fix it. Replace it. That is the bottom line conclusion that we came to.
We find that the Department of Energy, sadly, in some ways is broken. It is time to fundamentally restructure the management of the nuclear weapons labs and establish a system that holds individuals accountable. That is what it comes down to. It is not about security; it is not about counterintelligence. It is about whether we are going to have a system of management that holds each and every person at every level of this structure accountable and responsible for security. That is what our report has proposed, alternatives that we think will help the leadership impress the seriousness of this responsibility on the people within the organization.
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Let me talk about root causes. We found that these labs are not only the crown jewels of the United States' scientific establishment, they are the crown jewels of the world's scientific establishment. They did a great deal to help win the Cold War. They do a great deal to keep our Nation secure.
We visited these laboratories, and I can tell you that their work is phenomenal. I want to be clear that nothing that we say in this report is intended as criticism of the scientific research and the development that goes on at these laboratories, nor do we want to do anything that will undermine their effectiveness. In fact, we wish to do just the opposite, and we think that we have.
We want to improve their security, their counterintelligence and their accountability that will allow them to continue to do their job because, in my view, Mr. Chairman, if we have much more like what has happened in the last few months, there is a serious question in my mind about how much continuing support there would be for the structure as it presently exists and in terms of the laboratories themselves. We believe that would be tragic.
In six critical areas we found evidence that was appalling: security and counterintelligence management and planning, physical security, personnel security, information security—otherwise known as cybersecurity—nuclear materials accounting, and foreign visitors.
There has been report after report of serious security failings. I brought a few examples; I could have had 100 examples, but we do have a limit on time.
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In 1986, done by the DOE internally: ''DOE management of safeguards and security needs to be improved.'' .
In 1988, at the request of the House GAO: ''Major weaknesses in foreign visitor program at the weapons labs.'' .
In 1993, DOE internal: ''lack of accountability for implementing security requirements.'' .
In 1996, the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board: ''impediments to resolving problems are a result of a lack of understanding, experience and personal involvement by the upper echelons of DOE management.'' .
In 1997, DOE Office of Security Affairs: ''fragmented and dysfunctional security management at DOE,'' written internally by the agency itself.
Finally, 1999 DOE: ''DOE's bureaucratic complexity is so great that it can conceal otherwise obvious and easily detected administrative flaws.'' .
Two more. You all may remember that you mandated in 1999 the Chiles report. It said, ''A thorough revamping to institute streamlined, efficient management would send a strong signal through the complex that DOE takes its weapons project seriously.'' .
I could go on.
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We found recent cases in spite of all of these reports of foreign scientists visiting labs without proper background checks or monitoring; classified computer systems and networks with innumerable vulnerabilities, which could be the most serious of the problems recently; top-level bureaucrats who could not tell us to whom they were directly accountable; instances where secure areas were left insecure for years; thousands of employees being granted security clearances with no good reason. And in the middle of all of this, there were confirmed cases of espionage, the damage of which we may never know.
There is not a person in this room, and I would add, there is probably not a person at DOE who, when confronted with this kind of record, would say that this is tolerable. It is not. It is intolerable. In fact, for this entire government, I happen to think that it is a disgrace to the Nation. Why have these things been allowed to go on year after year?
DOE has so many overlapping and competing lines of authority that people are rarely held accountable for failure. To give you an example, the chairman referred to my Frankenstein's brain wiring chart. I am going to ask one of our staff to go over as I just point out briefly several things to you.
First, let's look at where the Assistant Secretary for the Weapons Programs is located. Now, let's go all of the way down to find out where the labs are located. Let's understand that at every level from those laboratories all of the way back to that Assistant Secretary are literally thousands of employees who are duplicating and replicating some of the command and control function built into the bureaucracy at the top of DOE. In order to get from the bottom to the top is like running through a maze.
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The more that we saw of this, the more we recognized that this, as I said in the statement, is an accountability issue more than it is a security issue. If you get accountability, you will get security; you will get counterintelligence. You can't simply move the deck chairs. You have got to change the way that this operates.
We don't want to isolate this activity, but we surely want to insulate it from the rest of the bureaucracy. And by the way, had we done a chart that actually showed the interrelationships with the boxes below the Assistant Secretary down through to the weapons laboratories, it would have taken a poster three times that size if you could see it. That is really inconceivable.
I will depart from my statement and tell you that I have got a friend who runs a Fortune 50 company who was very interested in what we are doing. I showed him that chart. He said, that is absolutely impossible, I cannot believe that goes on in our government today with all of the tools we have to improve management. He said, that didn't go on in American industry 25 years ago; if it did, they would have been in bankruptcy or worse.
Several Secretaries have tried some type of reform at one time or another. There were attempts to try to improve management within the DOE bureaucracy. The problem is that the DOE bureaucrats and lab employees have been able to wait out the reform for whatever reason and then revert to form. Because of the overwhelming and damning evidence of security failures and the profound responsibility that comes with the stewardship of nuclear weapons, it is time to fundamentally restructure the lines of authority to the weapons labs and their security, our job No. 1, within a substantially semiautonomous agency. Even in the current uproar over the Cox committee report, PFIAB found as late as last week, I might say—I will amend it to this week—indifference and business as usual at some levels in these labs. If the current scandal plus the best efforts of Secretary Richardson are not enough, only a fundamental and lasting restructure will be sufficient.
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I will look ahead for a moment. The Congress and the President in a bipartisan way have an opportunity to do what none of their predecessors have done, step up to the plate, make lasting reform and fundamentally restructure DOE. PFIAB offers two alternatives, a semiautonomous agency and a completely independent agency.
Do you want to suspend for a vote, Mr. Chairman?
The CHAIRMAN. We had better. Would you like a break?
Senator RUDMAN. I am fine, sir. We can do whatever you like. I have another five minutes left.
The CHAIRMAN. Then we can do a summation. We will recess.
[Recess.]
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order.
Senator, proceed as you would like.
Senator RUDMAN. Mr. Chairman, let me continue, talking about organization.
Our panel debated the merits and demerits of these reorganization proposals. But we came down in full agreement on one principle, and from that principle we will not deviate. The nuclear weapons lab needs to be semiautonomous from DOE. I will explain in detail what we mean by that word.
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That change needs to be substantial and codified in law. I guess if I were to attach a headline to our proposal, it would say, ''Do not isolate but insulate.'' That is where we are coming from.
It is not enough to change policy from the top. We have to change the culture, the priorities and the implementation at the ground level. That is going to require strong leadership plus an organization that lends itself to people being fully and directly accountable for their actions.
Someone asked me, Mr. Chairman, if it was merely a coincidence that the PFIAB panel's recommendation for a semiautonomous agency were similar to those proposed by some in Congress, including a member of this committee and also two members of the Senate. First and foremost, I will say unequivocally for the record that there was no collaboration or discussion with the Congress in our findings or recommendations. That would have been decidedly improper at that point.
Second, I would remind people that we did not endorse a single solution although I would have preferred to. We sketched two alternatives, and as a panel did so, so as not to favor one over the other for the initial presentation.
Finally, none of the conclusions that we reached or alternatives that we considered was new. I don't like to admit that, but that is true. After looking at the 100 or so of these critical reports, I told the Senate the other day that I don't think that it was a coincidence that we reached the same conclusions; I think it was destiny.
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Let me look at the record for a moment. In 1976, Federal officials studying the operations of the labs considered three solutions: placing the labs under DOD, making them a free-standing agency, or leaving them within the Energy Research and Development Administration. They opted for the status quo.
In 1981 the incoming Reagan Administration, led by OMB, evaluated whether to dismantle the Department of Energy and place the nuclear operations within an independent agency. The idea was dead in less than a year.
In 1995, chaired by the former chairman of Motorola Corporation, the Galvin report said, quote, ''It is hard to reach any other conclusion than that the current system of governance of these laboratories is broken and should be replaced with a bold alternative.'' that report recommended an alternative structure that achieves greater independence, but the status quo also prevailed.
In 1997, the Institute for Defense Analysis, which is very familiar to this committee, the IDA, issued a very detailed report. Here is the report. It was authorized by the Congress; it was appropriated for by the Congress. You paid a lot of money for it, and I want to tell you that it is a first-rate report.
The reason it did not get the attention that this report has received is obvious to all of us who have served in government for a long time. Government is like a fire company. We respond to the latest big conflagration. I have said before and I will say again today, had it not been for the extraordinary work done by the press and the Cox commission on this issue, I doubt that I would be here and I doubt that we would have had a report. But be that as it may, this report came out and it bears reading; it is very well done. I regret to say that nothing was done when that report was issued.
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Every time a President or a Secretary of Energy or Congress has run up against the DOE bureaucrats, they have won. They are willing to wait it out. There is a certain amount of arrogance there, in fact, the type of arrogance that enables these bureaucrats to delay implementation of a direct order from the highest authority in the executive branch, the President of the United States.
I think I have talked about it later in my testimony, but maybe at this point I could tell you the story. The Presidential Decision Directive, which you and this committee are familiar with, the one to do with the services, was issued in 1998. For the first six months, efforts went on within the DOE to find ways to get around it; not to implement it, to disobey it. And finally with a change of administration within the Department, efforts were made to abide by it, which is what they are doing now.
It has been 16, 17 months now. They are a long way from having conformed to that PDD. I happen to think, quite frankly, members of this committee, that this is about as close to a disgrace as you can find in the government, a government that theoretically has an elected President who has authority over his Administration.
I want to say something about Secretary Richardson and his recent initiatives. I have a very high regard for the Secretary, and I don't have any question that he has been working very hard to address these problems. The problem that we see on this panel, unanimously, is that he will be gone in 18 months. And the four-star general that he has just appointed as his security czar, who is a superb individual, and the counterintelligence chief that he appointed five or six months ago, a former FBI agent, a first-rate counterintelligence official, they may be gone as well if changes in the Administration follow the form. And then things evaporate.
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Most of the events that precipitated this current uproar occurred before the Secretary arrived in 1998 as Secretary of Energy. He has been at the tip of the sword of all of the media on this issue and all of the Congressional interest in this issue; and he has been sensitized to these security problems, and he has worked very hard on those problems. But I submit to you, the next Secretary of Energy might well have a totally different set of priorities.
Secretary Watkins, for example, had probably the best credentials on security issues of maybe any Secretary of Energy. But when he became Energy Secretary, he was immediately besieged, as you all recall, by the public outcry over the handling of environmental issues. Congress became inflamed about those issues and said, let's fix them, and rightly so. But everything else went over to the side.
It is almost as if agencies can't do two things at the same time. But that is exactly what happened. That is why Congress and the President, in our view, must institutionalize these issues at DOE, and by embedding them in the statutes and implementing them at every level, the fundamental issue of accountability and how well it is instilled in the attitudes and actions of individuals within the labs is going to remain regardless of which President, which Energy Secretary, which party, or which Congress is in office at any one time.
As I understand it, there are three fundamental objections to the model on which we have focused most of our attention. That model is in the book on pages 50–51. That is the model there which I think you will note bears quite a different—gives you quite a different picture than the original diagram that I held up of the present organization.
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Let me talk about the three objections that I understand have been raised and some things your staff has told us. First, people figure it would somehow weaken the ability of the Secretary to hold his subordinates in a semiautonomous agency accountable. That is simply not true. The Secretary will have more direct power to hold people accountable because the locus of responsibility will be more clearly defined and fixed.
I told the Senate committee that all they had to do to make sure that nobody had any question was use the same language that NSA would have or DARPA would have in the DOD or that NOAA would have in the Commerce Department. It simply says, ''Notwithstanding any other provision of this act, the director of the agency for nuclear stewardship who shall also serve as an Under Secretary of Energy shall report directly to and be responsible directly to the Secretary of Energy, who shall be his or her immediate supervisor.'' So I think that issue really is a nonissue.
The second issue that has been raised—and probably a legitimate issue, but I'm not sure it ought to be raised at this time—is that DOE's problems have to be solved in an all or none fashion. In other words, security cannot be addressed until environmental and health issues are also addressed. I ran into some of that before the House Commerce Committee here a couple of days ago. That, of course, would be ideal. I would agree, that would be ideal. But I am sure that all of you know that if we allow the best to be the prerequisite for the good, nothing will get done. That has been part of the problem.
Finally, there is a very legitimate concern that this charge may damage the science at the labs. I want to assure you that we looked at this issue probably more carefully than any other single issue. That is why I am thankful that we had the wise counsel of Dr. Sid Drell, a world-class scientist and a member of PFIAB and someone with 40 years of hands-on experience with these labs. He assured us, as he assured the Senate yesterday, that this is a workable model; and if anybody knows, I think he does. I would like to submit for the record his statement to the Senate yesterday, which is very, very persuasive on that point.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
I will conclude by hoping that the Congress and the President will work together on this. This is not a partisan issue nor is it politically easy. There is turf at stake. There is budget authority at stake. There is jurisdiction in the Congress at stake. There are jobs at stake. And contracts could be at stake. It is a hard thing for people who have so much vested in the system to admit that it doesn't work. We have seen a lot of that in the last few days.
This is a matter of tremendous gravity to our national security. I think that everyone here will agree that that rises above any political considerations. I believe that solving these security and counterintelligence problems within DOE will ultimately help the Department to better address its many other missions.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Senator Rudman can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Senator. I appreciate that and I won't have a question right now, but just let me elaborate a little bit on what you have been talking about.
I know I had occasion to meet with a couple of people from security at DOE—and I don't know if you met with these gentlemen or not, but I know you met with a lot of them—and I was sitting there listening to what they were saying about their attempts to plug the leaks and to report on the security lapses and all these things and the efforts made by his superiors—their superiors to prevent them from going public, from telling of these things and just the things they did to them to prevent them from doing it. And to say the least, they have been put on administrative leave and people have been there for 20 years and doing nothing but security, and they prevented them from doing it. I was sitting there listening to these things, and I would say I can't believe what I am hearing. I just can't believe this is happening in America.
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I couldn't believe that it was just all a matter of security lapses we were talking about, but it seemed like sometimes there was a conscious effort to—I will use the best face I can put on it—share this information with other people throughout the world, and I just couldn't believe it. Kind of like back home we have got a saying, it is so bad I am not even going to tell them about it back home because they wouldn't believe it anyhow, and that's about the way it is. People just can't—when you share this with people, they just have a blank look on their faces. They can't conceive of this happening, not here. They can't conceive of that.
And so with that, I will yield to Mr. Skelton for any questions he would have.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Senator. I notice your use of the word arrogance and several times you used the phrase ''they could wait it out.'' Senator, how do you get at that, assuming that is a root cause?
Senator RUDMAN. That is a very good question, and I am not sure I have the answer completely, but I will certainly try from what we learned.
Let me first say that I think it was a slip of the tongue. I don't think he really meant it. At the Senate hearing, Secretary Richardson said he didn't like the talk of these malcontents who have come down and talked to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Well, some of those malcontents are pretty high on his staff.
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We talked to enormous numbers of people without anybody knowing who we were talking to. It was truly the right kind of investigation to run behind closed doors, and we are not going to disclose who said what because they were able to talk frankly to us, and where we got the arrogance from and where we got the dysfunctionalism from is from these very people, who either work there, who are frustrated and want it better, who are terrific people, good government employees the overwhelming number of them but can't get it done within the structure, and I might say from a number of people who held extraordinarily high positions at the Department including Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries over the years. So that is how we came to the conclusion about the arrogance and the dysfunctional aspects of it, how do you get at it.
You know, if you have somebody who works for you that is arrogant and finds ways to get around what you tell him to do, unless you have real authority, and I mean total authority, you are going to have a hard time dealing with them.
I can give you an example that members of this committee can relate to and I can relate to. The name of the Senate committee will be nameless, but it is a very important Senate committee, and the staff is under the total jurisdiction of the chairman of that committee or was at that time. It may have changed. At least I am speaking of the majority staff at that time, and that staff was assigned, of course, to those of us who worked on that committee. That was a very arrogant staff. And as upset as members became, all the chairman wanted was their total loyalty, and they were loyal to him, and the rest of us, you know, didn't really count, and you could see an arrogance to the point where the committee staff, I thought, became dysfunctional.
Well, in this organization, if you look at the way it is organized, there is no strong person at the top who can send orders down from high that you are going to do it this way or you are going someplace else.
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Now, the University of California at Livermore and at Los Alamos is the contractor, but they will tell you and have told us that they respond to the direction they get from the people who are paying the bill, i.e., DOE. The problem has been there have been so many people with authority over various pieces of these laboratories that there is nobody who can be truly a strong leader and say, look, this is the policy and this is what we are going to do.
Now, the issue that the Chairman raised, we had the same issue raised to us and disclosed to us, a couple of instances. I don't know what the motivation was of the people, but certainly if you had a strong response from the leader at the top that would not happen.
This organization, in my view, is leaderless, and that hurts the labs. It hurts the University of California. It certainly hurts the DOE.
Mr. SKELTON. Then what recommendations do you have to fix it?
Senator RUDMAN. The chart on page 50, if you will note, creates an agency for nuclear stewardship, and that is on page 50 of the report. It is also here next to the stenographer, and if you will look down there, there is a very direct line to a deputy director for defense programs and an extraordinarily short line to those labs. No one else in the Department can get their hands on any of the issues involved there other than those the Secretary wishes to charge to come to talk to the Undersecretary for Nuclear Administration or Nuclear Stewardship, if you wish. This is a small, tightly run agency with accountability, and we think that makes a huge difference. Everyone we have talked to who understands management structure says if anything will work, this will probably work.
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Let me say this is not unlike a major division of a major corporation. When you look at their budget, which is what, about a third of the entire budget of the Department, then you realize that they need to have essentially their own organization.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you so much.
Senator RUDMAN. We also, of course, had that same organization without the sector of energy with NASA up above, but we decided because of the science issue that that wouldn't work. Dr. Drell figured it wouldn't, but we thought the Congress ought to have the two proposals in front of you since we considered it.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Buyer. Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator, I have not read all 100 of the reports that you folks found. I have looked at at least 20 of them that have been written over the past few years, and the first thing I have got to say is I greatly appreciate the time and effort that you and the panel members and your staff made to go around the country, talk to people, and make this report and make it in clear and direct language. I think that is significant, and frankly, I think it helps put the monkey on our back, so that now, if we don't act on this clear, direct language that describes the problem and recommends a solution, then we are negligent in fulfilling our responsibilities. And I know you are doing all this testifying as a volunteer and so forth, and I just appreciate your time and effort coming here.
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Let me ask you a few questions as briefly as I can. Last week in May I introduced a bill, or an amendment, that would have been put on the DOD Authorization bill, which was very similar to your semiautonomous agency. The only significant difference really is that y'all include nonproliferation, fissile material disposition, and the naval reactor part in the new agency. How big a deal do you think that is? Why is it there? Tell me about that recommendation.
Senator RUDMAN. Because of the interface between the nuclear programs and those three boxes on your left, our question was where would you put them if you didn't put them there? They have more similarity and more working relationships possible where they are than any other place at DOE. Obviously, if you were to make it a totally independent agency, then you would have to find a home for those folks because it would not fit at DOE if the entire nuclear laboratory responsibility became independent. So that is why we did it.
But I want to say, Congressman Thornberry, that I assumed having looked at what you did that you would probably ask a question about our view of what I look at as H.R. 2032. Are we talking about the same thing?
Mr. THORNBERRY. Yes, sir. I later introduced it as a separate bill.
Senator RUDMAN. And let me just say that the panel has looked at it and the staff has looked at, and I would like to just make a few constructive comments about it because obviously you put a lot of work into it, and you heard me say it was destiny that we came to the same approximate conclusion. Well, anybody looking at the same kind of material is going to come to probably the same conclusion, I would think.
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We think the bill is an improvement over section 3165 of the FY 2000 Defense Authorization bill, and I would be happy to discuss with you, Mr. Chairman, some of things about that that we don't agree with, and they were reasonable disagreements, but we think it is an improvement.
It recognizes the need to establish a semiautonomous agency. It does not clearly articulate the authority and accountability of the Secretary, which is easy to fix. It gives the administrator explicit authority over and responsibility for relations with Congress, which could in the eyes of a strong Secretary undermine his authority. I think you'd have to think about that.
We believe it has too many separate entities reporting to the administrator. We would have four subordinate line managers reporting to the agency head. You have about eight and as many as 13 entities. So we think our organization tends to be a bit tighter, but obviously, that is a matter for the Congress to decide. And it would appear to prohibit the agency head from establishing liaison offices with the labs. Although that may not have been your intention, we read it that way, requiring him to rely on the field offices.
Let me talk about the field offices. There are thousands of employees in these field offices. This is a very sensitive issue politically. We think they are part of the problem. There is just too much in between authority and execution.
You know, if you have a great football coach and you have got too many assistants between the coach and the quarterback, you may never get the play called you want, and so I would say that that would be a comment.
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Now, I will at this point, if you'd like, Mr. Chairman, comment on Section 3165, because we assumed that the committee would be interested in our analysis of those, too, and we are pleased to give it for whatever it is worth. It gives most everything to defense programs, and we are not sure that probably in light of a lot we found is the best solution.
Defense programs is yet an inherent conflict between what we might call production and protection and some of the science, so we thought that might not work. One of the biggest problems is that we thought it would perpetuate and maybe exacerbate the natural propensity for managers to favor production, in other words, those activities perceived to be in furtherance of a particular mission over protection, which would be security, counterintelligence, environmental cleanup and so forth. So there could be tension there.
Our approach recognized the conflict and has a manager above the EP, the agency director, who is responsible for resolving.
The other thing is Section 3165 perpetuates the links to the field offices. We think it is very important to essentially do a zero-based organization of those field offices because they serve a lot of other functions. They do other things besides these labs. What you really ought to do is set this up. Say, all right, let's go back to ground zero. What do we really need if we have this organization in these field offices? You need something, but I am not sure how much.
I know that Congresswoman Tauscher from Livermore, I am sure, has had plenty of people talking to her out there about Oakland and this office and that office, and one of things we got out was it doesn't help the people it is supposed to help, and it may get in the way of the people it is supposed to manage. So that is why we made that recommendation. We understand that that is very, very touchy from an employment point of view.
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Also, 3165 seems to take the defense programs from out of the Secretary's accountability. We think the Secretary should remain accountable. We think it is important enough to have a Cabinet-level person with final jurisdiction, which is why I don't understand Secretary Richardson's disagreement with us at all. He says he disagrees and he says he will do exactly what we have here, but he doesn't want to call it an agency; he doesn't want to call it an administration. He says he abhors the word agency. I looked it up in the dictionary the other night, and I don't know anything about the word to abhor, but he abhors it, so you will have to talk to him about it, and I say that in all good humor.
Finally, we just believe that you need the staff around the Secretary, the IGs, the general counsel and the other people to still have jurisdiction with him over whatever he wishes in any department, including this one.
Mr. THORNBERRY. If I can, Mr. Chairman, may I just ask you to address one other thing, and that is the way the Congress has contributed to the problem and how do you suggest we fix that because you mention it in the report.
Senator RUDMAN. Well, if I were still here and were asked to vote on one of several proposals after doing what I have been doing for the last 90 days, I would go for a semiautonomous agency directly responsible to the Secretary of Energy, giving him full authority over that, but insulating it totally from all other parts of DOE, other than the Inspector General and the general counsel.
Incidentally, Mr. Chairman, if I may, I had some interesting phone calls and e-mail, which this is a good chance here to say something, asking how much the panel members were paid for the work that they did, and I would like to just say what you all know is that this is totally a pro bono effort. Nobody on the PFIAB, the entire PFIAB, is paid one thin dime other than their travel expenses, and we have some very public-spirited citizens who have given up roughly three months of their lives to get this done. So for those who think we are riding a gravy train, I wish we were, but we are not.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. SISISKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Warren, for being here today.
I would like to compliment you, but really your staff, on how they wrote this. We ought to give lessons to the GAO and other reports that we have to read. I read it last night and didn't fall asleep. At my age that is, you know, that is a big wonder.
Senator RUDMAN. Be careful. We are about the same age, Norm.
Mr. SISISKY. I know one of the things that my friend just asked, how should Congress address it, when you said that they report to 18 committees, that is where you can start by the way, but that is an aside.
Reading this, I came upon—and I can't find it today as a matter of fact because I was just reading it and I turned down pages—that you thought the number of personnel was bloated. You have got a chart here on page 2, the number of people, of the findings, and you have a chart there, and then further in, further in you are saying that we should keep it as a NOCO operation. I mean, you are very absolute on that. Now, I am trying to think these are contract employees, coming back to page 2.
Senator RUDMAN. Right.
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Mr. SISISKY. Now, what interest does the contractor have in this? I know what you said before that it is who has the money, but as I understand it, these are not bid—the same people who have had it are getting it, and did you look—I think in something you said you didn't have time to really go through the whole process, but to me that is something that is left out.
Senator RUDMAN. If you look at page 45, I think that, Congressman Sisisky, is what you are talking about. I think it is the first full paragraph on page 45.
Mr. SISISKY. That is the numbers of people, DOE employees?
Senator RUDMAN. Right. We talk about that and we talk about the number of people that are in the various laboratories, the number of those that are in the field offices. The total field complement in the field offices is 6,000, and back at DOE they have a total work force of 5,000; and then you look at the number of people that actually work in the labs and it's pretty small by comparison.
You sure have a lot of supervisors there, and what we say is reduce that and streamline it and downsize all of the supervision and take a good look at the way these labs are staffed, but it is not the staffing of the labs we have the concern with as much it is the staffing of all the infrastructure between headquarters and the labs.
Mr. SISISKY. Well, is there any responsibility of the contractors as to security? Is there any responsibility?
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Senator RUDMAN. As to security, of course. They are supposed to carry out the security directives given to them by the department. The final responsibility for security and, of course, counterintelligence is a Federal responsibility.
Mr. SISISKY. I agree.
Senator RUDMAN. And we found in many instances that for reasons that they thought were justified, and some were and some weren't, that they had a hard time discharging that responsibility in the structure.
I believe that if you had an undersecretary or a director, if you will, dual-headed, who came out of a major U.S. corporation running an $8 or a $10 billion segment of that company and he or she was asked to run this, the first thing they would do is get top notch security and CI people to go in and do a survey and then tell these contractors exactly what was expected of them, and right now, it is sometimes unclear to me whether they know what is expected of them.
Mr. SISISKY. Now, you have seen the Secretary of Energy's reorganization.
Senator RUDMAN. Which one? They have been coming out daily.
Mr. SISISKY. Well, I don't know which one this is. You are opposed to the Secretary of Energy playing any part, that is what I was really—.
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Senator RUDMAN. No, not at all, and that is why I don't understand Secretary Richardson's problem. The Secretary essentially says I am willing to adopt exactly what you have on that chart, at least this is what he said to the Senate, with a few minor changes with one big exception. He just wants it on the line with all the other boxes. He wants an undersecretary for nuclear programs, and then he will deal with everybody else. The one thing he doesn't want to do is to refer to it as an agency or an administration within the Department of Energy. I don't understand that. It works in the government.
Mr. SISISKY. Basically, you are using the NRO-type of thing. Am I correct in that?
Senator RUDMAN. Exactly correct.
Mr. SISISKY. Who had a problem and corrected the problem?
Senator RUDMAN. Correct. NRO—how about National Security Agency, which I know you are very familiar with. We have been out there together many years ago, DARPA.
Mr. SISISKY. NASA.
Senator RUDMAN. NASA, of course, is independent, but the others all work within a major Cabinet agency. So I don't understand Secretary Richardson's opposition unless there is something so esoteric buried in the budget act that has to do with transfer of funds that are appropriated or authorized between blocks of responsibility and whether or not there are some firewalls drawn around those agencies and administrations which are within the Department.
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For instance, I don't think, having been on the Senate Budget Committee, that you could take and reprogram money from the National Security Agency or NRO into the Navy Department. I don't think you can do that.
Mr. SISISKY. But you can do it—.
Senator RUDMAN. I think so, and I don't think the Secretary hasn't told us what is on his mind, but that is my guess; and if I am wrong I would like to hear about it.
Mr. SISISKY. Well, you may get the opportunity. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Ortiz.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Like the rest of us Mr. Senator, we appreciate the fine work that you have done.
You know, my only question is that I cannot understand the arrogance that these people have. Is it because they—is it a lack of training that they don't get before they are hired or is it that they think that they cannot be replaced, that they are just outstanding scientists or whatever? Why is this happening?
Senator RUDMAN. Well, there are two types of arrogance that we found. One from some nonscientific but Federal employees at some pretty responsible levels who kind of think that they know what they are doing and they don't want too much interference, particularly from the Congress, and certainly from the Administration high up who they look at as political people, you know, let them serve their term, and we are really the people that run this place. That is one type of arrogance. That is the kind of arrogance that led to 16 months going by before the Presidential Decision Directive was adopted, was starting—was in the initial phases of implementation.
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The other arrogance—I want to choose my words carefully or Congresswoman Tauscher will come down on me like a ton of bricks. There is something different about rocket scientists and nuclear physicists. They are extraordinary people, and I had some interesting discussions with a number of them in the last few months. It is not an arrogance based on disloyalty. These are loyal Americans, but in some ways it is an arrogance of saying I really don't need to hear from you what I ought to do; I am plenty smart enough to figure it out for myself.
Now, let me tell you when it comes to polygraph tests and escorting people when they are on overseas trips, Secretary Richardson is going to have his hands full. It is not going to be easy. So arrogance is a strong word. We meant that word, but it is kind of a bit of a looseness—add to that that the greatest societies that produce the greatest scientists are open societies, and that is why the foreign business program has to be carefully watched; but it is very, very important.
And there has been a certain resentment of some of the characterization, some of the excess characterization of some of the things that have gone on for which—to which we refer in our report, although we certainly aren't referring to the Cox Commission, who we think did an extraordinary job.
Although we don't agree with each and every conclusion, we think it is a superb piece of work. So I guess I would have to say there are several kinds of arrogance; and there is an old saying about someone that if they were very modest and had a lot to be modest about—well, in this case you have got some people who are kind of arrogant, but they probably have a fair amount to be arrogant about.
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Mr. ORTIZ. I just have one other question. Now, when we talk about jeopardizing the security of this great nation, and then you come up with some recommendations that you have; and you say that it is really broken down to the point where you can't fix it, you need to build it new, with the recommendations that you came up, how long do you think it will take to really provide the security that is needed?
Senator RUDMAN. If the Congress were to pass this legislation in the next month and it was signed by the President, the first thing it would take probably the better part of six months to a year to get the right people in place because we make recommendations as to the kind of person who ought to be undersecretary of this particular agency for nuclear stewardship.
I mean, I don't know how much experience this committee has with NASA, but I am sure many of you must know Mr. Golden, who is the NASA chief executive; and you know, someone like that who has had major experience with—and you just to talk to him for a half an hour to understand that there is no nonsense over there, that when an order comes down from Golden, if it is NOAA based, somebody is out looking for a job.
You need someone like that in place, and then you have to make sure that you kind of trim down some of the underbrush here as we suggest. At the same time, all of these programs that the Secretary has put into effect can be working, but my guess is it will be probably 18 months, 2 years, if we are lucky, to get this really paying a dividend.
You know, it is like turning around the queen Mary; it doesn't turn on a dime. It takes a long time to get it around, but you have to start someplace, and I believe that this Congress, this Secretary and this President are the ones that ought to do it because we ought not to go through what we just have gone through and this should not have happened. There are enough reports here, particularly that IBA report and the Galvin report that essentially told all of us this is coming, and guess what, it came.
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Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you, Senator. We appreciate your contributions.
Senator RUDMAN. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Picket. Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman; and while it is a shame my friend Mr. Sisisky isn't here to hear this, because when he was complimenting the great writing involved, you know, Mississippi is now home to Stephen Ambrose, Willie Morris, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, John Grisham, and of course, one of the great writers on this was Joe O'Keefe from by Biloxi, Mississippi. I wanted to recognize that.
Senator, you know, I have heard a lot on talk radio, trying to link the horrible mistakes at the labs to the campaign contributions.
Senator RUDMAN. Doing what again, Congressman?
Mr. TAYLOR. Trying to link the horrible mistakes and the loss of security information to campaign contributions. Was your commission in any way—was it part of your task to see if there was such a linkage?
Senator RUDMAN. No, Congressman, it wasn't. You will find in the very beginning our tasking from the President. We tried to abide by that tasking. We looked at security from the point of view of these laboratories historically, present, and make recommendations for future, and to hit that hard.
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Now, in doing that we had to take up some issues that were tangential to that. You will find a whole list of questions we think the appropriate committees of Congress, not us, should ask the FBI, should ask the Attorney General, may want to ask the National Security Council. We have them there, but it was not our job to look at those questions.
As far as campaign contributions are concerned, no, we didn't—there was nothing that we even came close to that issue.
Mr. TAYLOR. So nothing you saw—I realize you weren't asked to look into it, but in the course of your studies, did you encounter anything that would lead you to believe that there was a connection?
Senator RUDMAN. No, we didn't, but in all honesty we sure weren't following any paths that would have led us there. My own sense is—and I am speaking just as an individual and I have a lot of respect for my former colleagues—but you know, I don't think we do, I don't think we do ourselves any good as a nation or as a body politic or certainly as a Congress to make allegations which are unsupported.
Now, so far I have heard those allegations, I have seen what people think is circumstantial evidence. But I think we ought to be very careful. I think we probably ought to lower our voices lest everybody will be hating everybody else and nobody will want to run for Congress.
I don't have an opinion on whether that happened or not, but if people want to make that charge, that is a pretty damn serious charge. I mean, what they are talking about by the way happens to be treason. I mean, if that is true, that is treason. If somebody did that, they probably ought to be lined up and shot. So it is a pretty serious charge.
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Mr. TAYLOR. Going back to what Mr. Skelton said and your remarks, a bureaucratic culture so thoroughly saturated with cynicism and disregard for authority. Never before has this panel found such a cavalier attitude towards one of the most serious responsibilities in the Federal government, control of the design information relating to nuclear weapons. Is it so ingrained now in the people that you dealt with that it is beyond fixing?
Senator RUDMAN. It is beyond fixing.
Mr. TAYLOR. Does the whole culture have to be fired and rehired?
Senator RUDMAN. No, I don't believe that at all. I think if you leave it at its present organizational structure, nothing will happen. If you have a slimmed-down structure with very direct lines of responsibility and one person with several deputies responsible for that and you are going to see changes. If you don't, then you replace those people.
You know, we don't have to mention them by name. We can look at a number of major U.S. corporations, some maybe in your districts that were on the verge of, you know, maybe going out of business. Certainly one we can talk about publicly or one of the great American corporation's success story, had a deeply ingrained culture that was all wrong for this century was IBM; and anybody who wants to read a business school case study on what happened at IBM over the last five years, it only shows you one thing: strong, effective leadership makes a difference; and certainly, there are numbers of American corporations, but that is the one that stands out, on culture, all kinds of problems, arrogance, all of it.
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And I have reason to know something about that, and I will tell you that a strong leader can change almost anything, and there are plenty of strong people who are patriots who would like to serve this government. If we select someone for that job based on only one thing, competence, it will get fixed because the people who work in these laboratories and the great number of bureaucrats at DOE are good people. They are good people in a dysfunctional organization.
Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Chairman, could I ask a quick follow-up? Do you know of any impotence in the existing law that would keep the necessary heads from rolling?
Senator RUDMAN. None whatsoever.
Mr. TAYLOR. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Hunter.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Rudman, thank you for all your hard work.
I just had one thought to come on the heels of my colleague from Mississippi, and that is simply that I had Undersecretary Elizabeth Moler before our subcommittee which oversees the labs in October of last year and asked her under oath whether there were any—had been any thefts of nuclear technology from national laboratories, and Mr. Trulock, who was sitting with her, and they talked about some old cases, but obviously did not talk about the case of the W88s, which they very clearly knew.
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Later, under oath again, Mr. Trulock said that Ms. Moler had told him not to talk about that. So let me just say to my colleague, there are lots of unanswered questions, and I agree that the wild accusations shouldn't be made, but certainly the fact that there was enough arrogance that the Congress was not told the truth in a timely fashion is very disturbing, I think, and should be to all of us.
Senator RUDMAN. Mr. Hunter, we read the entire transcript of that hearing.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you. I am glad you did. It was quite interesting when we discovered the truth several months later, Senator. Senator, one of the criticisms that we have heard of the advisory board's proposal and basically manifest in your two alternates, or two options here, is that, I quote, ''that the new agency leaves behind monitoring of safety and environmental oversight of the weapons complex.'' How would you respond to that?
Senator RUDMAN. Just untrue. I mean, that is why we finally decided to leave it within the Department of Energy. If you would have set up a NASA-type organization, you would have had to create all of that. Well, that exists. The Secretary of Energy has absolute authority to say to that undersecretary, we are going to send environmental people in to do thus and so, cooperate with them. We're going to bring safety people in. He can send the IG in if he wishes. That is just a totally, phony argument, just not true.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. So basically from your—in your discussions with Secretary Richardson, the only major disagreement that he has with this, at least that he has articulated, has been this really wordsmithing, if you will, or labelling of this semiautonomous agency.
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Senator RUDMAN. Precisely, and we think that, although it is only wordsmithing, it is extraordinarily important, as we all know who served in this body, how important words can be in the right places.
We just had a United States Supreme Court decision on the Americans with Disabilities Act that tells us a lot about how important words are, and the words have to be chosen very carefully; and that is why we decided that if you want to carve this out to insulate it from people then you take—you know, you don't reinvent the wheel. You look around and say, as Congressman Sisisky pointed out, what has worked and worked well after it was fixed, NRO, NSA, DARPA, NOAA, they are pretty good agencies. They run pretty well. They are not perfect. They don't have the problems this agency does, and they report to a Cabinet Secretary; but everybody in the Department knows hands off, that is an independent unit, and that is why we are so strong on this.
And by the way, Dr. Drell, who probably more than anyone else, understands the culture, the history, strongly felt that we shouldn't do this and said so yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mr. HUNTER. Let me ask you one other question with respect to the capability that the labs manifest and retain. Obviously, during the Cold War, the design and construction of nuclear weapons was a very important piece of our national security apparatus, if not the primary piece, and we got the smartest people literally in the United States and as you mentioned in your report, the smartest people in the world that came to the U.S. after World War II.
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That was our—deterring the Soviet Union from a nuclear strike was our major military goal, probably the primary military goal. Today, we are not testing weapons; but we have another threat, and I think with—after a lot of position-taking, Democrats and Republicans have come to the common conclusion that defending against these increasingly effective and increasingly fast ballistic missiles, all these species of ballistic missiles that are now being tested by potential adversaries around the world, is a very important goal, whether you call it theater ballistic missiles or a national ballistic missile defense system.
The smartest guys we have got in the country still arguably are these physicists at the national laboratories, a national treasure. I want to run one thing by you. We have been trying to give part of this challenge, which has been an enormous challenge that we haven't been able to solve, hitting a bullet with a bullet, with the defense's system, to assign part of that problem and that challenge to the smart people in the national labs.
Now, last year I put in money and carved out a piece of national—of the budget for the development and work on and contribution to theater ballistic missile defense systems. The laboratories got together, decided they didn't want to do windows, they classified this as windows, and they ended up getting a provision installed on the Senate side in the bill saying that the national laboratories, the places where we have the smartest people in this country, arguably, will not participate to the extent of one thin dime on missile defense; and that was retained, fought hard by the Senate in conference and retained as a bar to using this resource.
Now, understanding that this—obviously we are going to move on from where we are right now with respect to the cultural attitude, I think, and the physical makeup of the bureaucracy that runs the laboratories. But if you'll follow me here, we know this is an important national endeavor, probably a challenge that is every bit as important as the deterrent challenge of the last 40 years.
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Under your semiautonomous agency option here, will we be able to rally and utilize and mobilize the intellectual capability and all of their resources, their testing ranges, their computational capability, their simulation capability of the national laboratories to assist in defending, building a defense we can utilize in theater or nationally against incoming ballistic missiles? Will we be able to use that resource that we have got?
Senator RUDMAN. Absolutely. There's no prohibition whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I would like to point out to you—Brendon, if you'd walk over there—that there was a line that goes from the Assistant Secretary for Science and Energy Resources directly to the Deputy Director of Defense Programs. That is why that line is there. Right now, that line can go right down into the laboratories. That is one of the problems. It should go to someone who is running the laboratories. They should have just one person directing them.
No, I was not familiar with that particular episode you have just recounted, and obviously I don't know enough to comment on it, but without Congressional intervention, I assume that these laboratories would be required to do whatever they were asked to do unless they said we don't want to do that and the Congress said you have to do it.
I am not sure where you come out there. I expect they would probably do it because you might have some funding issues with some other kinds of things going on, and as I am sure, as the Congressman knows, there are some very extraordinary things going on in those laboratories that have absolutely nothing to do with nuclear. They have to do with other classified and some unclassified things.
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Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, if you would indulge me, just one last question. Any additional powers, Mr. Secretary, that we should give to the director of weapons programs under your options to effect this transition? You talk about clearing out the underbrush of some of the bureaucracies, and I can see situations where you are going to have to have a guy or a lady with some clout and with the power to move personnel and to make some pretty radical decisions in some cases. Any additional powers that you would give them to make this transition?
Senator RUDMAN. Give me just 30 seconds because there is something in the annex that I don't have in front of me. While the staff is looking that up, because we did have a comment, we don't think any additional powers would be required. There might be some exemptions from some things you might want to grant because the nature of the work that is done, but could I answer that for the record?
Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely.
Senator RUDMAN. That would be better.
Mr. SPENCE. And while we are at that, too, before we go to the next question, I forgot to mention in my opening remarks that this committee authorizes two-thirds of the Department of Energy's budget. That might give you an idea about the work they do. Most of it goes for our national security, and all of the national security programs and any connection to it—I think Admiral Bowman said he has talked to you about the special provision to have nuclear propulsion and that you are in agreement with him.
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Senator RUDMAN. And we totally agree, totally agree.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Reyes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator, I really appreciate the job that you have done on this, and I mostly want the record to reflect that I appreciate your—the tenor and the tone of your comments and the context of how politicized this issue has been and contentious it has become over the course of the last few months or so.
But I am curious, and I will tell you, before I came to Congress, I was a chief in the border patrol, and we had an opportunity to go to Los Alamos post-Desert Storm. They were working on a couple of systems to be able to track individuals as they entered illegally into the country, and so a number of us as chiefs got an opportunity to go to the Los Alamos lab. And one of the things that I personally was very impressed with was the security that they had which, you know, unbeknownst to me at the time, must have been all for show.
But we had to submit all kinds of security clearance information. When we got there, we got badges. We got a security briefing. We had to sign a document once we left, and all of these things to me were very impressive.
Also very impressive to me was the attitude of the employees at different levels that were involved with the project that we were there to observe, and I am curious, based on the work that you have done with them and obviously in terms of your comments today about that process and the outcome, what is the morale of the DOE and lab employees after having had a chance to talk with them, you know, the way that you have described today?
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Senator RUDMAN. I don't think that I am in a position to really give you a complete answer. My sense from talking to a number of people is it is not too good. They are very worried that all these disclosures about the possible espionage could damage the amount of support they get from the government and the amount of funding and the job security issues, but I can't comment beyond that on any broad basis.
Let me say that your observation about security in the conventional sense, from the way you would have looked at in your prior occupation, not bad. I mean, some pretty—some mistakes out there, but as they say, they talk about guns, gates, and what is the third one, guards, guns, gates and guards, the three Gs, they are pretty darn good, and that is not the issue.
The arrogance doesn't get in there so much as it gets into the areas of what we call cybersecurity, other kinds of security, counterintelligence. I mean, you know, that is the kind of thing that we found.
Mr. REYES. Well, and again, just to follow up on the morale issue, these are obviously from the reports that I have read, some of the most brilliant people on earth working there.
Senator RUDMAN. Unquestionably.
Mr. REYES. And it would be—at least it is a concern to me—it would be something that obviously they are not in this business to get rich, to make money. They are in it because, from what I have read, they are committed. They are motivated by the challenge. They are motivated by the impact that they can have on keeping our country safe and secure and all the national security aspects of it. So is—do you have any sense that with the scandal—because I don't think there is any better way to describe it—with this scandal, there is a—it has turned off some of these people because they are not, at least from my observations and from my reading about it, they are not like neighbors that I have. They are a different type of individual that, if you turn them off with this, can conceivably pack up their stuff and go play someplace else.
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Senator RUDMAN. Let me just say that obviously the people you are speaking of—and the great many of these people are patriotic Americans. Irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds, they care deeply about America and they are patriots. Nobody argues that issue. My own sense is from talking to a number of those folks that if this Congress would say, okay, you know, you have been buried away here too long in the DOE with all the problems they have had, used to be Atomic Energy Commission and then you moved it into something else, we are going to give you essentially an agency that is kind of tightly controlled that is dedicated to this issue—you are going to be much closer to the people that you are accountable to—and we are going to breathe new life into this and have better administration, I think it would be a morale boost.
I think they recognize—I think they recognize that if it continues as it is, something is going to happen along the way that will invalidate some of the assumptions we have made about it can only be done there and people start looking for other ways to address these issues.
You know, there are a lot of people in this Congress right now who think it ought to go to DOD. I will tell you something, overwhelmingly—I am a big DOD fan—that is not where it ought to be for a whole bunch of reasons. You really want to turn off scientists who want to do some free and independent research, put them as part of DOD. In fact, I agree with everything you said, Congressman.
I think if we want to preserve this national treasure, we ought to darn well reorganize it and give them a feeling they are a part of something that they can be proud of, not just of their research, but of the way they protect this nation's secrets.
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Mr. REYES. And then if I can just follow up with one other different aspect of this. You know, you made reference to all these reports, and I believe you cited the first one from 1986, and you have made the general observation that it has been a failure in either leadership or this bureaucratic—let's wait them out, we are here and they are going to be gone-type dilemma that we have faced.
I am curious to get your opinion on why we have an agency or any agency exists that there aren't any built-in safeguards to this kind of situation. And I say that because this has obviously been documented, and some of the stuff that I have read goes back to the 1970s. What you mentioned today is from—.
Senator RUDMAN. Well, I will give you a very simple answer. I don't mean this to be offensive to anyone, because when people are offered positions by Presidents over the last 20 years—it is a great honor to be a Cabinet Secretary. People are delighted to come up—I am not sure delighted—but they grudgingly come up to the Senate and have confirmation hearings.
I don't think we have had necessarily the people with the background that they needed at the top of that department with some exception. Secretary Richardson has a lot of national security experience both here and at the U.N., but I can name a lot of Secretaries in every Administration, including this one, that didn't have that background, didn't have that concern.
As a matter of fact, one of the things that stunned us was that the transition team back in 1993 never really got into these issues, although these reports were all extant, everybody could look at them. So I think it is a lot to do with leadership at the top. It is not just the DOE.
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I will say something that will probably get me in trouble, but I really can't get in much trouble. I don't have a constituency anymore. I wish that whoever is elected President next year would put together a Cabinet irrespective of party or anything else, find the best people in America, the very finest people, people who are patriots, who are competent, who care, and show the people of this country that we can have a first-rate government.
I don't know how long—we did that during World War II is when we did that. You go back and look at Roosevelt's Administration. You could argue about that President. You couldn't argue with the people he picked to run that war, and nobody cared what party they were.
We have so much cynicism, if I can, Congressman, so much cynicism about our government, about our elected officials, you know, and I care deeply about these institutions. I spent a lot of time in them. If you put good people in management positions, you could change the view of that.
All of these scandals that happened mostly happened because somebody wasn't minding the store. They were off someplace giving a speech or overseas at an international convention; and quite frankly, we have got Secretaries if you look at their travel records for the last 20 years that look more like Marco Polo than the Secretary of any individual group, and I think we ought to manage this government, and this failure is a management failure going back 20 years. It is a management failure of the worst kind. You know, this report is blunt; I am blunter. We ought to fix it.
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Mr. REYES. Thank you very much, Senator; and you may not think you have a constituency, but you have got a lot of respect from members of Congress.
Senator RUDMAN. Thank you very much.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Bartlett.
Senator RUDMAN. Before I answer any other questions, I want to tell Congress Hunter if he'll look at page 47 at the top and page 55 under ''personnel security'' and on page 47, you will find some of your questions on authorities in power answered.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Rudman, you mentioned you asked your staff to find all of the reports that had found problems with security at DOE over the last 20 years; and I don't know if we know they found all of them, but they found 29 reports in the General Accounting Office, they found 61 internal DOE reports, and more than a dozen reports from special task forces and ad hoc panels that found problems.
A number of those reports suggested solutions to those problems, and every time nothing was done. Our hopes and our expectations are frequently not the same. I know it is your hope and it is my hope that we are going to do something about it this time.
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What I want to ask you is, what are your expectations? Are we going to do anything this time? Or is it going to be deja vu all over again?
Senator RUDMAN. Congressman Bartlett, I think something is going to happen this time and not because the PFIAB did this report, because there have been many other reports of extraordinary quality that have been done. The reason something is going to happen is because I think that people up here are feeling what I am hearing. People of this country are outraged by this. They are very upset. They say, you know, how long does it take to learn a lesson.
The Rosenbergs stole the atomic bomb from Los Alamos in 1944 and gave it to the Russians. Claus Fewkes stole a trigger to the hydrogen bomb in 1954 and gave it to the Russians. In 1996 something has happened. We are not sure and what I do know I can't talk about in open session. I mean, you know, how long does it take to learn?
The difference is that when all these other reports were written, there wasn't a fire storm under the country. I am sure that the Chairman remembers full well during the 1980s, when I served on the Defense Appropriations Committee, when the stories broke about the excesses in procurement at DOD. Well, we knew about those for a long time. It wasn't the first time somebody wrote about it, but once the American public hooked into it and it was then Johnny Carson making jokes about it, about these things at night, that is when the Congress acted.
Now, I am sorry that is the way it is, but that appears to be the way it is. You have got to have a crisis to get legislation. This is a crisis. If we don't fix it now, then whatever happens, everyone is to blame who has the authority and the ability to change it. It doesn't have to be exactly what we suggest, but it has got to be something that gives the principle of accountability.
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Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you. If we don't fix it now, shame on us, and I hope we are not ashamed.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator RUDMAN. Thank you, Congressman Bartlett.
The CHAIRMAN. Ms. Sanchez.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator, for coming today; and I actually like your blunt approach personally, and too bad I didn't get to serve with you when you were up here on the Hill.
I just have a couple of questions for you. The first is, one of the things I get really upset with respect to this whole issue of what has happened is the partisanship that is happening with respect—the political nature that is happening especially with our communications to people in America about this issue. I really just want to reiterate for the record from you, is this something that has been happening over several decades, various Administrations, both Republican and Democrat?
Senator RUDMAN. The report indicates with great precision each thing that happened going back to 1980 under several Republican Administrations, two Reagan terms, one Bush term, and the Clinton Presidency; and as I told the Senate day before yesterday, there is really quite enough blame to go around.
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Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you. Secondly, I am what you call a relatively new person to politics and to public service, having now been at this for 2-1/2 years, and before I came here, I worked for a firm that was recognized as an international management consultant.
One of the things I did was tell businesses how to streamline and get it together and get to where they wanted to be in a profitable mode. I have, over the last 2-1/2 years, a little bit of skepticism with respect to government being able to streamline itself and eliminate these various diagrams as you showed earlier when I was in here.
Do you really think that by putting in another quasi-agency to the side of this Department that, in fact, we could streamline through this mess in order to make a more direct accountability structure? With your years in government and understanding what you see at the Pentagon and other places, do you really believe that this is the solution, to streamline and to hold accountable and to eliminate so many of these layers?
Senator RUDMAN. Congresswoman Sanchez, it is the only solution, and this Congress plays the same role towards the government agencies as that international consulting firm played for major corporations. This Congress over the years has done some incredible reorganization. As a matter of fact, this committee and its counterpart in the Senate did something absolutely earthshaking many years before you arrived here called Goldwater-Nichols.
Talk about reorganizing lives and command and structure and things that most private consulting firms couldn't have done. This Congress has the capability, the talent, the staff to do what has to be done. The question remains is there, A, the political will; and B, is there enough sense of urgency to get it done? I think the answer to both should be yes.
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Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you. And my last question, Mr. Secretary, is with respect—Mr. Rudman—Senator—.
Senator RUDMAN. Please don't confuse me, Congresswoman Sanchez.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Believe me, I don't think I would really look at being a Secretary, either, considering some of these bureaucracies that exist. But with respect to our current Secretary of Energy, I am looking at the overview, the forward that you have in the report.
I would agree with your depiction of our current Secretary as being pretty activist, at least at this point. I would like to get an indication from you if you believe that the current Secretary is doing enough to address the issue or if there has also been some lapse.
Given the nature that this structure isn't changed yet, has he in fact been an activist Secretary trying to get to this problem?
Senator RUDMAN. There is absolutely no question that Secretary Richardson has been an activist. He has tried very hard; he has done some very good things. Some things have gone wrong on his watch, but that doesn't mean that he isn't trying to fix them. The problem that I have is, of course, that he will be gone in 18 months. Some of the great people that he brought with him will probably be gone in 18 months.
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Major United States corporations don't—business is not like government. There are some similarities. They are institutionalized. If its CEO and half the board are all killed in the same day in a plane crash, they go on. They are institutionalized. They have systems, they have management, they have rules, they have structures. We don't, not in this Department, unless you institutionalize the production and the stewardship of nuclear weapons and those things that relate to it.
If the next Secretary of Energy, the example that I used the other day, which is not so farfetched, let's assume that a month after that the Secretary of Energy takes office. I happen to think that he will probably be a Republican Secretary of Energy, but be that as it may—.
Ms. SANCHEZ. We Democrats are known for putting some Republicans on.
Senator RUDMAN. Let's assume that he takes office. And three months after he takes office or she takes office the attorney general of one of the States out there reports that there is gas leaking from the new energy-efficient refrigerators and making children sick. Do you have any question what the first priority will be of that Secretary?
I can tell you what it will be. It will be the same thing on the evening news every night which will be on 60 Minutes and all the morning programs, and you all will be talking about it.
Guess what will happen to security, counterintelligence and functioning unless this is institutionalized? The same thing that has happened for 20 years.
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Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Senator.
No questions, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, ma'am.
Mrs. Tauscher.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator, let me thank you for the constituents that I represent in California's tenth Congressional District. It is the only Congressional district, as you know, with two national labs in it, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory. Let me thank you for your very articulate and I hope successful and continued defense of them.
I think we need to be very clear about the fact that these security transgressions, this treason happened due to systemic failure over many decades; as you said, a bipartisan blame game that we could play for a long time. The 7- or 8,000 lab employees that I represent in my district are hardworking, patriotic, brilliant people and they are the smartest people in the world. Coincidentally, they did elect me twice, but they also do a lot of other neat things.
Senator RUDMAN. I think that you have used that line before, Congresswoman
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Mrs. TAUSCHER. I have not used it for a very long time.
I am impressed by the recommendations that you made. I am keeping a very open mind about it. I have a couple of questions because my concerns with your articulation of the reorg chart make me pause.
For the first time, as you know, we had a Secretary of Energy that is actually accountable for our secrets, someone that has stepped up, by the name of Bill Richardson, and said that it is my job to protect these secrets. We have a lot of folks out there that are meant to be catching Mr. Big and doing counterintelligence and other things. He has created a direct line of authority between the new security czar and the counterintelligence head.
Like your analogy just a moment ago about the quarterback and the coach, what I am concerned about by creating a separate agency—and I'm not violently opposed to this, I am just concerned—what it looks like we are doing in the name of the manager or the owner of the team is that we look like we are putting a quarterback coach between the head coach and the quarterback.
As much as we may be concerned about things that have happened in the past with people with not the right expertise, or not paying attention, or a national emergency that takes the diversion away, what I am concerned about is the lack of coordination that essentially lets the Energy Secretary once again off the hook for ultimate responsibility for these secrets in a Cabinet-level post and puts off to someone else who may or may not get along, who may or may not have the same expertise, who may or may not have some other kind of issue—the ability for this thing not to get coordinated the way that it should.
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I want to have an Energy Secretary that is accountable, that is protecting these secrets. What I am concerned about this reorg chart that calls for a semiautonomous agency with a new director is that we could be putting a quarterback coach, put in by the management, between the head coach and the quarterback and then you get the head coach in the name of the Secretary of Energy that says, 'Hey, you know, I didn't do it'.
So how do we tie this up? I know that we want the same thing. We want accountability and to know that it is going to happen the right way.
Senator RUDMAN. Congresswoman Tauscher, I appreciate your question. It is very thoughtful.
Let me ask one of the staff to go up to that large chart again and bring that back here, if I could. As a matter of fact, if you could take that chart there first and put it back up here.
I think we are doing exactly what you are talking about. I think the way it is presently is exactly the opposite of the way that you would like to see it operate. Here is why I say that.
If you were currently the Secretary of Energy and now you look at the laboratory and, in fact, your particular laboratory, which is in Livermore—and I want you to look at all of the boxes that exist between that laboratory and its Director and that Secretary of Energy. I also want to point out to you that there are thousands of employees at another level who essentially are a filter or a screen between those laboratories and that Secretary of Energy.
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Mrs. TAUSCHER. I agree with that, Senator. My question—I agree that that is a disaster and we have had the disaster.
My concern isn't about doing a reorg. My concern is about differentiating between an Under Secretary that directly reports to the Secretary while the Secretary retains the security czar and the counterintelligence component as a direct report, and then brings the lab up underneath directly, so that you get rid of that morass in the middle; versus your recommendation which creates a separate agency, but the agency has all of the counterintelligence and security czar operations, and it is taken away from the Secretary.
Senator RUDMAN. Not true.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. It is not taken away from the Secretary?
Senator RUDMAN. No. We told the Senate two days ago and we haven't said anything really different here—.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Isn't that the way that it is on that chart? All of those things on the right?
Senator RUDMAN. Right, but you need that at that level. You truly need the Under Secretary to have counterintelligence security people in that shop. The Secretary wants counterintelligence and policy people setting general policy at his level; that is fine. In fact, those people in that box can move into this position. They can have subordinates who are working in that area.
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All we are saying is that you can't expect the Secretary of Energy with all that he or she has to do to pay full-time attention to what is going on in those laboratories. That is why you need the Under Secretary and his own staff all together.
But there is—we don't have a problem with the Secretary having Mr. Curran, General Habiger; if he wants to at that level, that is fine. My sense is that down the line other Secretaries will not want them up there. They will probably want to move them down a slot.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. But we don't want that. We have a little dotted line we can put there to move them over there.
What my concern is is that when you create this independent agency, semiautonomous, whatever you want to call it, with the functions including an IG and a controller and all of that and all of the security, it is ex officio of the Secretary. I think that the problem is that it is very easy to get someone without his expertise, without this train of thought, as the Secretary of future administrations who goes like this.
Senator RUDMAN. What you hope is that the person who is in the Under Secretary position really understands the agency he is running. The Secretary has enough staff to get guidance as to what is going on down there.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. So there is coordination between the Secretary's office, the Secretary retains responsibility for the security czar and for counterintelligence, and then there is a subjective de facto subordinate or a number two person inside of this semiautonomous agency.
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Senator RUDMAN. Correct. That is how we would write it.
Incidentally, I don't know if you were here earlier at the beginning of the hearing.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. I was.
Senator RUDMAN. Well, I pointed out the language. The language is that there is only one direct superior for that position; that is the Secretary.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Snyder.
Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Rudman, we are just being all so sweet to you today that before we leave here we are all going to have to put ourselves on medicine for high blood sugar. But we really do appreciate your service and the work that you have done. I want to ask just a couple of quick questions, very broad-based questions. When you made your comments a few minutes ago about the traveling Secretary who is like Marco Polo, you concluded by saying, discussing management failure—I want to be sure that I understand the conclusions of your study. Do we have management failure or do we have organizational structure failure?
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Senator RUDMAN. We have had both, Congressman. We have had substantial evidence of both. But we believe that the management failure could have been at least ameliorated if not cured if you had less dysfunction in the organizational structure. That is the best way that I can put it.
Mr. SNYDER. You are recognizing that the best appointment process in the world, you do sometimes end up with weaker Cabinet Secretaries at other times and you had better have a structure that handles those kinds of weaknesses.
Is that what you are saying?
Senator RUDMAN. That is precisely what I am saying, Congressman, and now we have a great example of it in our form of government.
How many times in history have we had a weak President and a strong Congress or a strong President and a weak Congress, or, in some cases, runaway Congresses and Presidents but a strong Supreme Court? We have got checks and balances in the government that we think of as government; there are no checks and balances in some of these agencies. If you have the wrong people in the jobs, you see the results.
We purposely did not name people in here. That was not our purpose. But I can tell you that we heard some hair-raising testimony from people that were there over the last 20 years about things that went on and who paid attention to what. It was discouraging, and it led us to the conclusion that we have reached.
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Mr. SNYDER. I wanted to ask you, too—you began your opening comments by talking about the importance of focusing on accountability. It has seemed to me that if you had come here today and in your opening statement said that the answer is we need to do lie detector tests on every person that goes in the Department of Energy or something, the press would have picked up on that and it would have been television news. But because you started talking about lines of authority and moving some boxes around, the American people don't focus on that.
But you are clearly telling us that if we focus on accountability, the security will follow. If we make the mistake and focus on the security, all we will have done is fix perhaps the tree and not done anything about the forest. Is this a fair characterization?
Senator RUDMAN. I think you have characterized that report in one sentence.
Mr. SNYDER. The third question that I wanted to ask is, given the historic look that you have taken in this, if it was back in 1945 or 1948 or something in the early days of this, would this be the structure, your recommended structure? Is that the structure you would have set up?
Senator RUDMAN. No, I would not. No, I don't think so. The reason that I say that is, having talked to people who were, so to speak, at the birth of the first nuclear weapon and having read a lot of writings, that was a wholly scientific effort with massive logistic support from the United States Corps of Engineers and other military units, highly organized along the lines that is was organized under at that time.
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Now, when the Atomic Energy Commission was born in the postwar years, some of that structure was a pretty good structure. One of the problems—one of the problems with the AEC is it became too independent as an independent agency. There were great conflicts between the AEC and the services, particularly the Air Force who had the missiles to develop. You might get some insight into that by looking at our Department of Energy birth chart, if you will, on page 9.