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Introduction

ORIGIN OF STUDY

Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 (P.L. 115-232) directed the Secretary of Energy to enter into an arrangement with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct a study of the effectiveness and efficiency of defense environmental cleanup activities. These activities are managed by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Environmental Management (EM) and involve materials controlled per the Atomic Energy Act and are subject in large part to two environmental laws governing cleanups, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. The cleanups themselves are effected by contractors at 16 sites in the continental United States, with waste meeting certain criteria being disposed in a 17th site.

Congress specifically asked the National Academies to focus on the management and oversight of these cleanups by considering the projects into which these cleanup activities are organized. The primary tasks for the study as described by Congress were to provide the following:

The DOE-EM and the National Academies agreed to a modification of an existing cooperative agreement on August 13, 2019, in order to accomplish the study. The National Academies established the Committee on Review of Effectiveness and Efficiency of Defense Environmental Cleanup Activities of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. The committee was composed of diverse experts in the fields of project management, civil and nuclear engineering, acquisition and contracting, construction management, and other fields. Committee member biographical information is provided in Appendix A.

STATEMENT OF TASK

Per the contract, the committee was given the following statement of task:

COMMITTEE’S APPROACH TO THE STATEMENT OF TASK

This is the first of two reports envisaged in the statement of task. While conducting this first study, the committee members relied on their own expertise, information from publications they judged to be of high quality, and many interactions with officials at DOE, including those with EM, the Office of Project Management, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. During public meetings, the committee heard presentations chiefly from EM but also from other elements of the department that oversee or execute large projects. A list of activities appears as Appendix B. The committee made roughly 60 written queries of DOE to gather further information. The committee read and considered prior and ongoing reviews of project management at DOE, including those conducted by the department itself, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)—whose staff also briefed the committee during the public meetings—and the National Academies. All of the above discussions and information provided the basis for the committee’s deliberations and for the writing of the report. The following section describes how the report was written to address the committee’s statement of task.

STRUCTURE OF THE REPORT

Chapters 2 and 3 provide the history of the organization and management of the cleanup activities at DOE and of the laws, directives, and processes under which the cleanups proceed. The remaining chapters address specific aspects of the management and oversight of the projects within EM. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the project management of cleanup activities within EM and how progress on such is tracked and measured. Chapters 6 and 7 consider the contract structures available to EM, which ones have been used and how these fared, and then discusses the incentives in the contracts aimed at encouraging improved schedule and cost performance. Chapters 4 through 7 address the key aspects of the committee’s charge, with the outcome of the committee’s analysis and deliberations explained in a stylized way: “findings” are facts the committee noted to be of particular importance; “conclusions” describe the significance of these facts for project effectiveness and efficiency; and “recommendations” translate these into action, assigning a measurable action to a specific actor. Chapter 8 presents all the recommendations in one place.

The statement of task is addressed by the chapters as outlined in Table 1.1.