DOE Management

Impediments to Environmental Restoration Management Contracting Gao ID: RCED-92-244 August 14, 1992

The Department of Energy's (DOE) proposed new contracting approach for cleaning up contaminated nuclear weapons sites would rely on environmental restoration management contractors, who would assume sole responsibility for handling the cleanup effort. Although DOE has set several important goals for this contracting effort, constraints such as the lack of qualified cleanup personnel would make it hard to achieve them. GAO believes that evaluation should be a major component in the implementation of the 5-year pilot tests at DOE sites in Fernald, Ohio, and Hanford, Washington. DOE has not, however, established final criteria for measuring the concept's success, identified the information needed to evaluate the concept, or established a timetable for conducting the evaluation. In addition, DOE has not yet hired all the staff needed to oversee the pilot tests or developed plans to train current staff in their new oversight duties.

GAO found that: (1) DOE decided to test the ERMC concept, which it developed in response to concerns that current contractors were not sufficiently reducing cleanup costs, at two nuclear weapons sites; (2) experienced ERMC would focus solely on the environmental restoration of a site, subcontracting everything except the management and oversight of the cleanup; (3) DOE has set as goals for ERMC the hiring of more contractors with expertise in cleaning up sites under two specific environmental laws, improving management control of the environmental restoration program, reducing cleanup costs, and facilitating a more timely restoration of the sites, but DOE might not be able to achieve these goals; and (4) DOE is not prepared to implement the ERMC concept because of lack of evaluation criteria and trained staff to closely oversee the contractors.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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