nuclear-news

Pay cut for US nuclear weapons managers? – Heaven forfend!

Nuclear Weapons Complex Reform Could Mean Pay Cut For Contractors Government Executive, By Douglas P. Guarino Global Security Newswire  15 May 14 The for-profit companies that run the U.S. nuclear weapons complex might have a pay cut in their future, though by how much and exactly when is still unclear.For decades the complex — which includes the national laboratories and other facilities responsible for developing and maintaining the nation’s atomic arsenal — operated on a non-profit basis. Taxpayer dollars sunk into it went directly toward scientific work related to weapons development and nonproliferation efforts.

Since the early 2000s, however, the sites have been run by for-profit, limited liability companies. A portion of the annual budget for each facility is set aside as an “incentive fee.” The better the job a contractor does managing a facility’s work in a given year, the larger the percentage of the total available incentive fee the company gets to take home.

Lately these contracts have been under increased scrutiny due to repeated cost overruns, delays and security failures across the nuclear weapons complex. In one of the most dramatic examples, an 82-year-old nun and two other peace activists in 2012 were able to infiltrate the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where bomb-grade uranium is stored.

Associate Deputy Energy Secretary Bruce Held has been questioning whether what he describes as “large fees” currently paid to manage the weapons sites are the best way to motivate all players involved.

• Performance at the national labs might actually improve, the former CIA officer says, if less money went toward the fees meant to motivate the management companies that run the sites, and if more funds went directly to the scientific work that the facilities conduct…..One significant change that appears to be in the works is an effort to make the maximum fee potentially available to the contractor smaller, and to have much of that fee be based on a fixed amount…….
•  “But when you’re doing manufacturing and managing huge programs — [those are] not things that universities are very good at.”So that means you have to get the corporate world involved, and when you bring the corporate world in, they have shareholders they have to accommodate,” http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2014/05/nuclear-weapons-complex-reform-could-mean-pay-cut-contractors/84475/?oref=river

May 16, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war