Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: DOE’s cynical culture

Tuesday, June 22, 1999 | 10:10 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor

TODAY ONE of my favorite Americans, former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, will be appearing before Congress with his report on the security problem his board found infecting the Department of Energy. The title "Science At Its Best -- Security At Its Worst" about sums up the content of the report from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that Rudman headed up at the request of President Bill Clinton. As a citizen of the United States, I found the entire report both interesting and chilling. Yes, and the attitude of the Department of Energy toward security made me angry.

The attitude of the DOE is best expressed by Rudman's investigative panel's report as follows: "Never have the members of the Special Investigative Panel witnessed a bureaucratic culture so thoroughly saturated with cynicism and disregard for authority. Never before has this panel found such a cavalier attitude toward one of the most serious responsibilities in the federal government -- control of the design information relating to nuclear weapons. Particularly egregious have been the failures to enforce cyber-security measures to protect and control important nuclear weapons design information. Never before has the panel found an agency with the bureaucratic insolence to dispute, delay, and resist implementation of a Presidential directive on security, as DOE's bureaucracy tried to do to the Presidential Decision Directive No. 61 in February 1998."

And Nevadans get a load of this paragraph:

"Over much of the past decade, rather than a heightened sensitivity to espionage threats recognized widely throughout the intelligence community, DOE lab officials have operated in an environment that allowed them to be sanguine, if not skeptical. Numerous DOE officials interviewed by the PFIAB panel stated that they believed that the threat perception was weakened further during the administration of Secretary O'Leary, who advanced the labs openness policies and downgraded security as an issue by terminating some security programs instituted by her predecessor."

This is the same Hazel O'Leary who traveled around the world with executives of large corporations. We often wondered if she thought she was heading up the Department of State or Department of Commerce. Even before finishing her first three years as the secretary of the DOE she had spent 130 days overseas. For example, during a nine-day trip that took her and 48 staff members to places including Pakistan and Austria, she flew in a plush MGM Grand airplane that cost taxpayers $415,000.

This resulted in a Los Angeles Times editorial which called for White House action. "It is time that President Clinton publicly reprimand and rein in Hazel O'Leary, who has been running the Energy Department more like her personal fiefdom than a public agency. The secretary's poor judgment and management has already cost taxpayers plenty, which was demonstrated by two disclosures on Thursday."

The Times editorial didn't suggest that O'Leary go back to her energy corporation in Minnesota, but USA Today did in its editorial. Despite this suggestion, she hung around for another year freeloading and pushing nuke waste toward Yucca Mountain.

The Rudman report points to security problems that the DOE has developed since it was created 22 years ago. Not one administration has done its job the way it should have been performed. Some of this carelessness has taken place because of the entire mess created by a management structure that is almost unbelievable. Rudman's panel writes, "Time and again PFIAB panel members posed the elementary questions to senior DOE officials. To whom do you report? To whom are you accountable? The answer, invariably, was 'It depends.' "

So what now? Secretary Bill Richardson inherited these problems when taking over the reins a short 10 months ago. The report tells readers "Since November of 1998 and especially since April of this year, Secretary Richardson has taken commendable steps to address DOE's security and counterintelligence deficiencies. It then goes on to advise, "Although we applaud Secretary Richardson's initiative, we seriously doubt that his initiatives will achieve lasting success. Though certainly significant steps in the right direction, Secretary Richardson's initiatives have not yet solved the many problems."

Congress should be listening to Rudman today and in the future, because he has the solutions for many problems that legislation is needed to correct.