Fed work force at NTS to be cut

Benjamin Grove and Mary Manning

Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2002 | 11:07 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The federal work force in Nevada that manages the Nevada Test Site is being slashed by 66 percent, officials said.

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday made a "reorganization" announcement that workers had dreaded all year, which aims to cut the agency's nationwide work force by nearly 20 percent by October 2004.

The bottom line: 157 of the Test Site's 237 federal workers will be forced to transfer out-of-state or lose their jobs.

The 1,375-square-mile Test Site located 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas was the nation's proving ground for nuclear bombs from the 1950s until 1992. It is now home to a number of programs involving nuclear weapons and testing.

Officials said because the NNSA is cutting only the jobs of federal workers and not contractor jobs, programs and research at the site will continue and even expand.

The NNSA is consolidating administrators, middle managers and business, legal and information technology branches, which will end up at a service center in New Mexico.

The technical employees who would manage nuclear weapons testing if the United States ever decided to renew nuclear experiments will remain on the job.

"Merry Christmas," one dispirited worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said glumly after a morning briefing.

Troy Wade, a former Test Site manager and a member of the reorganization review team, said he was disheartened.

"I'm a little bit upset about it," he said. "We were hoping that the system would think Nevada was unique."

In fact, Nevada made a bid to become the administrative center, he said.

"The big bosses didn't agree with that," Wade said.

The transition is expected to take two years.

"Lots of things can happen in two years," he said.

The work force was bloated with bureaucracy, acting NNSA administrator Linton Brooks said. The cuts will leave 80 federal workers to manage work at the Test Site.

Bechtel Nevada, the contract manager for the Test Site, was not affected by the reduction.

"In keeping with President Bush's vision, we are streamlining operations and oversight while clarifying roles and responsibilities," Brooks said. "The new, more responsive organization will improve federal management of our nuclear weapons complex."

The NNSA, a two-year-old agency that oversees national security programs within the Energy Department, manages the Test Site.

Workers who do not land one of the 80 remaining Nevada jobs will have to apply for transfers to the NNSA's seven other site offices nationwide, or lose their government jobs.

It's yet not clear if there are enough jobs in the NNSA's seven sites scattered nationwide for the workers being squeezed out of their Nevada positions, NNSA Nevada spokesman Darwin Morgan said.

The Tuesday announcement was tough news to take before the holidays, Morgan said.

"It's pretty somber around here," Morgan said. "The employees are concerned. It's the proverbial lead brick in the face."

After the announcement Tuesday morning, NNSA Manager Kathy Carlson allowed some workers to go home for the day.

Morgan said two staffers in his communications office are both in their 20s and recently bought houses.

"They were trying to stake out the American dream, and now their future is really uncertain," Morgan said.

From 1951 until 1962 the test site was managed by the former Atomic Energy Commission Office in Albuquerque. In 1962 the Nevada Test Site became an operations office.

"We fought that battle all the time," former Test Site seismologist Jim O'Donnell said, referring to the Albuquerque office overseeing Nevada activities.

Former test site manager Nick Aquilina said he supported the reorganization effort. When Aquilina ran test site operations from 1987 until his 1994 retirement, a combined federal and contractor work force numbered 10,000.

The economic impact on Southern Nevada from the loss of Test Site jobs is minimal, said Keith Schwer, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

A couple of hundred jobs out of a Las Vegas Valley work force of 700,000 does not seem like much, Schwer said.

"Obviously, for those unemployed, it has a major impact," he said.

The contractor work will continue uninterrupted, officials said. The only change is that work will be overseen by a more efficient, smaller staff of federal workers, NNSA spokesmen said.

Anson Franklin, the NNSA's spokesman in Washington, stressed that the NNSA was cutting only its federal workers, not contractor jobs. The test site's mission likely will expand, Franklin said.

"The test site is going to continue to be a pretty busy place," Franklin said.

New proposals will continue as planned, officials said. For instance, the test site is one of five sites under consideration for a new plant to produce plutonium "pits," the heart of a nuclear weapon. The Energy Department in September also said it planned to move plutonium and uranium now stored at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory to a safer spot inside the underground Device Assembly Facility at the Test Site. And President Bush has hinted that he may decide that nuclear bomb tests should be renewed.

Nevada politicians, skeptical of the NNSA's rhetoric, criticized the cuts. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., questioned how 80 people could do the work of 237. She suspects the agency will be forced to contract out for managers who handle highly sensitive information.

"I'm all in favor of a lean and mean federal government, but I'm not in favor of compromising national security in an effort to have a bottom line that looks better," Berkley said.

Berkley questioned the timing of the announcement, which comes when Congress is out of session and unable to question or delay the changes.

In a sharply worded written statement, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., slammed President Bush for directing the agency to make cuts without consulting Congress.

"The Bush administration actively works to dump deadly radioactive waste in Nevada while taking nuclear security jobs out of the state," Reid said. "What a wonderful gift, just days before Christmas, from the Bush Administration to the people of Nevada."

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., made a personal plea to Brooks earlier this month not to cut Nevada workers, and on Monday voiced his concerns about the cuts to Brooks personally, spokeswoman Traci Scott said. And Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., sent a letter to Brooks Tuesday asking for more justification for the Nevada job cuts.

"It is my goal to ensure that the safety and security of the important work that the Department of Energy does in Nevada is not adversely impacted by these actions," Gibbons said.

NNSA officials in February first announced that they were launching a reorganization study to eliminate waste in the NNSA's weapons programs by 20 percent, which translates to a cut of about 18 percent of the total NNSA work force.

Part of the NNSA's goal was to streamline its three "operations" offices -- in Nevada, Oakland, Calif., and Albuquerque -- that oversee contractor work.

Brooks on Tuesday said he would close the NNSA's Oakland operations office by October 2004, and scale back the Nevada office. The Albuquerque office is being reorganized as a "service center" that will provide the procurement, human resources and other support work formerly done in all three offices, an NNSA press release said.

Brooks also said his cuts included NNSA's Washington-area headquarters where 130 jobs -- roughly 30 percent of staff -- would be phased out through "managed attrition."

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