Doe Sends Budget Watchdogs To Hanford New Workers Sent To Watch How Money Being Spent; State Worries About Fate Of Cleanup Agreement

The U.S. Department of Energy is beefing up its Hanford staff to get a handle on wasteful spending, said President Clinton’s nuclear waste cleanup chief.

Nuclear contractors at Hanford and other weapons sites have worked without adequate oversight for too long, Thomas Grumbly said.

Without federal workers to watch private contractor costs, “you end up being taken to the cleaners,” he said in an interview at Hanford last week.

“For 45 years, the tail has wagged the dog in the DOE weapons complex. The contractors have been totally in charge and the people who were supposed to be the protectors of the taxpayers’ dollars haven’t been adequately skillful or in enough numbers to challenge what’s gone on,” he said.

Grumbly is trying to change that by sending 158 new DOE workers to Hanford to watch how the taxpayers’ money is being spent. So far, 136 are already at work, with orders to analyze - and challenge - contractor costs.

Hanford is a government facility run by private contractors. The largest is Westinghouse Hanford Co.

Grumbly also blamed the Bush administration for not making large enough budget cuts at Hanford when weapons production ended and cleanup work began in 1989.

U.S. taxpayers have sent more than $7.5 billion to Hanford since 1989. The work force grew to 18,750 last year.

But the days of escalating budgets are over. Grumbly visited Hanford last week to talk about major budget cuts the White House proposed to Congress.

In a crowded Federal Building auditorium, he told Hanford workers that DOE will eliminate up to 4,774 positions by the end of the year from among the contractor ranks.

Even with the cuts, Hanford still will have about as many employees as it did during the 1980s plutonium-making rush ordered by President Reagan.

A work force around 14,000 is the right size to clean up the nuclear reservation, Grumbly said. He called Hanford’s current work force “bloated.”

On Friday, Grumbly also met with Gov. Mike Lowry.

State officials are worried the cuts may derail the state’s legally binding agreement with the federal government to clean up Hanford by 2028.

“We are not going to ask (Lowry) to renegotiate the Tri Party Agreement - at least not now,” Grumbly said.

That’s a “hollow reassurance,” said Jerry Pollet of Heart of America Northwest, a Hanford watchdog group.

Pollet said the budget cuts will delay clean up of the Columbia River shoreline.

But Dan Silver of the state Department of Ecology says the state trusts Grumbly’s intentions.

“We had a tightly constructed cleanup agreement because for years we didn’t trust” DOE, said Silver. “But it’s different now than in 1989. They are trying, and we’ll help them to the best of our ability.”

Grumbly is the former director of Clean Sites, a private group working on Superfund cleanups. He has led the massive nuclear waste cleanup program for the past 20 months.

He said The Spokesman-Review’s November 1994 “Wasteland” series prodded DOE headquarters to do more to get Hanford costs under control.

The series criticized misspending in the Hanford cleanup, including questionable employee perks, donothing jobs and high contractor overhead.

“I say, we have to do a lot better,” Grumbly said. “I don’t need any more cartoons with dollars disappearing up smokestacks.”

Grumbly wants more Hanford reforms, including:

Less money for elaborate security systems since Hanford no longer makes plutonium.

Streamlined Hanford work rules and regulatory procedures to finish projects faster.

A smaller staff at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, where hundreds of workers still guard 11 tons of purified plutonium stored there.

“We can reduce the people there without endangering the safety of the place,” Grumbly said.

The cleanup chief disagreed with Sen. Slade Gorton and other Republicans, who said Monday they can find better ways of cutting DOE’s budget than laying off thousands of workers.

“You can’t have a system where 70 to 75 percent of costs are people-related and talk about slashing the budgets big time” without cutting jobs, he said.

“We are finally biting the bullet and doing what we need to do.”