Days before Ernest Moniz’s wiry haircut and imposing eyebrows drew national attention when network TV cameras covering the State of the Union address focused on him, the secretary of Energy announced a series of internal oversight reforms he admitted were “unlikely to create a record number of YouTube hits.”
With or without the YouTube hits, Moniz is on a campaign to change the way his department manages projects and measures performance. His emphasis is on promoting “budget and schedule discipline” at every stage of a project.
“There has not been enough of what I would call more the corporate style of risk evaluation and risk management,” Moniz said during a recent speech at the National Academy of Public Administration.
Moniz said he has directed the Energy Systems Acquisition Advisory Board, which hasn’t met in more than two years, to meet at least once a quarter in order to play a much more active management oversight role.
He also called for the formation of a Project Management Risk Committee to weigh the potential risks of projects.
Moniz said each project will soon have a single “owner” whose budget, he promised, will “get hammered if the project does not succeed.”
His comments followed a November 2014 report by an internal review board he convened, the Contract and Project Management Working Group, to get at flaws that resulted in scandals like the Solyndra debacle that wasted nearly half a billion tax dollars before tanking in 2011.
“Unclear ownership creates a culture where everyone is in charge but no one is responsible,” the report said.
The lack of independent oversight has similarly hampered some of the energy projects.
Moniz claims some progress has been made, noting that the Government Accountability Office has removed his department from its “high-risk list” for projects below $750 million.
The GAO high-risk list outlines the agencies and programs that are most vulnerable to waste, fraud or abuse.
Despite such “good signs,” Moniz said the energy department still has “some very high-profile, multi-billion dollar projects with a performance that none of us finds acceptable at this time.”
