The federal agency charged with maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile says it will make up for a lack of comprehensive data about its facilities and workforce with computer modeling.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, says a Government Accountability Office report dated Feb. 14, recognizes that a lack of information on matters such as the condition and value of its existing infrastructure and critical human capital skills to sustain the nuclear stockpile has hampered its ability to make informed decisions.

But, NNSA officials told GAO auditors they believe that computer models could become "an additional tool to take a broad and accurate assessment of the enterprise and to highlight the interdependencies between various components."

The GAO report finds that NNSA has not always ensured that its contractors perform a facility inspection at least once every five years and doesn't ensure consistency in the methodologies contractors use to determine replacement property value. Specifically, auditors say that of 2,897 weapons activities facilities, 26 percent have either not had an inspection within the past five years or don't have records of any inspection, ever.

The nuclear agency also lacks an enterprise workforce baseline of critical human capital skills within the mostly contractor workforce that operates the facilities, the GAO says. NNSA officials told GAO auditors that's the case mostly because contractors track the skills--but even if that's so, the report says, the NNSA still lacks information needed to make enterprisewide human capital decisions.

In July 2009, NNSA had the operators of its eight main enterprise sites form an enterprise modeling consortium, but has yet to determine the accuracy and reliability of any data that could populate the models, the report says.

The agency is no stranger to computer modeling, having since 1995 had a supercomputer-powered program to simulate nuclear testing. It wants to spend $628.94 million on the Advance Simulation and Computing Campaign in fiscal 2012, an 11 percent bump from the $566.07 million it got for that purpose in fiscal 2010.

That increase is in line with NNSA's overall budget request, which is $29.55 billion for fiscal 2012, an amount that would be a 11.8 percent increase over the fiscal 2012 appropriated amount of $26.43 billion.

Included in that total amount is a request to spend $86.1 million on information technology, a 17 percent increase over the fiscal 2010 appropriated amount of $73.58 million. The NNSA IT fund supports routine IT functions such as network connectivity and user equipment, as well as oversight over a separate $1 billion IT capital investment portfolio.

In addition, the NNSA wants another $126.61 million specifically for cybersecurity, almost 3 percent more than the $123.39 million it got for cybersecurity in fiscal 2010.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-888 (.pdf)
- download the NNSA fiscal 2012 budget request (.pdf)

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