Rethinking The Honor System
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel, March 22, 2009]
Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop notes that shady mortgage operators who helped precipitate the financial crisis are renaming their companies and then getting new FHA money (News-Sentinel, 1/8/09). Lenders are supposed to disclose past regulatory sanctions, but FHA does not check on this. As Ms. Harrop says, “we all know crooks never lie. So the honor system will work fine, won’t it?”
Amen, Froma! History shows that crooks rush in whenever honest folks let down their guard. Since some people regard others as marks and suckers, the honor system succeeds only when everyone involved has scruples. And — we’re all grownups here — that’s as likely as flying pigs having a snowball fight in Hell.
The financial arena is bad enough, but things are worse when safety and health are at issue. Here the worry is the corner-cutters who prioritize the bottom line over measures intended to protect workers and the public. Exhibit A for East Tennessee is surely the TVA coal ash pond failure. With no regulation of coal ash processing, only TVA was involved in making decisions about maintaining and checking that pond. Thus the Feds and the State could not step in until something bad happened. TVA can claim all it likes that its internal safety checking is competent and thorough, but this event shows that even with early and repeated detection of flaws no action may be taken until a crisis occurs.
Clearly, the reason the pond deficiencies were not acted on was to save money. Why would TVA do that, considering the implications of a pond failure? TVA managers, like managers at many companies, probably think of themselves as honorable and honest people who are “only trying to do their jobs”. But I could write a book (oh, wait, I already did that) about how people contrive to convince themselves that short-term company interests and their own long-term interests in keeping their jobs are not really in conflict with their duty to protect others from the health and safety impacts of company operations. Company managers say, “We did the best we could”, but often this boils down to “We did the best we could afford to do”.
Regulators should be skeptical about such claims. I have heard regulators say, “Well, I guess you (contractors) know what you’re doing; after all, you’re the experts.” With that attitude, regulators should just hang a “Kick me” sign on their backs — they are leaving their duty in the hands of those who may already have demonstrated their fecklessness regarding health and safety. Retroactive protective response by regulators is too little, too late, as we have seen.
Current national thinking is that we should use tax money (e.g., the stimulus package) to create jobs and improve the infrastructure. But maybe we need additional food safety inspectors more than we need yet another road built. Beyond that, we should not allow safety standards to be relaxed in order to shore up companies’ bottom lines, or let contracts for major cleanup or construction work go to fly-by-night or inexperienced companies or to companies with “tame” inspectors, auditors, and consultants. Business alliances that were cobbled together yesterday, solely to win a contract, are not the best choices to do safety-significant work.
I’m not in favor of micromeddling by government; I firmly believe that “that government is best which governs least”. But surely one important function of government should be to protect people from dangers created by industrial operations and kindred activities. No government should allow a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to people’s health and safety; as somebody once said, “Trust, but verify”. We — as a nation, a state, a community — should rethink the honor system in cases like the ash pond and future cleanup/buildup projects.
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A DOE Fish Story….Business As Usual at DOE
[Sent on 28 October 2013]
It’s probably none of my business — I’m just an ordinary taxpayer — but I am puzzled by a government agency’s recent declaration that the details of how public money is being spent on a public project need not be released to the public. I speak, of course, of the Uranium Processing Facility to be built at Y-12.
Let’s recap. Last fall it was announced that “mistakes were made”: the almost complete design of the UPF was seriously flawed. For example, the roof was 13 feet too low to accommodate the equipment. Some $500 million was spent on this failed design effort, all of it wasted, or so one must conclude from the announcement that another $500 million is needed for the redesign.
I and others pointed out that the commission of such errors seemed incredible. Truly experienced and capable engineers would not have made such mistakes unwittingly, so either the project engineers were completely incompetent (doubtful) or UPF upper management was fraudulently misrepresenting the adequacy of the assumptions and design analyses.
In similar circumstances, most large private companies and government agencies would have appointed a blue-ribbon independent commission to investigate such an egregious waste of money and effort. However, DOE does not think like that; they always seem to go for saving face and spinning the story, not for ferreting out the truth and correcting problems. DOE also has a long history of letting people assess themselves, audit themselves, and investigate themselves.
So the first root cause investigation was done by Babcock & Wilcox and Bechtel, two parents of the Y-12 managing entity supposedly overseeing the project. Their report did expose design flaws, but it was marked “For Official Use Only”. Thus the explanation of what happened was not made public until a consultant to the National Nuclear Security Administration (the quasi-independent DOE arm overseeing Y-12) eventually issued a report revealing the prevailing UPF culture: management was coercive in pushing the defective design, creating a “chilled work environment,” in order to gain financial awards for meeting deadlines and to keep the project in the UPF contractors’ hands.
As several people have observed, one would think that after this revelation of how such an engineering fiasco occurred DOE/NNSA would have bent over backwards to be open, if only to reassure everybody that the next $500 million would be spent wisely. But no: despite NNSA’s hiring the consultant, NNSA doesn’t really want people to know how badly managed the UPF project was or how the money is being spent. After all, they were supposed to be providing oversight but failed to detect the disturbing propagation of design error and the consequent waste of money.
Passing the buck, NNSA now declares that it is the Y-12 manager’s decision whether to release the details of which subcontractor gets what part of the $4.5-6.5 billion UPF pot and of what the subcontractor does for that money. Some of the new subcontractors and the amount of their contracts have been identified by the new Y-12 managing entity, but others have not. If we don’t know who is doing what on Design Part Deux, how can we know if competent people are on board and are doing the work that truly needs to be done?
No heads will roll over this — in the DOE world, they never do. (Well, except for that poor manager who was axed for trying to avoid the train wreck; UPF management made an example of him, which seems exactly backwards.) If heads don’t roll for this debacle, why should we expect that there will be reform? The huge waste of $500M of taxpayer money caused barely a ripple in congressional circles. Politically, this may seem tolerable. But from the engineering point of view, it is appalling because of the perversion of scientific and mathematical common sense, compounded by the apparent unethical dishonesty of project management and the cluelessness of DOE/NNSA oversight. Two plus two always equals four — except in the DOE world, where it may equal seven by fiat. As I always say, it’s best to know the truth even if it turns your stomach, but this affair has a very high pukeability quotient.
