GAO finds gaps in DOE oversight of nuclear cleanup contractors

A new Government Accountability Office audit says the Department of Energy lacked clear standards for judging whether contractors were effectively monitoring safety, compliance and performance at major nuclear cleanup sites.

GAO published and publicly released report GAO-26-107850 on August 26, 2026. The audit found that DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the field offices overseeing three large cleanup contracts had not defined what an effective contractor-assurance system means or established measurable criteria for evaluating one.

The finding matters because Environmental Management is responsible for cleaning up contamination from decades of nuclear weapons production and nuclear research at 15 sites across the United States. GAO said the office spends about 95% of its roughly $8 billion annual budget on contracts and relies on a contractor workforce of more than 25,000 people.

How contractor assurance is supposed to work

Contractor-assurance systems are management processes that contractors use to oversee their own performance, identify and report problems, complete corrective actions and share lessons learned. DOE policy says information from those systems should help the department tailor the amount and focus of its federal oversight to risk.

The systems are not a substitute for independent federal oversight. DOE directives also require the department to maintain baseline oversight and perform federal assessments to validate the effectiveness of safety controls at nuclear facilities.

GAO said DOE had not translated its risk-informed approach into a shared definition of effectiveness or specific evaluation standards. Without those standards, field offices may have difficulty comparing contractor performance or showing why an effectiveness rating is justified.

Different ratings, unclear basis

The audit reviewed a nongeneralizable sample of three contracts and their associated field offices: Hanford in Washington state, the Idaho Cleanup Project and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Hanford and Idaho field offices rated their contractor-assurance systems effective. Los Alamos did not determine whether its system was effective. GAO said the basis for the different determinations was unclear because DOE had not established criteria that applied across the program.

The contracts reviewed were valued at approximately $10 billion for Hanford, $6.4 billion for Idaho and $2.1 billion for Los Alamos as of November 2024. Those figures show the scale of the work, but the audit’s central issue was how DOE evaluates contractor oversight—not whether any one contract should be renewed or canceled.

Examples from the three sites

At Hanford, GAO reported that the contractor improperly closed or insufficiently documented 13 of 33 sampled issues classified at the two highest significance levels between January 2022 and October 2023—nearly 40% of that sample. The figure does not represent all Hanford issues.

At Idaho, the contractor reported 15 radiological events over an eight-month period that put personnel at risk of radiological overexposure. GAO’s report describes a risk of overexposure; it does not establish that workers were overexposed or that the events caused an active release or public exposure.

At Los Alamos, the contractor identified a widespread breakdown in its training and qualification program in 2023. The breakdown led to a stop-work order that delayed nuclear-waste disposal and environmental-remediation work by 90 days, according to the audit. The stop-work order is part of the report’s evidence about contractor-performance problems; the new development is GAO’s public release of its findings and recommendations in August 2026.

Oversight gaps extend beyond the ratings

GAO also found that EM headquarters had not collected and analyzed contractor-assurance information in a way that would support complex-wide risk analysis. The report said headquarters had not implemented its field-office oversight assessment schedule since 2020. Annual schedules developed beginning in 2024 included assessments of contractor-assurance effectiveness, but officials told GAO those assessments had not been carried out.

That gap can make it harder for the department to identify systemic problems, direct limited oversight staff to the highest risks and determine whether field-office oversight is working. GAO’s report also noted that EM headquarters officials cited staffing and expertise shortages when describing how the office prioritized assistance to field offices.

What DOE agreed to do

DOE concurred with all four GAO recommendations. They call for EM to define contractor-assurance effectiveness and establish measurable evaluation criteria, document how contractor-assurance information will guide risk-informed oversight, create field-office oversight assessment schedules and use contract mechanisms to clarify performance expectations and consequences.

DOE’s concurrence does not mean the recommendations have been implemented. GAO lists all four as open. The next key test is whether EM publishes measurable definitions, standardized metrics, review schedules and clearer consequences for weak contractor performance.

For taxpayers, workers and communities near cleanup sites, the immediate change is not a new contract or funding award. It is a watchdog finding that the federal government’s method for judging contractor self-oversight lacked clear rules. Future GAO updates and DOE implementation records will show whether that accountability gap narrows.

Sources

• U.S. GAO: DOE Contracting Audit
• U.S. Department of Energy: Oversight Policy

Look for updates to this story

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