GAO: Better data could save DOE-EM millions

A recent Government Accountability Office report found that the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management faces significant aging infrastructure, data accuracy issues, and funding challenges in managing nuclear waste cleanup facilities.

As of June 2025, DOE-EM faced more than $1.5 billion in reported repair needs across about 4,300 operating facilities at the 15 cleanup sites the office oversees, according to the report. In addition, DOE-EM's budget request included over $950 million in maintenance spending in fiscal year 2026, an 80 percent increase since FY 2020.

Released on May 5, the GAO report, Nuclear Waste Cleanup: Better Data and Project Prioritization Vital to Managing Aging Infrastructure and Communicating Needs (GAO-26-107957), describes the status of DOE-EM's infrastructure, examines the extent to which the office's maintenance and related data management practices align with DOE policies and guidance, and examines how DOE-EM prioritizes maintenance in its budget planning.

Better planning between DOE-EM headquarters and its cleanup sites, along with better communication with Congress regarding unfunded maintenance projects, would help the office to manage its maintenance needs and save millions of dollars in the long term, the GAO said.

Report highlights:The GAO found that DOE-EM spends approximately $781 million per year maintaining about 2,200 buildings, 2,500 other structures and facilities, 1,200 trailers, and support elements such as roads and utilities across its sites. "In some instances, piecemeal approaches to infrastructure maintenance have resulted in maintenance costs exceeding replacement costs," the report states.

A GAO analysis of DOE-EM data found that, as of June 2025, about 80 percent of all DOE-EM facilities had a condition index considered "good" or "very good," and about 1.5 percent were considered "mission critical" and had "poor" or "very poor" condition indexes. "Although relatively few facilities are considered to be both mission critical and in poor or very poor condition, the failure of any one of them may pose high risk to the cleanup mission, site safety, or both," the report states.

DOE-EM cleanup sites were found to not consistently follow requirements in DOE Order 430.1C regarding data validation, accuracy, and comparability. Order 430.1C requires DOE-EM to conduct annual data validations for all its sites.

Sites reported that the Master Asset Plan, DOE-EM's enterprise-wide strategic plan covering the infrastructure necessary to meet current, planned, and future mission requirements, does not capture all site-level needs that may affect the complex's mission, in part because it uses a "snapshot" of recorded data from the previous year to develop recommended projects.

Recommendations: To address the issues, the GAO report makes the following recommendations:

• That DOE-EM ensures cleanup sites create and complete corrective action plans to correct data validation issues.

• That DOE-EM ensures sites have procedures to accurately and comparably capture deferred maintenance and annual actual maintenance data.

• That office headquarters better incorporate more reliable information from cleanup sites in the Master Asset Plan to better reflect site maintenance needs.

• That the office communicates to Congress the reductions in cost and risk to mission that can be achieved by specific projects identified by their prioritization model.

In response, the DOE concurred with the first two recommendations and partially concurred with the remaining two recommendations.