To ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, NNSA relies on contractors who manage and operate government-owned laboratories, production plants, and a test site. NNSA’s eight enterprise sites each perform a different function, all collectively working toward fulfilling NNSA’s nuclear weapons-related mission. Figure 1 shows the locations of the sites and describes their functions. To provide support and oversight, NNSA locates between about 30 and 110 NNSA staff in a site office at each facility, and also draws on the resources of NNSA staff in headquarters and the Albuquerque complex. According to NNSA officials, this support and oversight requires that some NNSA staff have critical skills comparable to the contractors they support and oversee. For example, NNSA staff may need technical knowledge and expertise to accept and review deliverables from M&O contracts and, when presented with options, be able to determine how best to proceed to meet contract goals, mission, and objectives. They may also need skills related to the safe operation of sensitive defense nuclear facilities such as expertise in occupational safety and fire safety. For example, according to NNSA officials at the Livermore Site Office, most of the staff in critical skills positions there are focused on ensuring safety at the laboratory’s nuclear facilities. Maintaining critical skills within its workforce is not a challenge unique to NNSA. Every 2 years, we provide Congress with an update on GAO’s high-risk program, under which GAO designates certain government operations as high risk due to their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or their need for transformation to address economy, efficiency, or effectiveness challenges. In 2001, GAO designated strategic human capital management across the entire federal government as a high-risk area, in part because critical skill gaps could undermine agencies’ abilities to accomplish their missions. We have also reported in the past that NNSA and its predecessor organizations’ record of inadequate management and oversight of contractors has left the government vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. Contract management at DOE has been on GAO’s high risk list since 1990, the first year our high-risk list was published. Progress has been made, but NNSA and DOE’s Office of Environmental Management remain on our high-risk list. As of 2011, our most recent update of the high-risk list, significant steps had been taken to address some of the federal government’s strategic human capital challenges. Strategic human capital management was designated a high-risk area 10 years earlier governmentwide and remains on the high-risk list because of a need for all federal agencies to address current and emerging critical skills gaps that are or could undermine agencies’ abilities to meet their vital missions. Specifically, across the federal government, we reported that resolving remaining high-risk human capital challenges will require three categories of actions: Planning. Agencies’ workforce plans must define the root causes of skills gaps, identify effective solutions to skills shortages, and provide the steps necessary to implement solutions. Implementation. Agencies’ recruitment, hiring, and development strategies must be responsive to changing applicant and workforce needs and expectations and also show the capacity to define and implement corrective measures to narrow skill shortages. Measurement and evaluation. Agencies need to measure the effects of key initiatives to address critical skills gaps, evaluate the performance of those initiatives, and make appropriate adjustments. NNSA and its M&O contractors have developed and implemented multifaceted strategies to recruit, develop, and retain both the federal and contractor workforces needed to preserve critical capabilities in the enterprise. NNSA focuses on attracting early career hires with competitive pay and development opportunities, and the agency is reassessing future enterprisewide workforce needs. M&O contractors’ strategies vary from site to site, but each site focuses on maintaining competitive compensation packages. NNSA takes various steps to recruit, develop, and retain a federal workforce with the necessary critical skills. NNSA’s recruitment strategies are focused primarily on students and recent graduates in science and engineering programs. NNSA generally relies on two key programs to develop its critically skilled workforce––one that identifies needs and another that identifies the qualifications necessary to meet them. Its retention efforts focus on competitive pay, flexible schedules, and development opportunities. NNSA is also undertaking a comprehensive reassessment to ascertain future federal workforce requirements. NNSA has several programs targeted toward recruiting students and recent graduates, primarily in science and engineering fields. NNSA began these programs within the past 7 years as a means of succession NNSA’s programs focused on recruiting students include the planning.following: The Student Temporary Employment Program is a summer internship program for high school through graduate students of any discipline. Students participating in this program receive a salary while working at NNSA. The Student Career Experience Program is a program for graduate students in science, engineering, and other fields. This program aims to persuade skilled graduates to pursue careers in NNSA. Participants work for NNSA full-time during school breaks and part-time the rest of the year. These positions can be converted to full-time competitive appointments when participants receive their degrees. The Minority Serving Institutions Program aims to strengthen the diversity of the applicant pool by exposing younger minority students to technical fields and NNSA work early in their educational careers. This program focuses on students beginning in junior high school and continues through college entry and has cooperative agreements to enhance science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curricula at all levels at 29 minority-serving institutions. Since the program’s inception in 2007, 167 minority students have participated in hands-on research at NNSA site offices and laboratories. NNSA’s key program for recruitment of recent graduates is its Future Leaders Program. NNSA established the program in 2005 to recruit recent U.S. citizen graduates of bachelor’s and master’s programs, primarily in engineering and science. The Future Leaders Program is a 2- year development program that requires participants to complete classroom and on-the-job training, in addition to developmental assignments outside their home office. NNSA hires about 30 recent graduates into this program each year. Applicants are hired into the program offices where they will be permanently placed and are selected based on each program office’s skills needs. According to NNSA officials, approximately two-thirds of the 175 program participants hired from 2005 through 2010 have engineering and science backgrounds that enable them to develop the technical critical skills NNSA needs to provide support and oversight of contractors. As their careers advance, some program participants are expected to become more focused on developing deep expertise in a particular technical area, and others will gravitate toward more senior management and leadership positions. NNSA officials told us they consider the program very successful because nearly 90 percent of all those hired into the program since 2005 remained at NNSA. NNSA relies primarily on two programs to develop a federal workforce with the requisite critical skills––the Federal Technical Capability Program and the Technical Qualification Program (TQP). NNSA employees’ critical skills generally fall into two broad categories: (1) technical skills related to managing the safe operation of nuclear facilities, and (2) technical knowledge and expertise necessary to accept and review contract deliverables. To ensure that it has sufficient numbers of federal employees with critical skills to manage the safe operation of nuclear facilities, NNSA relies on the Federal Technical Capability Program––a DOE-wide effort to define requirements and responsibilities for meeting the department’s commitment for recruiting, developing, and retaining the technically competent workforce necessary to achieve this mission. To implement the goals of the Federal Technical Capability Program at the site level, NNSA senior managers conduct annual workforce analyses and develop staffing plans that identify critical technical capabilities and positions that ensure the safe operation of nuclear facilities. For example, NNSA relies on senior managers to identify the fire safety needs for the National Ignition Facility, a stadium size research facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and to identify how many fire protection engineers are required to meet these needs. To help meet these goals, DOE established the TQP, which sets technical qualification requirements for NNSA positions related to the safe operation of nuclear facilities and tracks federal employees’ progress in meeting these qualifications. More specifically, the TQP documents how NNSA: tailors qualification standards for them, establishes time and duty limitations for qualification, describes the process to identify learning activities to achieve competency for the specific job duties, and establishes methods for evaluating qualification. NNSA officials told us that only federal employees in positions related to managing the safe operation of nuclear facilities are required to participate in the TQP. However, NNSA managers may also subject employees who accept and review contract deliverables to TQP requirements to help ensure that they have the skills necessary to evaluate technical criteria of contract deliverables. Beyond the TQP, according to NNSA officials, human capital managers rely on annual human capital needs assessments to inform subsequent recruitment and hiring efforts to ensure the requisite mix of skills is present in the federal workforce. These assessments consider attrition and other demographic data, succession planning, and education and experience requirements. For example, NNSA officials told us that in 2011 its Office of Human Capital Management surveyed NNSA programs to identify needs for the Future Leaders Program. As part of this survey, they analyzed attrition in the federal workforce and used the information to assist in decisions about how many engineers to hire across the enterprise through the Future Leaders Program. Recruitment efforts in 2012 will focus on finding replacements for these engineers. NNSA’s retention strategies focus on offering new staff competitive pay, flexible schedules, and career development opportunities. Competitive pay. According to NNSA officials, NNSA’s retention efforts place a high priority on preserving the agency’s capacity to offer competitive compensation.