Anyone familiar with a few fairy tales knows it’s not a good idea to let a fox guard a henhouse. But that’s just what the federal government is allowing to happen with the stewardship of–incredibly–our nuclear weapons.

A recent report from the Department of Energy’s Inspector General found that a questionable policy of the National Nuclear Security Administration that allows contractors to evaluate their own performance has not only proven ineffective but directly led to the security breach of a Tennessee nuclear facility by antiwar activists last summer.

This is particularly stinging for NNSA, the agency tasked with the care and feeding of our nuclear weapons arsenal. Like the rest of DOE, NNSA farms out most of its functions to contractors, including management of the nine weapons and research laboratories under its jurisdiction. Such heavy reliance on contractors requires a heavy hand with oversight. But in 2007, NNSA handed contractor oversight to the contractors themselves with the creation of a “contractor assurance system” in which contractors measured their own performance and progress.

The DOE IG report found that five years in, the system was not “fully functional.” That’s an understatement: In fact, the report found that federal officials’ hands-off approach to managing contractors was actually exacerbated by the review system because they believed it prohibited them from intervening when they saw contractors screwing up.

The most glaring example is the security breach at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee last July in which three anti-nuclear activists—one of them an 82-year-old nun—managed to break into the complex and spray graffiti on a building containing highly enriched uranium. The report found that a serious backlog of security equipment had not only gone unreported by contractors, but federal officials aware of the deficiencies felt it wasn’t their place to point it out. 

“NNSA has placed substantial reliance on its contractors' ability and willingness to identify and correct weaknesses that threaten the safe, secure, effective and efficient operation of the Department's national security facilities,” concludes the report. “Our findings suggest that this reliance may be unwarranted.” We suggest that NNSA stop this ridiculous practice pronto and start doing its job–not paying someone else to fail at it.