12/15/11 4:02pm

Article By: Marty Niland

Although today’s Senate Environment and Public Works hearing on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was tamer than yesterday’s verbal fireworks before the House Oversight and Government Reform panel, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko's fellow commissioners maintained their stance that Jaczko's aggressive management style inhibits the agency's work.

In yesterday’s hearing, Jaczko’s colleagues, two Democrats and two Republicans, accused him of bullying and intimidating NRC senior staff members and withholding crucial information from other commissioners. The commissioners had written to White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley about those concerns in October, and the hearings came after the letter was made public last week.

At today's hearing, it was not until they were questioned by lawmakers about Jaczko’s qualifications to continue as chairman that the commissioners expressed reservations. "He can do a good job, but he needs to do two things: Control his temper and not impede the flow of information," said Commissioner George Apostolakis. The commissioners recalled three female staffers who said Jaczko had humiliated them and recounted a few specific instances when Jaczko presented information to them as the consensus of the NRC staff, when they said the staff had actually recommended something else.

Jaczko maintained that his management style can be “intense” and that he often challenges the staff to defend their opinions, and said many of those exchanges my have been misconstrued or misinterpreted. But he conceded that he does need to work on interpersonal relationships. “I work on it every day,” he said. Jaczko repeated yesterday's offer to sit down with his colleagues and discuss the problem.

Lawmakers did not want to let go of the allegations, though, and Democrats continued to defend Jaczko while Republicans assailed him. In her opening statement, Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) derided yesterday’s hearing as a “witch hunt and an attempt to assassinate the character of a dedicated public servant."

Later, Boxer accused the commissioners who complained about Jaczko of using the allegations as a surrogate for policy disagreement. “I think this is about safety, and whether we’re going to move expeditiously,” she said, referring to slow implementation of safety measures following the apparent meltdown of the Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant after an earthquake and tsunami.

Ranking member James Inhofe (R-OK) said he was “dismayed” by the accusations against Jaczko. He characterized efforts to cast the commissioners’ complaints as politically motivated as “an immediate, concerted and very public attempt to demonize four public servants whose only crime is to conduct themselves with honor; to seek assistance, as a last resort, from the White House to address problems they had not been able to resolve on their own.”

Although all five commissioners said they were basically in agreement on safety issues, the dissenting commissioners could not say whether they could repair their working relationship with Jaczko. Some held out hope, but for the most part, they said the situation was dire. "If we'd thought that things were going to change," we would not have sent the letter to the White House when we did, said Commissioner William C. Ostendorff.