A government-affiliated program that supplies dozens of scientists and other expertise to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command is being cut at the same time Congress is demanding more recoveries and identifications from the Hawaii-based organization.
JPAC, as the command is known, is one part of a larger Defense Department accounting effort that has come under intense congressional scrutiny and criticism in recent years for not making enough recoveries and identifications of Americans missing from past wars.
Now, the 50 Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education fellows assisting JPAC are being let go as the Pentagon’s accounting effort undergoes a wholesale reorganization. Only about six current or new Oak Ridge fellows may be retained, according to the Pentagon.
As one way to produce more identifications, a total of 100 disinterments of Americans buried in Hawaii, the Philippines and Europe — many as "unknowns" — were proposed for this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, according to JPAC. A total of 32 were disinterred last year.
"Almost all of these projected areas are assigned to ORISE research fellows, all of (whom) are subject to termination this FY (fiscal year)," JPAC said in a report.
Termination "means an immediate halt to all disinterment research," the report said.
"Thus, personnel factors risk grinding the disinterment project, and related identifications, to a halt," said JPAC, which investigates, recovers and identifies missing American service members from past conflicts.
JPAC’s headquarters and main lab are at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Carrie Brown, an Oak Ridge research fellow at JPAC’s satellite lab at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, said she was given about a month’s notice that her contract wouldn’t be renewed on Dec. 1.
"We’ve been constantly told, ‘The decision hasn’t been made, the decision hasn’t been made’" about keeping the fellows, Brown said. "The decision has been made by inaction."
She said she and her husband, who is getting out of the Marine Corps, moved to Nebraska for the JPAC job and bought a house. Now their future is uncertain, the 32-year-old said.
"They are destroying a world-class workforce when their message is they want to retain a world-class workforce," Brown said.
A Pentagon group called the Personnel Accounting Consolidation Task Force is guiding the reorganization and making the Oak Ridge fellowship decisions.
Navy Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in an email that the Defense Department is "reviewing the fellowship program."
"There has been no decision to eliminate or keep ORISE as the single fellowship source," she said. "We continue to explore a number of options to meet valid requirements, and any decision will be based on the government’s requirements."
Why the Pentagon wants to cut the Oak Ridge program so severely is not clear. Of 87 identifications of formerly missing service members made in fiscal 2014, which ended in September, 48 were attributed to Oak Ridge involvement.
Derrick-Frost was asked about the claim that the loss of the Oak Ridge fellows would have a crippling effect on identifications, including a novel approach of comparing old chest X-rays with clavicle bones to identify Korean War veterans buried as "unknowns."
"The Department of Defense has a world-class staff of government scientists, researchers and fellows who will continue to support the agency’s mission of the fullest possible accounting for missing personnel, including via exhumation and clavicle ID efforts," Derrick-Frost said.
No Oak Ridge contracts, which start on different dates over the calendar year, have been renewed this fiscal year, JPAC said.
THE CHANGE comes as the longtime scientific director of the Central Identification Laboratory within JPAC, Tom Holland, was removed. Most of the Oak Ridge fellows, who work as forensic anthropologists, historians, archivists, archaeologists and in other fields, work in the Hawaii lab.
"The lab is systematically being destroyed," said Frank Metersky, a former Marine and Korean War veteran who has been active in the MIA issue for 25 years.
Meanwhile, a new $85 million lab and headquarters for JPAC at Hickam that was supposed to be completed in late 2013 now won’t be occupied until the summer of 2015 because "C4I" (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) is still being installed, the Pentagon said.
Capt. Edward Reedy was selected as the first scientific director of the new Defense Department personnel accounting agency at Hickam "and he has assumed this responsibility," Derrick-Frost said.
Reedy previously was director of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s DNA Registry, she said.
Asked what job Holland, the former scientific director, is being given, Derrick-Frost said the Pentagon does "not comment on the personnel matters of our individual employees."
She added, "However, it is important to note that there have been no official Department of Defense personnel announcements made pertaining to the personnel accounting reorganization or the new agency."
The Defense Department’s efforts at accounting reform follow a series of embarrassing and damning revelations in reports and testimony before Congress concerning failures in the overall effort to identify missing war dead.
The POW/MIA effort, conducted by a handful of agencies around the country, was fragmented, overlapped and hampered by inter-agency disputes, a July 2013 Government Accountability Office report said.
"As of next year, Congress has mandated the department have the capacity to identify up to 200 sets of remains a year, but last year the (Defense Department) agencies only identified 70 sets," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in March in announcing an overhaul.
The Pentagon decided to establish a new agency that combines JPAC; the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office near Washington, D.C.; and some functions of the Air Force’s Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory in Ohio.
Thirteen former JPAC lab anthropologists and other scientists previously lent their names to a letter to Hagel expressing "grave concerns" with the decision to remove Holland.
The JPAC lab "is the gold standard of scientific rigor and excellence that all other laboratories that undertake the identification of skeletonized human remains strive to achieve," the group said.
The Oak Ridge Institute said on its website that it became an official U.S. Department of Energy institute in 1992 and it supports a national agenda to advance science education and research programs.
But U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said in 2013 that the fellowship program was "taking up significant resources" in the accounting effort.
McCaskill submitted a series of questions to JPAC commander Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague about the program, and in answers provided Aug. 1, 2013, JPAC said it had 584 personnel in the command.
Of that number, 48, or 8 percent of the total workforce, were full-time Oak Ridge fellows, whose terms were reviewed annually but typically fulfilled an appointment of three years at JPAC, with five years being the maximum, the command said.
JPAC said the program grew from 23 full-time and four "short-term" fellows in 2008 with a total participant cost of $985,103, to 48 full-time and 29 short-term fellows in 2013 at a cost of $2.5 million.
"Prudent use of government resources … requires careful review by the (Defense) Department on how this program is used and the work the department funds," the Pentagon’s Derrick-Frost said.
But even at the $2.5 million cost in 2013, defenders say the Oak Ridge scientists are a bargain. The institute charges up to 18 percent overhead in addition to salary as administrative costs while universities tack on 40 to 50 percent and the private sector sometimes charges more than that, officials said.
