Director’s Message
I am pleased to report on the fiscal year (FY) 2023 operations of the Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA). OHA’s mission is to provide adjudicatory and dispute resolution services to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). OHA’s work directly supports DOE’s strategic goal to “[p]osition the Department of Energy to meet the challenges of the 21st century and the nation’s Manhattan Project and Cold War legacy responsibilities by employing effective management and refining operational and support capabilities to pursue departmental missions.” OHA supports this goal by issuing timely and appropriate decisions in a variety of programs. In FY 2023, as in past years, OHA provided independent, timely, and thorough analysis and review on a wide variety of issues, helping maintain the quality of DOE’s decision-making. OHA staff continued to conduct remote hearings in all our cases. Our office has integrated Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams into its workflow, streamlining our processes and providing greater capabilities for collaboration with other offices.
OHA continued to promptly process cases in FY 2023. For example, we issued Personnel Security decisions, on average, just 10 days after receiving the hearing transcript. Also, while federal law allows 20 days to process Freedom of Information Act appeals, OHA adjudicated these appeals within an average of just 13 days, down from 17 days in FY 2022.
The number and diversity of cases received and processed by OHA, which rose dramatically in FY 2022, continued to increase in FY 2023. In FY 2023, OHA received 144 Personnel Security cases. The Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Office, housed within OHA, had 158 total cases, over twice as many as in FY 2022. The ADR Office added an ADR specialist to its roster, expanding our training capacity and allowing us to service more organizations and improve the working environment across the DOE complex.
As we begin FY 2024, we are committed to continued improvement and to meeting all Departmental needs for our services. Going forward, we will continue to review our operations to identify opportunities for increased efficiency and productivity while maintaining our commitment to excellence.
We hope that this report is informative. If you have any comments or suggestions for future improvements, please contact our office by email at OHA.filings@hq.doe.gov or by phone at (202) 287-1566.
Sincerely,
Poli A. Marmolejos
Director and Chief Administrative Judge
Office of Hearings and Appeals