Jessica McKenzie
One of Goodman’s first responsibilities was overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons plants at a particularly fraught moment. Within a year of joining the Armed Services Committee, the New York Times was running front-page stories about safety lapses at nuclear weapons plants on an almost weekly basis. Goodman’s work was thrust into the Congressional hot seat. She was tasked with drafting legislation for a new oversight mechanism, which eventually became (after a legislative wrestling match with the Governmental Affairs Committee) the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
In 1993, Goodman was appointed the first-ever deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security). She oversaw the Defense Department’s environmental programs, including the projects to clean up pollution at the roughly 100 military bases on the list of toxic Superfund sites. Many of the stories from this period of her career are about fighting tooth and nail for barely adequate funding from defense officials who would rather spend dollars on more equipment or weapons than on cleaning up their messes—even if those messes posed environmental health threats to American citizens. “There always seemed to be a faction who saw environmental stewardship and military readiness as opposing forces, instead of two sides of the same coin,” Goodman writes.
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