Former defence boss to examine the Australian Submarine Agency amid concerns over its performance

The newly formed agency overseeing Australia's $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine program will be scrutinised by a veteran bureaucrat, less than two months after the ABC revealed widespread dissatisfaction inside and outside the government organisation.

Former Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson has been asked to oversee the structure and provide advice on the direction of the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA), which has been led since its establishment in July last year by Vice-Admiral Jonathan Mead.

Since then, the ASA has grown to almost 700 full-time staff, including a dozen military officers holding a 1-star rank or higher, and an annual budget of $330 million, which is mainly comprised of salary costs.

In September, the ABC revealed one of the ASA's most senior technical directors had quit, as well as wider internal morale concerns from other staff members about turnover within the organisation.

During an interview with the ABC at the time, Vice-Admiral Mead rejected suggestions of cultural problems within his agency, saying: "Some of our people have been in the program for three and a half years and that is a long time to be in the program.

"We are not struggling to keep the most qualified people, we've got the most qualified people there, and they come to work every day with this sense of purpose — the sense of purpose that they want to protect Australia and defend our national interest.

"It is gruelling hours, it is VTCs [video teleconferencing] late night, it is travel face-to-face with our counterparts, so there is at times natural rotation of people from the ASA into either other government departments, back into defence or into civilian industry."

The ABC has confirmed that since September, the ASA's deputy director-general responsible for policy and program implementation, David Hallinan, has also quit and is now working in another shipbuilding role for the defence department.

"[Mr] Hallinan was a massive loss — he was the one senior guy in there with large project and infrastructure experience," a source familiar with the ASA's operations told the ABC, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The ABC has been told of growing government frustrations with the ASA, but a spokesperson for Defence Minister Richard Marles declined to comment, instead referring the ABC to comments made a month ago.

"It'd be unlikely for me to be sitting here saying everything is perfect, everything is not, but a lot is, and I think we're aware of where we need to make up ground," Mr Marles told the Submarine Institute of Australia conference on November 5.

"And so, I do fundamentally have a real sense of confidence that this program is going in the direction that it is, and part of that is based on the fact that we really are trying to interrogate ourselves, hold ourselves to account about where more needs to be done."

Last month, the Biden administration asked Congress for an emergency $8.8 billion funding injection to fix shortfalls with the US Virginia-class submarine program, as Australia looked to acquire at least three of the boats in the 2030s.

The ABC has contacted Mr Richardson for comment.