Military Control of Labs Studied
By John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal Staff WriterThe Obama administration is considering moving Sandia and Los Alamos national labs, along with the rest of the U.S. nuclear weapons design and manufacturing complex, out of the Department of Energy and into the Defense Department, according to an internal memo obtained by the Journal.
Such a change would end more than six decades of civilian management of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
The move, if it goes forward, would not happen until at least 2011, according to the memo from the Office of Management and Budget outlining plans for a study of the costs and benefits of the move.
Officials across the government — at the labs and the federal agencies involved — declined comment Tuesday, saying the document in question is part of internal government deliberations.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., released a statement Tuesday evening saying he spoke to OMB chief Peter Orszag on Tuesday to register his concerns about such a move.
"I think this is a very shortsighted approach, and I will fight it tooth and nail if they intend to proceed with it," Bingaman told Orszag, according to the statement. Bingaman is chairman of the Senate energy committee.
According to the statement, Bingaman said that because the labs do more than defense work, a shift to the Pentagon would damage their ability to do their jobs.
The undated OMB memo lays out a plan for a study to be done by the end of September on the costs and benefits of moving the National Nuclear Security Administration under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon.
It is too early to say what effect any such change would have on the more than 20,000 people in New Mexico who work for Sandia and Los Alamos.
The team studying the possibility of a change will include representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department "and other major NNSA stakeholders," according to the memo.
The policy of civilian management is rooted in a World War II decision by top Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer to have the design of the first nuclear weapons done by civilian scientists, rather than military officers.
A shift to military management of the weapons program "would be very dramatic," nuclear weapons historian Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the possibility of the weapons program being moved to the Pentagon.
In the years immediately after World War II, government officials concluded that the "ultimate weapon" should be left under the care of civilian leadership, rather than the military.
The weapons program was first entrusted to the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1975, a new agency was created, known as the Energy Research and Development Administration. That was followed in 1977 by the creation of the Department of Energy, where nuclear weapons development and manufacturing reside today.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration tried and failed to shift the weapons program to the Pentagon, Norris said.
The latest management change came in 2000, when Congress created the National Nuclear Security Administration to oversee the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The new agency was created as a quasi-independent body, but remained within the Department of Energy, under DOE jurisdiction.
The discussion echoes congressional testimony last year by C. Paul Robinson, former president of Sandia National Laboratories and a senior adviser to the U.S. government on nuclear weapons issues.
In written response to questions from members of the House Armed Services Committee's Strategic Forces subcommittee, Robinson said he thought a shift to Pentagon management of the labs should be considered.
Robinson said in a phone interview Tuesday that he has long supported civilian management. But in recent years, he said, "short-term upheavals" as different administrations come and go, repeatedly changing the direction of the weapons program, have made its long-term management a problem.
"The presence of a uniformed military could provide a continuity that has been lacking," Robinson told the House Armed Service Committee's Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
Robinson complained that the 2000 decision to create the National Nuclear Security Administration has been a failure.
"It hasn't worked," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
45 comments:
"According to the statement, Bingaman said that because the labs do more than defense work, a shift to the Pentagon would damage their ability to do their jobs."
Senator Bingaman's statement makes no sense. Sandia is actually on a military base yet has a much more successful WFO program than LANL.
The statement is not posted to his website yet. If anyone has a copy please forward it.
Frank,
You seem to be missing the point. The physical location of the Laboratory is not the issue, it's the overseeing agency. Sandia is a DOE lab, not a DOD lab. Bingaman is correct in his assertion.
I know that and I'm still missing the point. How could DOD possibly be worse than DOE, other than the fact that they might actually do some overseeing....
Of course Bingaman - as chairman of the Senate energy committee - is going to fight this move, otherwise he'd be losing a major portion of what his committee has oversight and budget control. Not to mention having a key employer in his home state moved out from under his committee. I wonder if LANL and SNL were in Arizona or if he were Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee would he fight as hard to stop this move.
MIT's Lincoln Lab is under DOD and it does more than just DOD work.
Frank Young said...
I know that and I'm still missing the point. How could DOD possibly be worse than DOE, other than the fact that they might actually do some overseeing....
2/4/09 8:29 AM
Amen to that Frank...
""short-term upheavals" as different administrations come and go, repeatedly changing the direction of the weapons program, have made its long-term management a problem."
I fully concur with Dr. C. Paul Robinson's statement above.
Internal DOE/NNSA politics have made a real mess of the NWC - in particular our National Labs. I've worked both as a DOE/NNSA contractor & Fed and I could find no correlation with sanity when it came to DOE/NNSA policy making & execution.
If NNSA were move to DOD it would be reporting directly to the civilian leadership of DOD, not a military officer. A civilian "Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Security and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration" would report to the Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, a civilian. Also US law requires that the Secretary of Defense must be a civilian who has not served in the active component of the armed forces for at least 10 years.
Eliminating the NNSA morass would go a long way to boost the Labs efficiency. I'd rather try that path and then reevaluate.
DOD cannot be worse than NNSA.
This could be an opportunity to get rid of LANS. MIT operates the Lincoln Laboratory for the DOD and it is considered to be quite successful.
This is ok as long as it doesn't affect my bonus.
Mikey
It is one thing to have a DOD facility in the middle of a big city next to world class universities. It is another to have it in the boondocks next to not one four year university.
I can see the recruitment ad.
'Come work for the DoD cleaning up nuclear waste miles from any city or university.'
How would this attract the national security talent that the nation needs?
with a few exceptions (Lincoln Labs being the primary one), the DOD labs have nowhere near the accomplishment or scientific recognition that the DOE labs enjoy. The NNSA labs still do pretty good scientific work, despite NNSA and DOE, not because of them. Look for any DOD FFRDCs on the R&D 100 list. Not there in any significant number. Very few other awards (National Academy, Noble Prizes, etc). A basic question that has to be considered is why the DOE labs outperform the DOD labs in most every way.
There simply isn't a huge volume of "commercial" work for others at any of the labs, but what little there is could be reduced by a move to the DOD.
Having said all that, the defense labs would become much more out of the spotlight at DOD, and that could be beneficial to them.
So the hundreds of DOE Orders and Federal Regulations that govern work at the NNSA labs would simply be dropped? Something that does not yet exist would have to replace them. I bet they would just be rewritten to change the bureaucratic details, and then re-issued by DoD. Voila! Same old same old. The fact remains that DOE/NNSA does this poorly. but DoD doesn't know how to do it at all. DoD has been actively refusing and rejecting "things nuclear" for quite some time. Germantown will become a DoD facility and everyone there will be at the same desks, just their paychecks will be signed by a different agency.
As a long time LANL employee who has witnessed the serious decline of LANL over the last few years, I have only two words to say... DO IT!
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy
"At every crossroad on the way that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck
Turning the labs over to the DOD might allow LANL to seriously ramp up the amount of WFO type work that it does for defense, homeland, and intel agencies.
With the weapons budget headed for serious declines, this move might just be the single most important change that ends up *saving* the NNSA research labs.
So the rumors of this move, seen first on this blog, were true? Sweet!
"A basic question that has to be considered is why the DOE labs outperform the DOD labs in most every way."
Because the best and the brightest are leashed to DOE? There is no reason they couldn't thrive at DOD - where another large portion of national security talent exists.
"Best and Brightest"
Frank, if you only want to recruit US Citizen, that's fine. But if you want to hire your CS expert from India or your math or physics guru from Russia you are out of luck with DOD labs. Foreign nationals (with or without green card) can not work at DOD labs.
My guess is this is going to happen. Dr. Chu clearly wants to concentrate on energy research and has no interest in the nuclear weapons side of the house, so he will let DOD have NNSA.
However, before DOD takes control in 2011, DOE will probably move to squeeze the NNSA budgets so as to shrink the complex work force as a courtesy to the incoming DOD team. That way, an outgoing DOE can be charged with doing all the dirty deeds for "work force restructuring" and the DOD can come in looking like the good guys.
This has got to have them shittin and gettin on the top floors of the Admin Building.
12:05 PM,
Rules can be changed with a stroke of the president's pen. Defense has adapted well to a lot of changes. The air force was split off from the army, all the branches were desegregated (long before this was accomplished in civilian society), the draft was dropped and the forces transitioned to "all volunteer", many roles were opened up to women, "Don't ask, don't tell", ect.
You raise a valid point, but it's not a showstopper.
"This has got to have them shittin and gettin on the top floors of the Admin Building."
2/4/09 12:07 PM
Not only from the top floors but many others you consider the "Best and the Brightest".
Next should be a congressional investigation!
Where is it written that all of LANL would go under DOD?
DOD takes the weapons parts it wants, and the rest of the Lab stays under DOE to work on whatever it is that Bingaman meant when he said, "...the labs do more than defense work, a shift to the Pentagon would damage their ability to do their jobs."
It would make sense to split LANL a la ORNL/Y-12. Of course, ORNL overhead is high -- as high as LANLs, or close to it, they tell me -- as ORNL staff pay a "cleanup tax", so you don't want to assume that you would instantly get cheaper.
I wonder if the people championing a DoD takeover are familiar with the various DoD labs such as AFRL and NRL. I've worked on DARPA contracts that involved management from these labs. These labs are little more than contract monitors.
I also wonder how many people are familiar with the Mansfield amendment, which sharply limits the scope of research of DoD labs. One summary I found:
"The controversial Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research (through ARPA) to projects with direct military application. Some contend that the amendment devastated American science, since ARPA was a major funding source for basic science projects at the time; the National Science Foundation never took up the slack as expected. But the resulting brain drain is also credited with boosting the development of the fledgling personal computer industry. Many young computer scientists fled from the universities to startups and private research labs like Xerox PARC."
Or this story: http://tinyurl.com/atqsv8
The Mansfield Amendment was quite hard on many researchers; the various DoD labs have never really recovered their pre-1972 stature. I wonder what parts of LANL would be immediately shut down to comply with the Mansfield Amendment?
"Germantown will become a DoD facility and everyone there will be at the same desks, just their paychecks will be signed by a different agency."
If all that's changed is the letterheads, then it's just a big waste of effort as was going from DOE to NNSA.
If they can't change the DOE/NNSA culture, then why bother.
There's pandemonium in NNSA over this, especially among the lifers who have been there way too long, and those who have fled the labs to take up federal jobs there. This is a move that is 40 years overdue.
Who wants and pays for a facility like, say, LANSCE?
Please......
You're not worried about the General Schedule (GS-xx) are you???? Surely all you brainiacs would be on the SES track???
Come on over to the better side; the one with all the metrics that show how the DoD FFRDCs have exceeded the "Crown Jewels" of the DOE system.
Please pass the crack pipe.
"Who wants and pays for a facility like, say, LANSCE?"
Yep - DoD will not see the usefulness of many facilities that claim to do "weapons-supporting research." Also, DoD will not see any use for WFO. What's the point? Let other agencies create their own labs. If DoD takes over, it will be a much smaller LANL than under even the worst budget-cutting scenarios under DOE/NNSA.
Name a DoD-run weapons-dedicated lab that does significant WFO.
as a non-weapons scientist at LANL, i like the idea of all weapons-related work going to DoD, and the rest of the science staying at DOE. and if obama includes in his "maximum wage" moratorium the bloated f_ers in LANS management, with their guaranteed 80 million per year in profits, plus who knows what in bonuses to the top execs, i would be optimistic.
maybe if that happens, your blog will be more than just 10% interesting. LANL is a large and heterogeneous place, so there is no way for me to know what divisions the many overly-entitled, paranoid, whining, have-no-real-life posters are from. i just hope i never have to work with any of them.
thanks for the blog, frank. i hope you get what you are looking for.
Even if I don't, I hope I helped others a little along the way.
8:35 pm: "as a non-weapons scientist at LANL, i like the idea of all weapons-related work going to DoD, and the rest of the science staying at DOE"
Yeah, but not at LANL. Wake up.
"There's pandemonium in NNSA over this" (6:14 PM)
That indicates to me that Obama *must* be on the right track with this DOD idea. And if Robinson will replace Mike Anastasio as our next lab Director, than count me in!
There are some things that might need to be worked out in this transfer, but it's do-able and it might even make for a better lab.
The naysayers seem to have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are, but the way things are at LANL is deplorable and we desperately need too see things start to improve beyond just crowing about our phony 6-sigma safety and security ratings.
Here is the GS Salary Table for 2008:
www.opm.gov/oca/08tables/html/gs.asp
Not too great. The senior-level scientists would have to be Senior Executive Service to match our present salaries:
www.opm.gov/oca/08tables/html/es.asp
And GLs and above would have to take reduced salaries which would probably be a good thing!
The government doesn't have to stick their scientists into the rigid GS pay schedule. They can construct optional pay scales to remain competitive. It's been done before.
Furthermore, it is not a given that DOD oversight would mean the employees of LANL would become civil servant workers. In all likelihood, we would remain under an LLC and be paid competitive wages.
"Best and Brightest"
Frank, if you only want to recruit US Citizen, that's fine. But if you want to hire your CS expert from India or your math or physics guru from Russia you are out of luck with DOD labs. Foreign nationals (with or without green card) can not work at DOD labs.
-------------------------
Not true. I personally know of many foreigners who work at DoD labs.
Paul Robinson is right. They need to get them in line with the nuclear weapons mission and get rid of the dead wood.
I checked out the job openings at the DOD's MIT Lincoln Labs and didn't see any requirement of US citizenship listed on many of the jobs. This foreign national issue is a red herring.
"The government doesn't have to stick their scientists into the rigid GS pay schedule. They can construct optional pay scales to remain competitive. It's been done before."
Bingo - and life is great!
'"The government doesn't have to stick their scientists into the rigid GS pay schedule. They can construct optional pay scales to remain competitive. It's been done before."
Bingo - and life is great!'
=====
Dear Santa, please get rid of all oversight and give me a raise. Sincerely, LANL Scientists
PS - can I have a pony, too?
Red herring you say 10:55?
Then read
http://www.ll.mit.edu/employment/
about employment at your beloved MIT Lincoln Labs, especially the bottom part
"MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s fundamental mission is to apply science and advanced technology to critical problems of national security. To assure excellence in the fulfillment of this mission, the Laboratory is committed to fostering an environment that embraces and leverages diversity of thought, culture, and experience.
U.S. citizenship is required."
Also concerning MIT Lincoln Labs, but perhaps working for DOD labs in general, and connected integrity of their scientific research, you might find interesting to read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Postol
Sure LANS and NNSA sucks and it would be good if they were gone, but think about alternatives a bit deeper before asking for them.
"U.S. citizenship is required."
Opps! You are right. My bad.
"PS - can I have a pony, too?" (12:18 PM)
No, Mikey, you cannot have a pony. However, you can have a LANS supplied luxury sports car.
Trust me, it's much better than a pony! ;-)
"U.S. citizenship is required."
Opps! You are right. My bad.
2/7/09 7:41 PM
No foreign nationals no science.
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