The relationship between the three U.S. nuclear weapons labs and their federal managers has become “dysfunctional,” with micromanagement threatening the labs’ ability to carry out their security work, according to a federal review made public Wednesday.
As an example, the report cited a scientist who had to obtain three or four management signatures and write a half-page justification to take a laptop to work from home. The same scientist said five signatures were needed in order to attend a routine scientific meeting.
“We are drowning in paperwork and regulations,” the unnamed scientist told members of the National Academies of Science panel reviewing lab management problems. “Where academic freedom once reigned … we have today a lab totally driven by risk averseness.”
The three nuclear weapons laboratories – Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore in California – are funded by the government and managed by private companies. It is an example of a long-used model for federal researchers, of “government-owned, contractor-operated” labs known by their acronym GOCO. The model dates to the Manhattan Project, when an independent team of scientists funded by the Army and working for the University of California built the first atomic bomb.
The original idea was to provide researchers relative freedom from government meddling, allowing them to focus on their research. Wednesday’s report is the latest in a series, going back at least to 1995, that has complained about the decline of the GOCO model.
A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that runs the labs, issued a statement Wednesday saying it was working on some of the problems cited by the panel.
The combined budget for the three labs in 2011 was $6.5 billion.
Rather than assign overall goals and hold the labs accountable for their accomplishment, the federal government now micromanages every step, said Charles Shank, chairman of the review committee.
The problem is worst at Los Alamos National Laboratory, but extends to Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, Shank said in a telephone interview Wednesday from Washington, D.C., where he was preparing to testify today at a hearing of the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
Fixing the problem will require changes in the way the labs’ budgets are done, funding them in broader categories rather than with narrow specifics, the panel concluded.
The panel also called for “NNSA and each of the Laboratories (to) commit to the goal of rebalancing the managerial and governance relationship to build in a higher level of trust in program execution and Laboratory operations in general.”
Congress chartered the review committee in 2009 to investigate the shift in the mid-2000s to private-sector management at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national labs. Specifically, it was asked to determine whether the change had hurt the labs’ ability to do scientific experiments.
The answer to that question, it found, was “no.” While private sector management has been significantly more expensive – an extra $140 million per year at Los Alamos and $70 million at Livermore – the science has not suffered under private management, the council found. But while the contract structure itself has not hurt the labs’ ability to do science, the committee found deeper problems in the lab-management relationship that are causing significant problems.
One core issue is a bureaucracy on both the lab and the National Nuclear Security Administration side that is averse to risks.
“There is great punishment for mistakes, no reward for success,” said Shank, former director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now on the staff at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland.
The problem with respect to Los Alamos worsened because of spying allegations against Wen Ho Lee in 1999, which ultimately led to charges of mishandling classified information. That was followed in 2002 by charges of financial mismanagement at the lab, and a 2004 lab shutdown because of security and safety concerns.
Shank said some of those problems were overblown. To the extent they represented legitimate problems, lab management has substantially improved, he said. But the deeper problem of mistrust between the three weapons labs and their federal managers has been growing for decades.
Sandia and Los Alamos spokesmen declined to comment.
NNSA spokesman Josh McConaha issued a statement late Wednesday saying the agency was reviewing the report and said efforts are under way to address problems raised by Shank’s committee.
“We are already actively working to reshape the relationship between the laboratories, sites and headquarters; engage in efforts to examine and reduce the number of budget reporting categories; enact a series of management reforms intended to both improve the way we do business and increase the efficiency of our operations; and maintain a safe, secure, and responsible security posture at our sites,” it said.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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