National Labs Resist GOP Assault

Prodded by savings-hungry Republicans in Congress, the colossus that is the Department of Energy (DOE) awakened in January to find itself under attack and its offspring-a cherished, $6 billion network of national laboratories-at risk of being orphaned. Alarmed, DOE embarked upon a campaign to save the department and reshape the laboratories, by shrinking and restructuring them. At the last moment, one day before the deadlock that led President Bill Clinton to shut down much of the federal government, he signed into law the Energy and Water Development Appropriation Act of fiscal year 1996. The measure preserves DOE at nearly 1995 funding levels. EMBARRASSMENT: Revelations that Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary paid $43,500 to a media consultant further lowered morale among DOE staff. But DOE scientists, many of whom were still struggling with President Clinton's two-year-old, $1.7 billion mandate to court industry and speed technology to market, still must carry on their work in the face of increasing uncertainty over their jobs and their department's seemingly kaleidoscopic shifts in its mission. Adding to its difficulties, DOE must rebound from its latest embarrassment-news that Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary spent $43,500 of DOE money to determine why the agency gets such bad press. At press time, the situation and O'Leary's status were still unresolved. Given the agency's entrenched bureaucracy, DOE's effort to reform its labs can claim only a measure of success, according to a report issued to O'Leary on October 26 by an independent advisory board. The Laboratory Operations Board, made up of DOE department heads, esteemed academics, and corporate leaders, was established by O'Leary in April. It found that while "some of the laboratories are moving ahead rapidly," here "there appears to be confusion about the direction-and in some cases even about the necessity-for reform." Uncertainty over the direction the reforms may take should come as no surprise, given the number of possibilities that have come under consideration in Washington. The Clinton administration had proposed a plan that would cut $1.4 billion in funding and trim staff by 5 percent within the next five years. At press time, since the budget debate had not been resolved, some details of DOE's funding had not been decided. agency officials say, however, that DOE will receive almost as much money as in 1995. A SHIFT IN FOCUS: O'Leary aid Peter Didisheim notes that DOE conducted an internal, agency-wide review. "The budget that has been passed will not have a widespread impact on DOE labs or DOE itself," says Peter Didisheim, special assistant to O'Leary. FOCUS ON FUNDS: Rep. Todd Tiahrt wants to "abolish" DOE, which he calls a waste of taxpayer's money. The final compromise supplanted a number of bills introduced from both sides of the congressional aisle. Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), a freshman legislator and fervent DOE opponent, presented a bill that would have abolished DOE entirely and done away with several of the labs, a measure that attracted nearly 50 cosponsors. LAB-FRIENDLY MEASURE: Re. Steven Schiff's bill would give O'Leary a free hand in restructuring. Rep. Steve Schiff (R-N.Mex.), who chairs the House Science Committee basic research subcommittee and has Los Alamos National Laboratory in his district, introduced a lab-friendly measure that would have given O'Leary a relatively free hand in restructuring the facilities. Even a Democrat, Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), weighed in with a proposal that would have cut laboratory staff by a third, eliminated duplicative research, and encouraged use of university and private labs. ONE FROM THE DEMOCRATS: Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer's proposal called for cutting lab staff by a third and eliminating duplicative research. Didisheim says the department last year managed to shift the focus of the discussion by setting up its own agency-wide review. PLAN REJECTED: A committee chaired by former Motorola Inc. CEO Robert Galvin urged "corporativation," but DOE took a less revolutionary approach. The review committee, chaired by Robert W. Galvin, former chief executive officer of Motorola Inc. in Schaumburg, Ill., urged in February that DOE "corporatize" the labs by turning them over to a quasi-private board that would run them as it would a company, but using funding from government block grants. DOE rejected the Galvin plan. "The corporatization idea didn't gather much support," Didisheim notes. Instead, DOE decided to adopt a "two-track approach," he says. DOE would "remain open to more revolutionary approaches, like Galvin's, if [the department] felt it retained stewardship of the public purse and accountability," according to Didisheim. "DOE would also aggressively pursue the lesser option, an aggressive effort to clear away the administrative burdens that have strangled the labs and driven up the cost structure." O'Leary established the Laboratory Operations board in April "to police us and hold us to our commitment," Didisheim asserts. The October report was prepared by the non-DOE members of the board. The members found that DOE had made progress, and noted that "both the character and specificity of reforms under way by the department and its laboratories are more serious and far-reaching than has been seen in response to prior examinations of the department's laboratories." The report also found that "the extent to which the department is starting to institutionalize these reforms is unlike anything we have observed in the past" at DOE. Among other reforms, the members found: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., has reduced the number of steps in its procurement process from 140 to 40. This enabled the lab to cut its procurement staff by nearly 30 percent and review time from more than a year to about one month. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., has embarked on an 11-month effort to cut administrative costs by one-third, or $60 million, in two years. The lab cut its work force by nearly 900. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has cut administrative requirements on scientists so they can spend more time doing research. The changes are expected to increase productivity and enable the lab to cut its work force by 1,100 people. The group also endorsed DOE's commitment to the development of a Strategic Laboratory Mission Plan, scheduled to be completed this winter, that will define each lab's mission and track its performance by following the flow of funds for each activity. The change will enable DOE to "manage the laboratories more as a system," DOE deputy secretary Charles Curtis told lawmakers at a September 7 hearing of two panels of the House Science Committee. "We've got a crazy system in place, and we've got to take it apart," he acknowledged. The report's findings come in the wake of criticism spurred by an exhaustive, week-long, front-page series in the Philadelphia Inquirer (G.M. Gaul, S.Q. Stranahan, June 4-9, 1995) examining the Clinton administration's push to expand the labs' collaborations with industry. Measuring the labs' performance with the administration's stated yardstick-the creation of new jobs and companies based on the transfer of advanced technology to the private sector-the Inquirer concluded simply: "That policy has failed." The Inquirer reported that more than 1,000 companies had benefited from the collaborations, but the returns to American taxpayers were limited at best. According to the series, many of the companies that received lab assistance did not create jobs in the United States; they eliminated them. Indeed, taxpayers supported industries that had shifted more than 100,000 jobs to low-wage nations. The newspaper also found that members of Congress have plundered the programs, "earmarking" money in appropriations bills for pet projects that are not subject to scientific peer review and "may, in fact, have little to do with an agency's official mission." Didisheim objects that "the series per se wasn't very well done. It was clear they had a thesis they were intent on confirming. From the materials they received and interviews they conducted, they only sifted out those morsels that propped up their thesis." SUCCESS STORIES: Argonne's Harvey Drucker believes that good CRADA outcomes "outweigh the failures." Harvey Drucker, associate laboratory director for energy environmental science and technology at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., responds, "In every case where you do something like technology transfer, where you're using public money to help the private sector, you're going to find cases that look like abuse. That's the way the world works. But you're also going to find other stories that are success stories. My hunch is at the moment is the successes outweigh the failures." However, tallying successes is not as easy a proposition as it might appear, Drucker points out. "Overall," he says, "I don't think we're really doing a good job of looking at experiments in technology development and evaluating how successful they are." The Strategic Laboratory Mission Plan is intended to improve that effort, DOE officials note. But congressional funding cuts in the bill Clinton signed will make it more difficult for the labs to collaborate with industry. "We had no choice but to bail out of a whole bunch of Cooperative Research and Development Agreements [CRADAs] that were already planned and under way," Didisheim complains. "Of $275 million we requested in support of CRADAS, we'll only have about $120 million of usable money and that will be tied up on the highest-priority collaborations." At Argonne, Drucker points out, much of the funding that enables smaller firms to take advantage of lab resources comes through the lab's Energy Research Laboratory Technology Transfer program. But congressional cutbacks have reduced the available funding from $60 million to $18 million, he says, "which means that our ability to work with smaller companies will be significantly decreased." Al Duba, a geophysicist on sabbatical in France from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., has long lamented the "politicization of the scientific process." Now, he asserts, matters are getting worse. "The current situation within DOE and the national laboratories has everyone feeding on everyone with each guarding his flank, unsure of who is friend or foe," Duba notes in an E-mail assessment of his views. "Part of the blame for this mess rests with Congress and the Executive for thinking only of the next election and playing political games [rather than] acting in the best interest of the country. Another part of the blame rests with the scientific leadership, not of the national laboratory system, but in general," he adds. "Too often our scientific leaders go along with a dumb idea that is handed down from the executive or legislative branch-even before it is a law or regulation- because they are afraid to challenge the source of funds." Unfortunately for Duba and his colleagues, DOE and its labs remain something of a political football. For instance, on October 30, Rep. Tiahrt sent out a "Dear Colleague" letter with this entreaty: "After We Dismantle Commerce, Let's Abolish the Department of Energy." Tiahrt's letter, an effort to enlist more sponsors for his bill, H.R. 1993, brushed aside questions of science. The thrust of the letter was money. "The National Taxpayer's Union has scored H.R. 1993 as a $20 billion savings over five years," it declared. "The Heritage Foundation has scored H.R. 1993 as a $23.3 billion savings over five years." A Tiahrt press aide cited the O'Leary debacle as new evidence of the agency's waste of taxpayers' money. FORGOTTEN VALUE: Kenneth Kliewer, a computer scientist at Oak Ridge, notes that the national labs are "incrediable repositories of talented people." "The one thing left out of this discussion," comments Kenneth Kliewer, a computer scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, "is that these labs are incredible repositories of talented people from engineering and science. The value that these labs represent to the country is enormous." Steve Sternberg is a freelance science writer based in Alexandria, Va.

National Labs Resist GOP Assault

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