Corruption Scandal Rocks Los Alamos Lab

An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of recent science fraud stories involving Bell Labs and Berkeley National Labs, a new scandal is now brewing at Los Alamos National Lab. Today (Jan 3, 2003), the New York Times is reporting that both the Director and Principal Deputy Director of Los Alamos have submitted their resignations under duress. A more detailed and earlier CBS News report here . POGO has an archive of related documents here. I recommend you visit POGO.org (Project On Government Oversight), a wonderful non-profit organization dedicated to fighting fraud and waste in the US government."

Comments

wrong kind of fraud

[josephgrossberg]

The people at Los Alamos didn't do the "fudging our data" stuff, they did the Dennis Kozlowski type.

This ranges from $3 million in "lost" equipment and improper credit card use, under Browne and Salgado's watch.

simply pathetic Bush grandstanding for mini-nukes

[js7a]

The Bush Administration (Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham) is willing to go to great lengths to get the Regents of the University of California out of the business of running nuke factories.

The kinds of abuses described in the allegations happen all the time, especially in the military, but you don't see any Joint Chiefs of Staff "mutually agreeing" on their resignations for it.

The real problem, from the Bush point of view, is the overwhelming propensity of Californian voters to insist on following the law instead of developing new "bunker buster" mini-nukes. Bush wants these new weapons, now more than ever, and to get them he needs a National Labs administration willing to look the other way.

Read the whole article

[0x0d0a]

If you get down to where it's conveniently stuffed waaay at the bottom (wow, seems the NYT likes being sensationalist as well), it says that all but $141,000 have been resolved after the investigation.

Now, that's certainly not pocket change, and it could be abuse of funds, but it sure as hell isn't in the millions of dollars range. Unless the people in charge were the ones actually doing the charging, I don't see why they'd get canned for this. This is not the amount of funds that you'd have to be willfully ignoring to have slip through the cracks to dishonest workers at the lab.

At least from what I've read so far, this smells a *lot* more like internal politicking. Someone screwed someone over or someone wanted to give someone a favor, or someone was blocking someone else's ideas.

I distinctly remember Bush hammering a number of DoE affiliants and top people about a year ago. Given the fact that Bush has tons of Big Energy ties, it's a lot more likely that he's just repaying favors. Perhaps someone would have lost a lot of money if nuclear power become more economic, or perhaps someone wanted to discover something privately and get the patents on it. [shrug] Who knows?