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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."
Here is the google news link to the article .
Or read all the coverage on google news here
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.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
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.
Where did this come from? Mini-nukes? Mini-nukes don't seem to be the issue. My impression attitude of the lab to the bunker-buster program was that it was quite positive because it was such a large project that fits into the mission of the lab. The lab wanted the project.
The article in the NY Times indicates that it was the response of the laboratory leadership to the investigations into the problems with the property, credit card and purchase order accounting that caused Brown and the deputy director to resign. The article read in such a way as to indicate that there was a pretty feeble attempt at a coverup, which was exposed.
There are significant problems with property accounting at Los Alamos. During my time at Los Alamos as a postdoctoral research associate, we had 1 person responsible for accounting for the property in our division. He couldn't keep up with everything going on and there was a lot of hostility to him doing his job. I suspect other divisions were similar.
The credit card system gets so much abuse because it is used so damn much. You can't get anything in a reasonable amount of time by going through the official channels of purchase orders through the appropriate group. If you need something in a timely manner, you find a secretary with a credit card. I suspect that a lot of the problems stem from the fact that they are buying so much stuff that they lose track of what's going on. Slipping in a bogus purchase gets easy when there's so much activity. If you can get away with it once, go back for seconds.
Don't even get me started on the theft of equipment. Our group lost tools by the ton as well as larger ticket items, like air compressors. The air compressor was even chained down. This kind of theft goes on so often it is sickening.
It is unlikely that the resignations are going to alter things significantly, but the odds of improving the situation are better than if things had been left as they were. Personally, I'm hopeful that the lab can straighten some of this out.
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?
May we never see th