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UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos
crlove writes "LA Times reports, 'The University of California today won its hard-fought bid to continue operating the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, beating back a challenge from a Lockheed Corp.-University of Texas team to run the nuclear weapons research facility...
For months, the New Mexico laboratory had been shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight.'"
Status quo? More like static.
Bechtel wins, Haliburton wasn't bidding.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Part of the deal that had my parents paying for my education was an undergraduate, course load heavy in Economics, Commmerce and Business Law. Having the tools to gain some perspective in how large organizations run, it's instructive to look into the internals of a giant, once prestigious organization like Los Alamos and try to trace the systemic flaws that led to it's current plight.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Wow, so a University is now running an entire city. That's freaky!
Still, got to be better than Bush!
It's not the status quo it seems to be. The bid included an entirely new management team taken from the cream of the crop (many EXTREMELY good people comming from LLNL). The new people will come in, fire the people at LANL who believe that the rules STILL don't apply to them, and generally clean up shop. It will be a good thing.
The thing that needs to be remembered is that the UC knows how to run the place... the competition didn't.
While the University of California will be deeply involved in the new management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is not strictly correct to call this a win for UC. As the DOE press release makes clear, the winner of the competition was a limited liability corporation comprised of UC, Bechtel, BWX Technologies and others. The difference is very significant in some areas. For example, LANL personnel will no longer be members of the UC staff and participants in their retirement system, but employees of the LLC. The DOE did not release details of the winning proposal yet. As they do, I believe it will become increasingly clear that there is much more to this change than just UC continuing to play the same role.
There's been a lot of ambivalence at Berkeley in the past about it running labs like this. One line (not that I believe it) goes that it is better for the Univeristy involved than leave it strictly to the defense contractors.
I think it provides UC with some serious money and opportunity to do major research, so the geeks get attracted to it and tend to brush over any ethical concerns.
E.g. who else has the budget and inclination for some serious computin'?
Similar stuff happened at MIT in the beginning of computing. It was somehow harmless when it was just Ma Bell wanting telephone switching technology -- but the defense contractors have budgets and interesting requirements, so it is easy to look the other way.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Efficient bureaucracy? Now that's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one...
The owls are not what they seem
Nice, a university running a city, good universities like the one described are often full of bright, mature, and great working people bursting ith inspiration.
Why not let them unleash their glowing intelligence on a city and help improve the management of the laboratory for science?
#!/bin/bash
login root
chmod 775 universe://
The postings are interesting. It appears that other labs are being grabbed by the original university that managed it AND a large company. For example, BWXT teams with University of Chicago for Argonne Lab. This makes me wonder if this is the wholesale sell-off of our R&D labs to private enterprise. IOW, will these companies now have unfettered access to all the ideas that comes from these labs and will declare them their own? I only mention this because of the large system support contract that GWB awarded Accenture (a company of crooks and inepts) a HUGE contract that takes place overseas. They not only pull the jobs away but much of the code is now being done elsewhere. IIRC, Accenture will have partial ownership as well as will be in control of a large number of federal systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
UC, for students who want to glow in the dark.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
at least, lets get the young people into designing new and even more efficient ways of killing people, that what schools and universities do right ?
taking bribe money from the chinese peoples liberation army through third party cut outs, then guaranteeing transfer of some serious high tech military grade research? Ties to drug and weapons smuggling and politically motivated murders in mena arkansas? Serious allegations of rape starting during his years at oxford and continuing into the presidency? Being in charge when the coverups of the first WTC bombings and the OKC attacks occurred? Joe pres during the government massacres at ruby ridge and waco? Using military assets to engage in undeclared warfare as a media political dodge to try and divert attention when the lewinsky scandal broke? Obvious coke use during his terms (how many news conferences with him being glassy eyed and sniffling does it take to notice this?) Vince Foster murder and coverup? Dead bodies just don't levitate from point A to B without human intervention ya know. Ron Brown and payoffs and a murder and coverup? Being governor and approving and profiting from selling infected jail prisoners blood? Coverup and obfuscation of the TWA 800 shootdown? and etc, etc. How much more do people need to see he and his gangster crew were just as scummy as the current crop of crooked fools?
Face it, capital D and capital R partisans as just as myopic when it comes to their own gangster bosses and processes and infrastructure.. Quick to point out the other sides legitimate flaws, quick to fall into 100% complete denial when it looks like their side is crooks as well. And both still think the political process is legitimate, witness high level dems completely ignoring the recent elections voting black box scandals. The only serious activism there is coming from steps below the top levels, and it's a pitiful response at that. Most of the voting scandal activism is coming from third parties and independents in the US "grassroots" area. Capital D and R supporters are mostly silent on the issue. Not all, but certainly most. Gee, wonder why that is? How about voting for bills that they never even had the time to read, like the patriot act in the first place? Continuing the scam that is the federal reserve counterfeiting racket? A cooperation of monied interests there.
Government as a large cooperating cartel of criminal interests is todays "status quo". There are no "good guys" at the top, regardless of party label, and there is little credible effort to actually fix anything criminal going on. And it's been like this for a long time now and has only gotten worse. I've been hearing about "cleaning up government" for near half a century, and it's just as crooked and rotten as it has ever been, just they have more experience and high tech toys and larger legions of mercenary order followers to accomplish these criminal goals now, that's all that has changed, more efficiency in crime.
Face it, the US as a political experiment is over, it's now "profit, inc." with anything goes as the only rule. ANYTHING. I don't know how long it will last like this, but my best guess is as soon as the dollar flight takes hold globally it will start to unravel. There is no longer any actual need for other nations to filter their global trade through the petrodollar. The only reason it still even exists is because of previous "investments", but eventually even these will be seen as throwing good money after bad and will cease.
UC = University of Cincinnati, at least per the domain registry. www.uc.edu
NASA really needs to get out of the business of micromanaging their research centers and let consortiums of universities and private industry run them like the DOE does. It'd probably be much more efficient to not have to employ expensive civil servants.
"to run the nuclear weapons research facility"
I thought that UN Securety Consul had planty of rules against the development of nuclear weapons.
The other side of the story not being told is that the loser just spent a crapload of money putting together a detailed award proposal and probably never had a real chance in the first place. I've been on that side of the deal too. When you bid this stuff it is hard to know if this is an honest offer unless you (illegally) have someone on the inside feeding you information. At lot of big contracts, especially government ones, have outcomes decided before the bidding even starts.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"For months, the New Mexico laboratory had been shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight"
Was this written in the 80s?
It is appropriate that this story is listed first under "politics", because that is what LANL has mostly been a victim of. Its safety and security record has actually been no worse than other DOE labs and industry, but no one seems to notice when classified information goes missing at other labs (it happened recently at Sandia, but as no senators are interested in having a company in their home state win a very lucrative contract to manage that one, no one seemed to notice). Of course, having an antagonistic ass like Pete Nanos at the helm shutting down the lab for months certainly didn't help things.
l
A very informative opinion piece on this can be found at:
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-12/p60.htm
Lastly, the NNSA is so hyperactive about classifying everything (they decide to classify some of most stupid crap), and there are so many classified items in the inventory (millions of them), it is remarkable, actually, how few incidents there have been with those.
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(* Disclaimer: The term secutiry may or may not apply to rampant port scanners, rootkits, warez hosting, trojans, DDOS attacks, MMOPRG skr1ptz, mp3 servers, video jukeboxes, large USB drives with legs, backdoor ports, and general purpose 0wn3rship of boxes which may or may not be connected to your network. Hacking is not bad unless intent was malice. Information wants to be free so we can be held responsible if your information gets loose into the wild. )
I'd say this is hardly off topic. Under UC's run, the lab has had several problems like this. Hell, that's why there was even any question as to who would continue running LANL in the first place.
With Bechtel on board and some shifts in management, things should be better.
By the way, I believe that in the case of missing hard drives, the were behind a copy machine. And I believe in the case of the laptops, it was discovered they never existed at all. Good Management.
For a second, I thought LA was about to be run by the Undead.
I knew someone who worked in the IT department at LANL who was a total security risk. Two words: Airhead Bimbo.
Fortunately for LANL she's working elsewhere now.
Check your facts, dude. That's hardly all the National Labs do.
atlast many here would realize that NM is part of USA.. thanks Slashdot for making us heard.
-NM residents who were till now mistaken to be 'Mexicans'
I misread the article title as "UAC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos", and my first thought was "So this is how it all begins..."
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
mod it up.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ive never seen anything Haliburton related, even on vendors, at Los Alamos... so theorize away on that
They arent running the entire city, just the entire labs.. which is bigger than the rest of the city yes. The Labs are still only being managed under contract by them, for DOE. Its still a DOE government facility. And UC has been running it since the 50s... the only story here is that everyone thought they were going to lose the rebid and they didnt.
Lockheed knows very well how to run a Lab. Sandia Labs, run by Lockheed, runs so much smoother and better than LANL does. Paul Robinson, who used to run Sandia, left just to run in the bid for LANL so he could start running LANL and get it cleaned up and running as well as he had SNL running.
i dont know much about UTs experience, but with lockheed as their partner, and Paul running it, LANL would have gotten 500% better in the first year, as it is right now I hate that place, and glad i didnt start working internally in LANL when i had the offer not long ago.
I think Caltech should of taken over Los Alamos. Los Alamos would be a Caltech 'Department'. :-)
Just like JPL is a department of Caltech. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
But then I'm biased, I work at Caltech.
Mod parent offtopic. This policitcal troll has no relevance to the current discussion.
This already happened at Oak Ridge: the management of the classified weapons infrastructure,
i.e. the Y-12 facility, was divorced from that of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now a scientific institution. ORNL gained by now having a University on its management (where previously all of ORNL & Y-12 & K-25 had been a succession of not very good companies, Dow, MartinMarietta-->Lockheed, etc...)
Maybe the same will happen at LANL as well---note that they brought in private-sector contractors (Bechtel, BXWT) who had experience in the "production" side of things, including the management company of the Y-12 plant.
I believe that previously, it was only the UC who managed things.
At DOE there is already the "NNSA" divison which is essentially the re-invention of the old
Atomic Energy Commission---it handles nuclear weapons and nothing but.
So the divorce between science & engineering and nuclear weapons is already in effect.
The non-weapons engineering is not the same necessarily as a university---where people have to go for individual glory (& grants) over longer team-project slogs with big capital investments that are better suited for national labs.
The notion that contractors to the government are intrinsically better than civil servants, especially in scientific jobs, is far from being true.
What *really* happens when you have a contractor is that the government doesn't actually save that much money--or could even lose lots of money.
Why? Because of all the rules: the government still has to hire people to check the paperwork of the contractors, and on the contractor side there has to be an army of people and procedures and forms to interface with the government. Think about a for-profit health care company contracting with Medicare. Each has opposing bureaucrats who are trying to extract money and power out of each other---while the real issue (health care) gets worse as a result.
The government still decides what it wants to do, not the contracting company. Hence, the contracting company is just another layer of "crufty thunking" in programming terms.
On the science side, there are just more needless rules, and management of projects is not improved one iota from civil servants, who they often work with daily.
What does change is that the contractors insert their people and make money out of the inefficiency, and the employees on contract have much worse pensions. The extra money went to the shareholders.
There's a reason that of all the labs, LANL---which had been University managed since inception---actually has the best science and attracts the best researchers of the DOE labs. Universities are different from private companies--for better and for worse, the management was lighter.
I used to work at a DOE site which was managed by private contactors. Guess what: the DOE had a whole building of its own employees from Headquarters nearby the site to check up on the contractors, and the contracting company had its own off-site building of its own employees as well. None as far as we could tell had any involvement in the science & engineering mission, which proceeded identically slowly throughout all the different contractors who came and went.
There is no substitute for smart managers with power and sympathy who know how to get things done: putting a private versus public sector badge on them makes no difference.
Problems in NASA are not that much related to civil servant status---interface between contractors and NASA are a big problem.
Think about the Mars missions: the ones which worked right were ones which were built, designed, and managed all by high-end academically motivated teams at JPL. THe ones which failed were split between NASA centers and private contractors (the one who confused the units was at Lockheed), often forced because of Congress who wanted to send money to certain districts.
texas got the rose bowl last year, after all.
But seriously, my opinion is this: Your first point (about not knowing the next year's budget numbers) is true, but the management minimises that problem by saving some funds into any number of accounts, so they can shift them as they need to. I also have to disagree with your second paragraph somewhat:
No, the biggest management problem is balancing "Security" and "Efficiency". If it's easy to do, it's probably not secure, and vice versa. And the security side wins most decisions (which is usually a GoodThing(tm), given the stuff people play with at the Labs.) Nobody MEANS to cause a problem, but they break one little rule ... and it gets easier to do it that way, or it encourages somebody else to break one little rule too ... and as you say, "things can get kind of out of hand."
(*And nobody seems to want to write such software for OSX/Linux/etc ... why is that?)
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
"...shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight.'"
Theft occurs because of security lapses.
Fraud occurs because of lax oversight.
Why do people feel compelled, when posting new stories, to be so wordy?
No sig for you! Come back one year!
UC didn't win shit. They just saved their ass and pennies in the coffer.
I work for one of the labs. We are not happy with the decision. They are going to "offer" every employee their job with "close to equal compensation." We watched it on lab tv. It was not mentioned in the article, was it?
We all know what this means.
"Hi, Bob, Bob..."
ac
qz
You've never been to New Mexico, have you?