Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
UC = University of Cincinnati, at least per the domain registry. www.uc.edu
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
A few things that you might not be aware of, or failed to give proper consideration:
The last one may require more explaination -- there are a large number of scientists who are elligible for retirement. Were they to retire, they'd be getting paid by the government for doing no work (ie, their retirement). They could then get a job with a contractor, who would sell their services back to the government, for more than what the civil servant was getting paid in the firt place ... resulting in it potentially costing the government 2x the cost of the employees.
I admit that these numbers don't work for people who aren't near retirement, but a large percentage of civil servants are, because they don't bring in that many new civil servants, compared to the total population.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Oh, I'm aware of this since I'm a contractor. If contractors create such fluid and dynamic disposable workforce that adjusts to changing budgets then perhaps all employees of NASA should be contractors so you don't have to deal with long and arduous RIF processes to downsize staff. I've watched hundreds of my fellow contractors get laid off so far due to budget problems and not one civil servant has left involuntarily. To be treated like nothing more than a glorified temp worker when you've worked along side these people as coworkers for decades is incredibly infuriating.
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.
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.
I'm a retired experimentalist from LANL so there is no need to theorize. Kellog, Brown and Root does the site services.
e .story&story_id=1320
http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php?fuseaction=hom
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.
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.
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!
qz
You've never been to New Mexico, have you?