A History of Innovation and Dysfunction At Los Alamos National Laboratory (santafenewmexican.com)

In the past, Los Alamos National Laboratory has done some of the United States' most crucial research and development. Lately, the lab has been dealing with accidents and management problems. Reader DougDot directs us to a report from the Santa Fe New Mexican about the questions surrounding LANL's future. Quoting: Federal officials told Congress in December that they will put the LANL contract up for competitive bid for only the second time since the lab opened in 1943. The current LANS contract ends Sept 30, 2017. Identifying what went wrong, and why the lab has proven so difficult to manage, will play an important role for the Department of Energy as it seeks out new managers to run the lab. Investigators say the problems stem from repeated management weaknesses, the kind that were supposed to get fixed when the Department of Energy turned to private industry in 2006 to oversee the lab.

It was the first time the federal government had put the lab’s management up for bid, with the idea that a for-profit model, operating under an incentives-based contract, would fix the problems that haunted the nonprofit University of California, which had run the lab since World War II. ... experts, watchdog groups and former lab employees point to an array of problems, from a clash of cultures between the regimented and profit-driven Bechtel and the languorous, research-oriented university; to incentives that may have induced contractors to put a premium on meeting deadlines despite safety risks; to a mix of shoddy accountability and micromanagement on the part of the federal government.

Comments

Re: Private industry...

[silentcoder]

>Bell Labs, a privately run lab to soak up profits from a government mandated monopoly. Not sure that makes a case for private for profit management. More like publicly funded research utopia.

Not to mention the core diference is that Bell Labs, being created as a profit sponge, was not a profit seeking enterprise. They may have been owned by one, but because they were specifically *expected* to not make profit they didn't operate like one - and instead was allowed to operate like academia and deliver knowledge instead (some of which, at least, would later be profitable to Bell of course).

The GP correctly pointed out that basic research is a very bad fit for a profit-motive, the only thing Bell Labs prove is that "academia" and charity are not the only ways one could conceivably fund a non-profit research lab. Nobody argued that, that was the case.
That said - government-funded academia is definitely simpler to accomplish - which is why there are millions of government funded research labs around the world (including major multinational ones like CERN) while examples like Bell Labs are few and far between.
Where private enterprise have tried to dabble in the "free reign for researchers lab" model in the past, hoping to cash in on ideas, there are far more dismal failures than successes. Xerox PARC was such an attempt - and while they produced world-class research and innocations - Xerox utterly failed to see it's value or capitalize on it (and basically gave the results to Steve Jobs for free). Ultimately that led to the end of PARC.

Bell Labs didn't survive much past the end of the AT&T monopoly either. It genuinely seems that research labs run by profit-seeking enterprises generally do not work well, and can only succeed when very specific conditions are in place (that are not organically arrived at by market forces).

I would add to the GP's reasons for this that science requires peer review, which works best when the results are shared as widely as possible. Secret-sauce science is not really science at all - and that too is fundamentally incompatible with the profit motive. Profit demands exclusivity but science demands reproducability - which are flat-out contradictory aims. This means that even when, practically, the process can be made to work - the results are tainted as science. Just look at the many resent scandals due to unreproducible drug tests. Evidence based medicine becomes a lot less trustworthy when we water down the scientific standards for what "evidence based" means (though still a lot better than pseudo-science like homeopathy and anti-vaxxers).