The Future of the DOE Labs

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) system of national laboratories has been a critical part of the nation’s security and civilian research infrastructure for more than 60 years. The labs play a key part in the economies of regions where high technology enterprises would otherwise never have existed. But the world in which the laboratories operate has been fundamentally transformed.

Instead of creative rethinking of the role of the labs to face 21st century challenges, we have seen heroic efforts to avoid any fundamental review. Each new scandal leads to another layer in an already thick encrustation of bureaucratic regulation. Pork barrel politics all but requires that funding be maintained for facilities in areas where private investment in high technology is unlikely. In too many cases, the lab’s safest funding strategy has been to argue for national security and nuclear missions that justify maintaining the Cold War infrastructure. And poor states are not getting the kinds of spin-off benefits one would expect from such an enormous investment of federal R&D funds because these Cold War missions are least likely to create opportunities for local business development.

	Instead of creative rethinking of the role of the labs to face 21st century challenges, we have seen heroic efforts to avoid any fundamental review.

Missing in all this is a basic rethinking of the advantage of government laboratories. What is the comparative advantage of the labs today? Can or should DOE fill a gap left by the decline of major corporate labs? Are they located in the right places, with the right missions, and the best links to academic and corporate interests?

The fact is we really don’t know because we haven’t seriously confronted these questions. Wasting money and incurring the opportunity cost of misallocating the talents of approximately 30,000 laboratory employees is bad enough. But our failure to rethink the role of the labs is dangerous if missions justified to sustain existing facilities distort national security or energy priorities. We have inadvertently created a powerful lobby for nuclear weapons that has, without question, led to the funding for nuclear weapons facilities far in excess of the investments that would have been made if spending for nuclear weapons were held to the kinds of standards that would be applied if they were an integral part of the Department of Defense (DOD) budget.

A Changed Landscape

The labs, like most great organizations, have a founding legend. The basic story is that during the crisis facing the U.S. at the beginning of the Second World War, some of the world’s greatest scientists selflessly gave up promising academic careers and went to remote, secret facilities where they developed – in an astonishingly short time – a weapon so revolutionary that they helped end the war.

This achievement was a tough act to follow – perhaps it never can. But the idea that skilled scientists, working together in the unique intimacy of these remote labs, could save the Republic with a continuing series of spectacular inventions has been an enduring belief and retains enormous emotional and political power. While the founding narrative was essential to the ethos of the weapons labs, it carried over and helped provide the foundation for labs, like the accelerator centers, that did pure physics research. The political support for these facilities depended in no small measure on the implied link between basic research and security breakthroughs established in 1945.

The world has changed while the labs have not. They are saddled with a labyrinthine management system and infrastructure inherited from decades of tinkering but never real reform. The most dramatic change, of course, came with the end of the Cold War and new threats posed by rogue states and non-state actors. The demands of national security and homeland security were transformed with these events and dramatic developments in materials science, biology, information technology and other areas have reshaped scientific research priorities.

	We have inadvertently created a powerful lobby for nuclear weapons that has, without question, led to the funding for nuclear weapons facilities far in excess of the investments that would have been made if spending for nuclear weapons were held to the kinds of standards that would be applied if they were an integral part of the Department of Defense (DOD) budget.

The nation’s research and development infrastructure has been transformed with enormous growth in corporate applied research and business-academic research partnerships. One major change is that the private sector has all but abandoned its former laboratory system in favor of focused, specialized facilities and new partnerships with universities and contractors. The legendary private laboratories funded by Bell, GE, Sarnoff, and IBM, which were the source of so many of the great inventions of the 20th century, have either disappeared or been rendered nearly unrecognizable through management changes. Increased defense spending has produced a huge collection of U.S. defense contractors offering spectacular R&D capabilities and equally spectacular political clout.

The labs recognized many of these changes and made valiant attempts to diversify into other missions in energy, the environment and commercial technology. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) managed to make the transition successfully because it had abandoned all defense research and was located at the edge of a great university. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in a suburb of Denver, had the opportunity to start from scratch and build corporate and university alliances. The Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) has thrived because of its inextricable personnel links to a prominent academic institution, making it a magnet for international talent.

	A thoughtful review of the value and missions of the DOE laboratory system is badly overdue.

But most of the other labs have struggled. When the end of the Cold War forced their hands, they developed an ambitious plan of technology transfer. The labs had successfully convinced the nation that they had a treasure trove of spectacular technology locked away behind security fences. They announced their willingness to open this treasure trove to American industry through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). But, as my colleague Ivan Oelrich points out, when the curtain was lifted and industry allowed to look inside, the result was a near universal “so what?”. There was little science in the labs that wasn’t already better known to alert American companies.

The lab’s ability to react to change has been limited in part by an endless series of self-inflicted wounds. They’ve endured a cadence of mission changes, mismanagement, new management and contract renegotiations. They’ve been through years of expensive efforts to cleanup waste in programs that mixed technical priorities with local, state, and national politics in ways that only Lewis Carroll could explain. And they have been plagued by a bizarre series of scandals, including tragic-comic searches for nonexistent computer disks and the disgraceful treatment of Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee. Each scandal has been followed by new procedures and top-down, random security rules. But the forces driving these debacles may be a symptom of the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in attempting to perpetuate a 50-year-old national security research model.

The New Rules

Finding the right role for national labs in the 21st century must begin by defining their comparative advantage among research institutions and approaches to research management. When should taxpayers consider sending funds to national laboratories instead of spending the money in other ways? The question of comparative advantage is not the same as asking whether the labs can do first rate research. Of course they can. The deeper question is whether the funding they receive could be used more productively if it were given to corporate and university research teams. A related question is whether federal funding sent to a state like Idaho or New Mexico could create more economic growth and more job opportunities if it were invested in local universities or research partnerships with local firms instead of fenced-off laboratories.

In some areas, the labs have a clear advantage. They are uniquely qualified to maintain large user facilities whose design and operation requires a sophisticated technical staff. This is particularly true when the equipment must be operated in remote locations for security or safety reasons. They can also support research that requires a long-term commitment by large technical teams – something that is extremely difficult to do in an academic setting.

Familiar answers, however, must be rethought in light of changed circumstances. New realities put the labs at a considerable disadvantage in comparison with other research alternatives.

First, it is difficult to house classified and unclassified research in the same facility. Researchers operate at a disadvantage if they are not able to participate freely and fully in the exploding networks of international research conducted through the internet and global grid computing. U.S. research teams are hamstrung if they can’t invite foreign colleagues and students to participate in projects on short notice or if their publications face restrictions or delays. The paperwork required to get a non-U.S. citizen into a DOE facility is so horrendous that many researchers choose to meet off-site rather than go through the hassle. Foreign travel for DOE and laboratory staff is often a frustrating, slow and mysterious approval process. Research depends on networks of data and international travel and needed face time with colleagues – methods that depend on openness. Yet classified work at the national labs has become isolated from academic science.

Second, the role of science in nuclear weapons work has changed dramatically. The need to maintain unique weapons laboratories stems from the idea that the maintenance of nuclear weapons requires a special blend of the best scientific minds in the country and a secure facility. In reality, the need for basic science in the U.S. nuclear enterprise has declined as the tasks involved become more like routine engineering. One of the unstated justifications for the expensive devices in weapons labs has always been to lure young scientists to nuclear weapons design teams with the idea that the old band must be kept together in case we return to the glory days of weapons design. This tactic is hard to swallow (and isn’t working in any event). Even if the U.S. decides to develop a new generation of “robust” weapons, they will be based on the most conservative and basic models and are unlikely to require the exquisite designs needed to squeeze every kiloton of yield out of low weight, low volume devices. In fact, it’s likely that scientists with creative (and possibly unreliable) new ideas will be welcome, but in a process that will be dominated by hard-nosed engineering design teams.

Third, while the world is connected electronically, the physical proximity of academic and corporate research personnel and equipment is still important. Places like Silicon Valley in California, Route 128 in Boston, and the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina are legendary because they have reached a critical mass of talent and investment in equipment making it possible for someone with a new idea to assemble a brilliant, multidisciplinary team quickly, and purchase and maintain any kind of equipment. These centers are being duplicated around the world, with ambitious new efforts in China and India.

Fourth, the era when government-funded technology was at the cutting edge is over. The U.S. military must get in line to purchase state-of-the-art microprocessors or gene sequencing equipment developed and sold for commercial markets. Given access to materials, it would be orders of magnitude easier to design a functional nuclear weapon using the basic 1945 designs, than to try to reproduce the technology of an Intel microprocessor plant of 2005. The complex management in place in most of the laboratories may not be compatible with modern research styles – environments that demand fast assembly of corporate and academic teams worldwide, and rapid decision-making. In fact, the labs have lost staff to the commercial sector, which pays better and offers more perks. The best computer people have gone to academia, big companies like HP, gaming companies and web startups such as Netscape.

While universities continue to do the lion’s share of U.S. basic research, the bulk of all U.S. research is now supported by industry. Universities are sites of corporate-sponsored research, which then spins off clusters of creative new companies in, for example, biotechnology or optoelectronics. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) has been successful in pioneering many new concepts in energy because it is closely connected to a world-class university and developed ways to draw on the creative talents of businesses in Silicon Valley. LBL is a comparatively small, open facility - an atmosphere difficult to reproduce for labs in remote locations. Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNNL) has shown it understands this problem by hiring people like Mike Davis who comes from a strong background in business, government, and public labs. But he is the exception, not the rule.

	The current system does not make the best use of the scarce funding available for the physical sciences, it distorts national security priorities and it fails to make effective use of funds that could be used to promote regional economic growth and job creation.

Fifth, scientific and technical development in today’s most exciting research areas is difficult to anticipate, requiring an ability to draw quickly on a pool of consultants and equipment. The large, fast-paced commercial research centers are ideal environments for such work. The national weapons design labs, working under difficult bureaucratic constraints and isolated from the forces reshaping most of the rest of U.S. research, have often missed the boat in integrating interdisciplinary teams of specialists and are overstocked with nuclear and other engineers.

Finally, labs in remote regions face growing difficulties in attracting young, diverse talent. It’s difficult to attract such people to isolated sites when competing offers come from regions offering opportunities for continued education, industrial partnerships and employment prospects for spouses. Working conditions are frustrating as security rules proliferate. Visitors are shocked to learn that they cannot use wireless laptops, personal cell phones or PDAs in many labs. And strong biases imposed by management against researchers born abroad add further difficulty. The result is that such institutions tend to draw much of their new staff from regional and local universities.

Light at the Edge of the Briar Patch

The DOE labs are an essential part of the nation’s research infrastructure. Instead of facing up to the key decisions needed to help them overcome a host of new problems and focus on topics where they can play an essential role, 21st century politics has managed only patchwork solutions designed to maintain existing facilities, with existing personnel, in existing locations.

This is understandable since efforts to build federal programs around civilian research objectives have not been noticeably effective unless they are targeted to specific health, energy, agricultural, or other missions (witness the fate of the Advanced Technology Program that was pilloried for doing applied work with corporate partners that would not have raised an eyebrow if it had a national security mission). Since other research organizations cannot compete in producing or maintaining nuclear weapons, weapons research makes a perfect rationale for a core set of labs. This has led to shameless arguments – including the argument that the National Ignition Facility was essential to the U.S. nuclear deterrent. It is a textbook example of the kinds of distortions that creep into national research management if the process starts with the goal of preserving the status quo instead of looking clearly at the real research needs of the nation and the kinds of management best matched to the state of the art in today’s science and engineering research facilities. The result may be understandable but the inertia is not acceptable.

The current system does not make the best use of the scarce funding available for the physical sciences, it distorts national security priorities and it fails to make effective use of funds that could be used to promote regional economic growth and job creation.

New research programs funded through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provided a superb opportunity to reflect on how best to manage new research – but it was a missed opportunity. Instead of contemplating how best to set priorities and manage the research, we’ve witnessed a frantic scramble for funding using all political methods available. The labs play this game with vigor and, since no one in Washington was in a position to second guess them, did a brilliant job of grabbing funds – often to finance on-going programs.

A thoughtful review of the value and missions of the DOE laboratory system is badly overdue. While some have suggested a process like a “base closing commission,” a better approach would be to ask an experienced group of academic, federal and corporate research managers to assess complex research programs and provide concrete advice about how and when the labs can make the greatest contribution (and where they cannot). Given the reality that one of the implicit missions of the labs has been to provide economic stimulus to the areas where they are located, the group could also suggest options for using federal research funding to stimulate economic development in the states and regions involved. They should also provide guidance about the role the labs should play in a badly needed program to strengthen national investment in the physical sciences.

	Couldn’t we find ways to strengthen research partnerships around the first rate universities in these states that are better matched to today’s national research needs?

Confusion about how to combine science and classified engineering projects at labs like Los Alamos has not been helpful. The commission should consider how much basic research can actually be conducted in a classified facility under today’s circumstances. And they should consider whether private defense contractors are best suited for managing the applied engineering work that constitutes the bulk of homeland security and national security work – including work on the maintenance of nuclear weapons.

While it might not be possible for the group to make specific recommendations about each major lab, they could at least provide a set of criteria that federal managers should use to restructure these critical institutions.

Couldn’t we find ways to strengthen research partnerships around the first rate universities in these states that are better matched to today’s national research needs? Couldn’t we build organizations eager to lobby for funds that supported the most critical national research priorities instead of clinging onto legacy missions? Can’t we find a way to build a stronger constituency for research in the physical sciences and unclassified basic and applied research key to America’s economic future?

It is important to get this right. Our failure to face up to this problem of lab management is not only wasteful – it’s downright dangerous.