February 2004
Should We Compete to Manage the DOE Labs?
- George Blumenthal
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ACSCONL members Janis Ingham (m) and George Blumenthal (Chair, r) with John Birely, AVP of Lab Programs |
Do you think that the University of California should submit bids to continue managing the Department of Energy Labs at Livermore and at Los Alamos? All Senate faculty will have an opportunity to express their views on this question in a systemwide poll of faculty opinion to be held this spring. Before discussing that poll further, let me briefly review the events leading up to this decision.
The University of California has managed the three Department of Energy (DOE) labs, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) for roughly sixty years. Both the Regents and the DOE have periodically agreed to renew our contract to manage these labs, and the UC faculty has frequently provided its opinion regarding the renewal of these contracts. In 1990, the Senate held mail ballots on eight of the nine campuses, with 36% of the faculty favoring continued management and 64% opposed. Senate views had changed by 1996, when a mail ballot on six campuses showed that 61% of faculty supported renewing the contract, with 39% opposed.
Two years ago, in anticipation of renewal discussions taking place this year, the University Committee on Research Policy (UCORP) constituted a subcommittee to examine, from a faculty perspective, how UC might better manage the labs. However, their report was brought to the Academic Council last spring just as the Secretary of Energy announced his intention to open the LANL contract to competitive bidding because of a series of widely publicized lapses in security and accounting at the labs. Subsequently, Congress passed legislation mandating that contracts for all three UC labs be opened for competition. We do not yet know exactly when this competition will occur, but a Request for Proposal for one or more of the labs could be released as early as summer 2004. The cost for UC to bid for each lab is estimated to be in the range of $5-9 million, and presumably this money would come from either our lab management fee or industry partners. Ultimately, the decision whether or not to bid resides with the UC Board of Regents.
In response to this changing situation, the Academic Council established a new subcommittee last June, which reports directly to the Council. This group, called the Academic Council Special Committee on the National Labs (ACSCONL), has two primary duties: 1) to provide timely input to the Office of the President on issues that must be faced prior to a decision about competition, such as whether and how to partner and terms to include in any bid; and 2) to provide educational background material to UC faculty and to solicit the views of the Senate regarding whether or not to compete for these contracts. The ACSCONL group has already concluded that there is no serious controversy about submitting a bid to continue managing the LBNL, since the research occurring at LBNL is all unclassified and closely connected to research taking place at UC Berkeley.
The other two labs (LLNL and LANL) conduct both classified weapons research and unclassified research, some in collaboration with the campuses. In March, the Academic Assembly will be asked to approve a recommendation from both ACSCONL and from the Academic Council that the Senate conduct a poll of all Senate members on the advisability of bidding for these two labs. We are proposing to conduct this poll during the first week in May via the Internet. This will be the first systemwide electronic poll of all UC Senate faculty, and it will ask each member a series of questions intended to elicit the nuances of faculty opinion regarding the labs. In the months leading up to this ballot, ACSCONL will issue a series of “white papers” about the labs, and several campuses will hold town hall meetings to discuss UC’s relationship with LLNL and LANL. About one week prior to the survey, Senate members will receive email instructions on how to participate in this poll. Once the poll results are tabulated, we will release them to the public. Your faculty representatives on the Board of Regents, Larry Pitts and I, will communicate the UC faculty views to the final decision makers, the Board of Regents.