Fixing the National Laboratory System

Over the past 20 years, there have been numerous studies of the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories. Most of these studies recognize the high technical quality and unique capabilities of the laboratories but also have raised serious questions about the viability of their post-Cold War, post-energy-crisis missions; their cost; their claim on federal R&D funds vis-a-vis universities and industry; and their size, focus, and possible redundancy.

These studies have resulted in a mountain of incompatible recommendations and expectations for action. Some people have proposed new missions for the laboratories, such as industrial competitiveness and industrial ecology. Others have suggested new management structures. One of the most recent and provocative studies, the Report of the Task Force on Alternative Futures for Department of Energy National Laboratories, chaired by Robert Galvin of Motorola, proposed managing the laboratories through a government-owned corporation. In addition, bills were introduced in the 104th Congress that would have established a laboratory-closure commission modeled after the Department of Defense base-closure commission, required specified staff cuts of one-third or more at the laboratories, and dismantled DOE and reassigned the laboratories to other government agencies with related missions.

Having reviewed them, we find that there is much merit in the criticisms and much good intention in the proposals to change the governance and focus of the laboratories. But we believe that the proposals either attack the wrong problems or are simply unlikely to succeed. We have developed instead what we believe is a comprehensive and practical strategy to manage the national laboratory system to achieve national goals and to make the laboratory systems once again recognized as an essential, cost-effective, and well-managed element of the nation’s R&D enterprise. We believe that this approach, unlike others tried over the past two decades, is demonstrably working and should be continued.

When we refer to the “national laboratories” in this paper we mean DOE’s nine large multiprogram laboratories that serve several DOE missions.

They have a total annual budget of more than $6 billion and employ some 30,000 scientists and engineers. About $1 billion of this funding comes from outside DOE, primarily from other federal agencies but also from the private industry. The national laboratories play major roles in each of DOE’s four missions (national security, energy, science, and environmental quality), but nearly 80 percent of their R&D is concentrated in the national security and science missions.

In addition to the multiprogram national laboratories, DOE also has several specialized laboratories, such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Federal Energy Technology Center, that serve a single mission. Most of the debates about the laboratories have focused, as does this article, on the multiprogram national labs, but many of the same issues are relevant to the single-mission labs.

Although owned by the federal government, the national laboratories are operated by nongovernmental contractors. This management arrangement has been followed since their inception, with the intent of giving the laboratories the flexibility they need to attract top scientists and take advantage of private-sector management practices. At present, four of the nine national laboratories are managed by universities, three are managed by a for-profit corporation (Lockheed Martin Corporation), and two are managed by not-for-profit contractors.

Our management approach