by Cheryl Rofer
Scientists, with a tiny bit of pride, like to think that their managers have a job that can be compared to herding cats. Steven Chu, Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Energy, has undoubtedly heard the metaphor and has probably contemplated it at various times during his career.
Chu may well be the first Nobel Laureate to become an officer of the President’s Cabinet. He certainly will be the first national laboratory director to become Secretary of Energy. And that is valuable experience for him to have: having seen the system from below.
He is being hailed for directing research at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) toward solutions to global warming (The Guardian, New York Times). But that’s not all there is on the Secretary of Energy’s plate.
If I were giving a briefing for or to the Department of Energy, I would present an organization chart. So here is the current one for the Department. Yes, I know; I can barely read it, too, and I’ve tried a couple of things to improve it. This is better, but I can’t import it directly into the blog.
The Department of Energy is a patchwork of agencies that were brought together in 1977 by Jimmy Carter and added to and rearranged at various times. So the Secretary of Energy is responsible for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, along with the various New Deal Power Administrations (Southeastern, Bonneville, Western Area and Southwestern). I’m not going to discuss them, but if you will click on the links, you will see that they are not chopped liver. The Energy Information Agency collects energy statistics and provides them to the public. These agencies seem to be more autonomous than the rest of the department, although, like any enterprise, they run into problems from time to time that may require the attention of the big boss.
The three columns on the left-hand side of the chart are the parts of the Department that will need herding, er, active management: Office of the Under Secretary For Nuclear Security/Administrator for
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); Office of the Under Secretary, and Office of the Under Secretary for Science. Each of the three has its own stakeholders in the national laboratories and industry. Each of the boxes in those columns is a quasi-independent fiefdom, competing with all the others for funding and attention at the top.
Besides the power projects of the New Deal, the other big progenitor of the Department of Energy is the Manhattan Project, which is most evident in the NNSA, although its influence is felt in many of the other boxes. Mr. Chu will hear from the NNSA, whose wish list includes a new complex for manufacturing nuclear weapons and a new weapon design, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, to manufacture in that complex. Congress has been doubtful about the value of such a project, but that hasn’t dampened the NNSA’s enthusiasm.
The second column contains the bureaucratic, national laboratory and industry interests that will fight his global warming initiatives most fiercely, under the Assistant Secretaries for Fossil Energy and Nuclear Energy. His experience as a national laboratory director will have prepared him for this; he will know the strength of the lobbies for their entitlements, like Clean Coal. Those who are accustomed to receiving their subsidies in this way know how to work Congress.
“Industry can do it best” has been the rallying cry that has worked well in Congress since the Reagan years. Much of the ability of the national laboratories to contribute to big national scientific problems has been gutted by this kind of lobbying, at the same time that industry jettisoned its own capabilities in research. The big research laboratories maintained by industry, particularly those of the oil companies and Bell Labs, are long gone. But the rallying cry has persisted.
It was, in a sense, an admission by BP of its need for something like those long-gone research when it offered the University of California and Chu’s LBL $500 million for research into clean biofuel technologies. It was, very likely, the difficulty of getting such research funded by the Department of Energy, that encouraged Chu to accept that money along with whatever strings BP attached.
As a national laboratory director, Chu has probably heard, more than once, from the DOE that they will fund a project at half of the requested amount, but the full amount of work proposed must be done and if he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to accept any of the money. This mode of negotiation has characterized DOE dealings with the national laboratories for a decade and more. The counter to it has been to inflate proposal estimates, which the DOE managers have figured out. This fully dishonest means of developing budgets is one of the dysfunctions he will have to deal with as Secretary.
There are others. The scientists refer to “the revenge of the C students,” which manifests itself in demands for too many briefings, other assorted unfunded mandates (out of those half-fundings), high-level misunderstandings occasioned by DOE personnel who don’t understand the projects they manage, a focus on minutiae of spending for materials the DOE personnel have never heard of, and the shadow bureaucrats who accompany DOE personnel everywhere who do understand the science but are rented from contractors who have their own agendas.
Most of the fiefdoms in the third column will cheer for Chu. He’s a physicist, one of theirs, and can be expected to understand and therefore fund all their wish lists. They will expect special access at all times; nothing else on Chu’s schedule could be anywhere near as important.
I’m going to hold back on predicting Chu’s success, my own wish list for improving the DOE, and lobbying for my very own fiefdom within the department. It’s encouraging that he will have experienced the department’s dysfunction personally and that he will have some idea of what the department is about, unlike many of his predecessors.
And he knows about those cats.