Sobering Appropriations Hearings for DOE Office of Energy Research

Dr. Martha Krebs, director of DOE’s Office of Energy Research (OER), appeared before the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee on March 9, and before its Senate counterpart on March 14. The hearings, on DOE’s FY 1996 budget request for energy research, ran along similar themes: subcommittee members warned of proposals to eliminate DOE, queried Krebs on DOE’s response to the Galvin report on DOE’s labs (see FYIs #17, #40), and questioned the status of the fusion program.

The chairman of the House energy appropriations subcommittee, John Myers (R-IN), said he had “heard...rumblings” about abolishing the Department. Krebs responded that since DOE’s missions will persist, she could not see how redistributing funding would save money. Asked by Ranking Minority Member Tom Bevill (D-AL) whether DOE’s “successes could be duplicated profitably by the private sector,” she answered that private industry is “pulling out of basic research.” Rep. Vic Fazio (D-CA) asked for evidence that businesses want DOE to continue its functions. Krebs pointed out that about one-half of DOE’s facilities users are from the private sector, and the labs receive several times more proposals for partnering with industry than they can accommodate.

Krebs said that in response to the Galvin report, DOE and OER were trying to “work smarter” by improving management and oversight of the labs and increasing utilization of user facilities. She felt that the Department could make management changes to the labs faster and more effectively than the report’s recommendation of corporatizing them.

Krebs noted that the OER budget request included the 6.8 percent increase for high energy physics recommended by the Drell Panel, including a small amount (approximately $6 million) to initiate participation in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC.) She estimated that continued participation in future years would cost $40-50 million a year for the next decade, which she called “pretty inexpensive in comparison to the SSC.” Warned by Fazio that some might consider the B-Factory still “within reach” for budget cuts, Krebs reported that it was about 30 percent complete.

A major concern of the subcommittee is fusion research. Bevill complained that 25 years ago, DOE promised “a breakthrough in 25 years.” Krebs responded that a breakthrough had been achieved last year at Princeton’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor. Asked about the chances of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built and the additional need for the Tokamak Physics Experiment (TPX), Krebs said a review of the U.S. fusion program by the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), due by July, would be “critical” to the Administration’s perspective. She added that while ITER would lead to a commercial demonstration power plant, TPX would maintain the vitality of the domestic program, but admitted that one could be built without the other.

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) warned that the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment was preparing a new DOE authorization bill that would significantly cut fusion funding. The authorization bill, while not providing funds, would guide the appropriations legislation. “This committee’s always supported fusion,” Myers said, but “we keep asking for the light at the end of the tunnel.... This committee’s been burned so many times.”

At the March 14 hearing before the Senate energy appropriations subcommittee, chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM), whose state is home to several national labs, announced that he intended to ensure that the labs “are sufficiently funded and staffed to meet the needs of the 21st century.” Noting that the federal R&D effort is “splattered across a number of agencies,” Conrad Burns (R-MT), who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, queried whether it should be coordinated under one umbrella. Krebs argued that the government departments and agencies involved in research all “have legitimate missions to pursue.” Proclaiming himself “astounded” at talk of doing away with DOE, Domenici said, “I’m going to proceed as though we’ll have a Department of Energy.” Ranking Minority Member J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA) agreed that “we need to keep DOE... and the capability of doing energy research.... If the government doesn’t do basic research,” he said, in today’s budget climate, “almost no one will.”

Johnston, although pro-fusion, questioned building the TPX when the country did not have a firm commitment to ITER. “Why go into another SSC debacle without opening our eyes?” he asked. Questioned about the cost of the spallation neutron accelerator that DOE has proposed to replace the canceled Advanced Neutron Source (ANS), Krebs answered “we don’t know yet,” but estimated perhaps $1 billion.

As the hearing drew to a close, Johnston promised the subcommittee would try to “keep the science function [within DOE] strong and healthy.” Whether the appropriations subcommittees are able to do so remains to be seen. They have yet to receive their budget allocations, and pressures are strong within some sectors of the Republican party to do away with the Department of Energy. Just recently, the House Budget Committee proposed cuts to DOE’s energy research mission as part of a $100 billion budget-reduction package over the next five years (see FYI #41.)

The PCAST review of the U.S. fusion energy program will be chaired by John Holdren, a professor of energy sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Further information on this review will be available by the end of next week.