Time Out: Senate Gives Richardson an Opportunity to Draft Lab Bill

After what seemed a relentless drive to push legislation to the Senate floor to fundamentally change the management of the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons program, the Senate Armed Services Committee has called a time-out. During a wearying and somewhat confusing hearing on Wednesday, committee chairman John Warner (R-VA) gave Energy Secretary Bill Richardson an opportunity to write his own bill on the weapons labs. Richardson’s ability to stop what can be likened to an express train is a testament to both his reputation and skills. He will now have to use those same talents to draft legislation meeting the escalating chorus of demands in both the Senate and House for major changes in DOE’s weapons management.

Richardson was back before the committee on Wednesday, as was Dr. Sidney Drell (see forthcoming FYI for more on Drell.) Richardson scored a big point early in his testimony when describing the most recent security procedures stand down at the weapons labs. As Richardson told the senators: “Some very tough crosstalk took place. Apparently there was one employee at one of the labs who stood up and complained, saying he didn’t do classified work, he was in the fusion area, and he shouldn’t have to participate. The lab director apparently said: You can leave the lab and be terminated if you don’t participate. I think that set a tenor that was very important. The lab director, in my judgement, took a very positive and aggressive step.” Warner later cited this incident, saying, “That [existing] culture has got to change abruptly and change now under your leadership.” Richardson replied that it “has to change now, rapidly, immediately, yesterday.”He extolled the “enthusiastic” response of the vast majority of employees to these immersion briefings at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore, calling them a “success.”

Secretary Richardson is at an impasse with most committee members on proposed legislation that would manage the labs through a semi-autonomous agency within DOE. He prefers them to be managed by an undersecretary within the department. While the senators could point to bill language making him ultimately in charge, Richardson could point to other language which seemed to make this unclear. He said of the bill, “It undermines the total concept of a bureaucracy, of lines of authority/accountability, chains of command.”With only a few minutes to review the latest version of the bill while the hearing was underway, Richardson and his staff located what he called serious, and perhaps unconstitutional, deficiencies in the bill language. He claimed the proposed bill was beyond the Rudman report’s recommendations. It was an impressive performance, and was enough to win Richardson time to write and then submit to the committee his own version of the bill.

There was considerable discussion at this hearing about the effects which all of this would have on science at the weapons labs. Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico) and Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) joined Richardson in hammering away at this point, Bingaman saying, “I’m concerned that the science at its best [referring to the Rudman report’s title] will be jeopardized if we take these laboratories that are doing science at its best and put them in a nuclear-weapons only organizational structure.” On questioning from Bingaman about the bill’s impact on non- weapons work at the labs, Richardson said, “Well, Senator, it’s going to cause real problems. It’s going to be a far-reaching, dramatic problem that we shouldn’t put forth. You mentioned these functions - solar combustion, life sciences, the science labs. To have them under the national security undersecretary I think would be a disaster. A lot of these labs prize themselves on their scientific independence. They are currently under a science component that works well. I think it would affect the research at the labs and it would be very counterproductive.” Richardson said 30 to 40% of these labs’ work was non-defense. Richardson summarized this problem, and what he has to do in his own bill, when he told Bingaman, “I believe, senator, we have to clarify in this [bill] language the separation and the difference in the relationships between the DOE’s Office of Science and the nuclear weapons labs. I think that’s very clear.”

Chairman Warner sent an important message to the employees of the weapons labs toward the end of this hearing. He said, “And we’ve got to be careful as we move through this maze of legislation not to send a signal that we’re going to put them all in irons. I think they will accept, as I told the Secretary, a change in culture as it regards fundamental, basic procedures regarding intelligence preservation and protection and not letting our knowledge slip into hands which are inimical to the interests of this country.” He said it was very important “to make certain that we do not send the wrong signal to this group of loyal Americans.”