James Decker

Thomas:

This is William Thomas with the American Institute of Physics. The date is June 8^th, 2023. We are in Potomac, Maryland with Jim Decker who will be talking to us about his time at the Department of Energy. A very long career there. But right before I started the recording, you were beginning to tell me a little bit about your biographical background just to kind of set the stage.

Decker:

Yes. I grew up in a very small town in Upstate New York called Westerlo. It’s about 20 miles southwest of Albany. I actually started my education in a one-room school, which seems a bit unusual but I know a couple of other colleagues who had that experience, including Allan Bromley and Ron Davidson. My father was a politician, basically. He was the sheriff of Albany County, which is an elected position, when I was really young, and my mother handled the finances of the one factory in Westerlo, New York. I'm trying to decide where to go from here. I wound up going to — from graduating from high school and going to Union College in Schenectady.

Thomas:

Were you already interested in a scientific or physics-type career at that time?

Decker:

Yeah, I got interested in physics for sort of strange reasons maybe it seems now. I like physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, all the science courses and math courses that I took in high school. One thing that I was concerned about — my father had died when I was 12 — was I got to figure out how I'm going to make a living. [Laughter] At that time, of course, Sputnik was all in the news and all this talk about the United States needed to really boost its science capabilities, et cetera. So, I thought, “Well, there are job opportunities. I like science,” and so that's what I decided to do. So, I was a physics major at Union College. When I graduated from there, I was fortunate to get into Yale, and I got my master’s and PhD in physics from Yale.

Thomas:

Did you have any opportunity at Union College to do any sort of research experience?

Decker:

Yes. Yes, I did. All the senior physics majors did a research project and so, yeah, I did a project that really involves solid state physics, making measurements on resistivity of single-crystal zinc and some other things.

Thomas:

Was there a particular professor you were working with?

Decker:

Yeah. Actually, my roommate and I did a project together. We were under the supervision of the head of the department. It was Harold Way at the time.

Thomas:

Way?

Decker:

Way.

Thomas:

How do you spell his last name?

Decker:

You know, I think it was W-A-Y.

Thomas:

W-A-Y? Okay.

Decker:

I'm not sure if that's correct.

Thomas:

All right. [Laughter]

Decker:

But yeah, then I went to Yale to do a PhD. My thesis work was in plasma physics. My thesis advisor was Jay Hirshfield, who later moved from physics into a new department, Applied Science and Engineering that Yale was starting at the time. After I had my PhD…

Thomas:

This is in 1967?

Decker:

This was in 1967. Then I went to Bell Labs after that. I had some opportunities to do other things, but I was really more interested in going into an industrial laboratory than teaching, which was the other option. So that was a good experience.

Thomas:

Was it the practical aspect of it or the…?

Decker:

I wasn't really interested in teaching. That had a lot to do with it, and Bell Labs was a pretty good place to go.

Thomas:

Definitely.

Decker:

Yeah, that was a good experience. Our group was allowed to do pretty much basic research but we lived off the IR&D funds from the ABM project, which, probably a lot of people didn’t realize, Western Electric was a prime contractor for the ABM system. Then what happened was that, during the Vietnam War, there were a lot of protests that sprung up over military things in general, and the protests came to the gates of Bell Labs.

[Ed. IR&D is independent R&D, which is R&D the Defense Department allows contractors to perform using funding that is added on to R&D contracts. ABM is anti-ballistic missile system]

Thomas:

I did not know that.

Decker:

So, the company decided unilaterally to get out of the ABM because it didn't want the bad publicity at the time. So that meant that our group no longer had financial support from the ABM system, of course, and we were transferred to other parts of the laboratory. Some people didn't get transferred, but I was fortunate enough to be transferred to an integrated circuit processing group. So, I did that for about a year and decided for various reasons, some family reasons, to go elsewhere and the opportunity opened up at the AEC at the time in the fusion program.

Thomas:

The Atomic Energy Commission.

Decker:

So that's how I wound up with AEC and then…

Thomas:

Had you been doing anything in fusion? You said you were in plasma for that?

Decker:

Yeah, plasma physics. Most of the research that I did had to do with fundamental properties of various types of plasma waves, wave motion in plasmas. But I kept track of what was going on in fusion.

Thomas:

You were in New Jersey at Bell Labs, so not too far from Princeton.

Decker:

Correct. That’s right.

Thomas:

Did you ever have any interactions with them? No?

Decker:

No, the only interactions I really had with other institutions in New Jersey was with — what was the name of the university? I don’t know. It escapes me right now. [JD. Stevens Institute of Technology.] Yeah, I published one paper with a grad student from one of the local universities but that was kind of it. No interaction with Princeton really.

Thomas:

Okay. So then, you went to the Atomic Energy Commission and that’s in Germantown, is it?

[Ed. AEC headquarters was located in Germantown, Maryland, where many parts of the DOE Office of Science are now located.]

Decker:

Yes, our office was in Germantown. The program was growing. At the time, Al Trivelpiece had come in as assistant director for the research program, which included the more basic research in plasma physics in both theory and experiments and, of course, then was getting into simulations as well.

Thomas:

Okay. Al Trivelpiece, my understanding is he was just there on leave from a university.

Decker:

From the University of Maryland.

Thomas:

Right. So, I'm not too familiar with how the research was structured at the Atomic Energy Commission. Of course, they had the weapons aspect of what they did. Was what you were doing walled off from that or was there interaction with it?

Decker:

We didn't have much interaction with the weapons side except with the weapons laboratories, because we funded research at Los Alamos and Livermore. We did actually have some research at Sandia as well, and that was mostly in the interaction of plasma with materials and the effect of neutron damage to materials. We did some basic plasma physics work at Los Alamos. They had some fusion concepts that they were pursuing. In fact, when I first joined the program, they had a pretty major facility. It was based on a theta pinch, but it was in the form of a torus. It was called Scyllac. So that was one of the major programs. Livermore had a major program in magnetic mirror confinement. So that was our relationship with the weapons program. It was just their research capabilities.

Thomas:

Right. Then as far as things like the nuclear energy work and fission work that they were doing, or things like high energy physics, what was the relationship with those? Were you closer to them?

Decker:

The individual research programs in Germantown pretty much operated in isolation from the rest of DOE and even the other programs in the Office of Science. At the time, back in the AEC days, there was a Division of Physical Research. I'm not sure I remember all this correctly, but that's where High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, and what's now BES, Basic Energy Sciences, were located. But they weren’t separate programs at that point.

Thomas:

Right, right. I'm mostly familiar with the structure of it today so my bias is always the way things are —

Decker:

Yeah, me too. [Laughter]

Thomas:

So, what was the nature of the work you were doing when you got there?

Decker:

I was a program manager for the experimental programs in plasma physics.

Thomas:

My understanding is, is that at this time in the history of fusion, that this was really when there was a lot of interest in tokamaks starting to come out?

Decker:

Yeah. I mean obviously, a lot of different magnetic configurations had been tried over a number of years and progress was pretty darn slow. The tokamak in Russia, of course, claimed some pretty spectacular results at the time. People weren't really sure that the results were real. In particular, there was concern about the temperature measurements, because using optical techniques, looking at line breadth and that sort of thing, you can easily get fooled, confusing turbulence with temperature. So, it wasn't until — I think it was a British team did Thomson scattering measurements on a tokamak and determined, “Yeah, the temperature’s real.” [Laughter] This device was working pretty well. And so then there was a move in the fusion program here to try a number of different tokamak approaches. Sort of the conventional approach was the Princeton Large Torus. No, there was one before that. I think it was called ST, but then there was a turbulent torus that was the idea of Bill Drummond at the University of Texas. Oak Ridge also had a tokamak, and then of course GA had the doublet concept. So, a lot of different approaches to tokamaks were tried in that period, and good progress was made in terms of getting to higher and higher temperatures.

[ed. GA is General Atomics, a private company that has long partnered with the Department of Energy on fusion research.]

Thomas:

Of General Atomics, what they were doing, was that sort of like it is today wherein it's funded -- I know DIII-D is funded through the Fusion Energy Sciences program, and so was what they were doing funded in the same way, or did that come later?

[ed. DIII-D is a present-day tokamak research facility that is operated by General Atomics and funded by DOE.]

Decker:

I'm trying to think how they were funded at first. I almost think that some of the original funding might have come from the Texas Atomic Energy Commission or whatever was called. I'm not sure of that, by the way. But in the end, the doublet concept really evolved into a different D-shaped plasma. The doublet part didn't really work, which was essentially sort of like one tokamak on top of another.

Thomas:

Right. Then there were also some private ventures around at that time. I know about KMS. Was there any relationship with them at all?

[ed. KMS Fusion was a private company that specialized in inertial confinement fusion.]

Decker:

Not really. That was laser fusion. That work, of course, as far as the department was concerned, was over in the defense programs. We did not really have much of a relationship with them, except sort of had some interest when they would testify before Congress. [Laughter] We sort of kept track of what they were doing.

Thomas:

Right, and there was no sense that there was a path in inertial fusion at that time within your program?

Decker:

No. As I said, there was a sort of a dividing line. Inertial was over in defense programs, Livermore. We did get involved in funding the work at Sandia. That was sort of interesting because Gerry Yonas was the one who was a big proponent of using pulsed power and NNSA wouldn't fund it. So, Gerry came to Al Trivelpiece, and Al thought, “Well, this is worth a shot.” At the time they were using electrons, which we knew wasn’t going to work because they have too long a range in materials and you couldn't really compress a pellet that way.

[ed. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was created in 2000 as a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy to manage the department’s work in nuclear weapons. NNSA oversees Los Alamos National Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Sandia National Labs. The reference to NNSA here is to the weapons programs prior to the agency’s creation.]

Thomas:

Is this during Trivelpiece’s first time there? We’re still in the ‘70s?

Decker:

Yes. I'm pretty sure that was the case, yes.

Thomas:

Okay. Sorry, I interrupted.

Decker:

Since I worked for Al twice, [Laughter] it’s easy for me to confuse it.

Thomas:

It was some time ago as well so it would be easy to conflate.

Decker:

Yes, exactly. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Nobody ever depends on an oral history for facts. We always go to the documents [Laughter] for those, but often it can point us to things that we want to look into. So, I interrupted you. I'm sorry. What you were talking about with that, the approach at Sandia?

Decker:

It’s just that we gave them their initial funding, and then after they had some success, NNSA funded them.

Thomas:

My understanding is that the big project that was ramping up at this time was the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton.

Decker:

Yes, yes.

Thomas:

Can you tell me a little bit about that? I don't know a lot.

Decker:

Yes, that was going to be the first tokamak here in the United States to burn deuterium and tritium. It was not an experiment that could reach break-even. It wasn't a large enough device, but it was going to be an interesting experiment to see the effects of generation of alpha particles in the plasma and for their effects. It was actually a very successful experiment, and then, of course, we were put in a position of having to shut it down when we had a big budget cut that was unexpected from Congress.

Thomas:

This was much later?

Decker:

This was much later. This was in the ‘90s.

Thomas:

Right. But you actually had — in the 1970s into the 1980s, my understanding is that there was a pretty sizable ramp-up in the budget for fusion.

Decker:

There was. It was all based on the progress that was being made in tokamaks with increasing temperatures and confinement times headed toward break-even. A long ways from break-even but the curve was moving. [Laughter]

Thomas:

It wasn't one of the periods of stagnation.

Decker:

It wasn’t a period of stagnation.

Thomas:

Was there a lot of hype around it at the time? Right now, of course, we're living in kind of a -- there's a lot of optimism surrounding it at the moment. Was it a similar sort of atmosphere then, or was there may be more sense that it was -- as they like to say that it's 30-40 years off or something like that, but at least you're moving?

Decker:

I think there was a pretty good understanding by most people that there was a long ways to go at that point, but the progress was such that people were really beginning to be optimistic after a long period of stagnation. So, yeah, there was a lot of excitement, the budgets grew.

Thomas:

Okay. So, can you tell me about some of the other people who are in the program? Of course, Trivelpiece was there for a couple of years, but he was not leading the program.

Decker:

Right, that was Bob. Bob Hirsch was the head of the program at that point.

Thomas:

Okay. What can you tell me about him?

Decker:

Bob's a very interesting guy. I would characterize him as a good leader, a good salesman. He was very good to work with. I mean I watched him testify before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. He was really good with that. [Laughter] I remember sitting there thinking to myself, “Geez, I could never do that.” Well… [Laughter]

Thomas:

You ended up doing it.

Decker:

I ended up doing it. [Laughter]

Thomas:

When you had to do it, did you think back to some of those examples of other people who had testified?

Decker:

Yeah, I did. I learned an awful lot from Al Trivelpiece about that, because when he came in as the Director of what was then the Office of Energy Research, he had actually gone through a whole course on testifying before Congress. I got a lot of tips from him.

Thomas:

As part of the confirmation process through the Senate, he had done that, or…?

Decker:

I don't know exactly when he took that course, but I suspect before his confirmation hearing.

Thomas:

It was actually a course?

Decker:

Well, it was at least a seminar. I don't think it was more than a half-day.

Thomas:

Right, right. I got you. Okay.

Decker:

[Laughter] You’ll learn, if you’re going to do a good job at testifying, you’ve got to make the committee members look good. That's a very important part of it, and I've known some people who didn't do that. It didn’t go well. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Right. Then Hirsch was replaced by Ed Kinter?

Decker:

Kintner, yeah. Ed was really interesting. A very thoughtful guy. He came out of the Nuclear Navy and he had worked for [Adm. Hyman] Rickover and closely with Rickover. So, what he brought to the program was a lot of his experience from the Nuclear Navy. One of his things was he always liked to see competition, and so he wanted to see competition between the tokamak and the mirror approach. He wanted to see competition within the tokamak program, and that really is what led in part to the buildup of GA. There was a case where we built the program. Today, I'm not sure people think this way, but we realized, for example, that if we're going to have a solid program at GA, they did not have a theory capability at the time. We needed to build up their theory program and so we just did it. I worked with Tihiro Ohkawa. He was able to hire some good people and I supported him.

Thomas:

He was at General Atomics?

Decker:

Yeah, he was the person who was sort of the inventor of doublet.

Thomas:

Okay.

Decker:

A very bright guy.

Thomas:

I understand also that this is the period when the fusion program became very interested in high-performance computing?

Decker:

Yeah, that was driven by -- I mean, Trivelpiece was very interested in it. And there were people like John Dawson at Princeton who was -- he had already started down that path, and there were a few others. So, Al commissioned a study to be done. Then probably the most important thing was deciding to provide really high-performance computing to researchers in fusion around the country, and that led to the Magnetic Fusion Energy Computing Center, which we placed at Livermore at the time. There were a lot of doubts as to whether this could be done. It was the first of a kind -- and that model has been replicated many times around the world now, but that was the first.

Thomas:

This was the first real foray within the Department of Energy — or the Atomic Energy Commission maybe at that time — into that?

Decker:

No, not really; remember, the weapons program. That's where, I think, Al saw the value really because he was familiar with how it had been used in the weapons program.

Thomas:

Right. Would it be appropriate to say that that particular effort -- so the Livermore center then, that's the one that later moved to Berkeley Lab?

Decker:

That's correct.

Thomas:

Yeah, and is that kind of the kernel of what we now call the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program?

[ed. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research program is one of the six main research programs in the DOE Office of Science.]

Decker:

Yeah. Well, that happened when Al came back as the Director of the Office of Energy Research. [Laughter] He wanted to broaden the use of the center to the rest of the Office of Energy Research’s programs. When I went to work for Al as a special assistant, that was one of my tasks and he decided to break out the Applied Math program, which was in Basic Energy Sciences, and combined it with the computer access program. [Pause] So that program initially was called Scientific Computing Staff because, as I say, it wasn't as large as the other programs. It didn't feel like it was large enough to be called an associate director-level effort. Anyway, yeah, that's the beginning of ASCR.

Thomas:

Okay. So, keeping ourselves in the ‘70s for a little while longer. There is this big top-level reorganization. First, it’s the Atomic Energy Commission, then it's the Energy Research and Development Administration for a few years, and then the Department of Energy. Did that really affect what you were doing, or was it a fairly smooth transition through that?

Decker:

You know, the AEC was a very efficient organization, I felt. It was very effective. Bureaucracy was kind of at a minimum. I was so impressed at how we were able to get things done when I first went there. As we moved into ERDA and then Department of Energy, bureaucracy grew. Not unexpected in many ways because as organizations grow, bureaucracy generally grows with it. It just became harder to get things done.

Thomas:

Was there an equivalent to the Office of Energy Research in AEC and ERDA or did that just come with DOE?

Decker:

There was, of course, as I talked about earlier, the Division of Physical Research and the fusion program. I'm not sure where the current Biological and Environmental Research program was. It was separate. It was someplace else in the organization. As ERDA and DOE came along, I can't remember exactly how -- what got reorganized with which change, but I think the Office of Energy Research as it stands today, certainly came about at the time that DOE was formed.

Thomas:

Okay. So, I only have research back to the Carter administration, the Office of Energy Research and the arrival of people like John Deutsch and then Ed Frieman in that position. Were there equivalents to them before that or did that really start with the DOE organization?

Decker:

I can’t tell you.

Thomas:

Okay, that’s fair enough.

Decker:

I’m not sure. As I say, programs like fusion out in Germantown are kind of isolated from what's going on in the rest of the department, and even the other related organizations.

Thomas:

Now, Ed Frieman was himself in the plasma and fusion area, correct?

Decker:

Yes.

Thomas:

Yes. So, did that make a difference having somebody like that heading up the Office of Energy Research? Did he take a direct interest in that?

Decker:

No, I wouldn't say so. Ed was very, very good. He understood a lot of science. He understood politics. He was politically put in charge. In fact, Ed had something to do with drafting the DOE legislation, at least the part that became the Office of Energy Research. I don't know exactly what that connection was, but I'm pretty sure he was involved in that.

Thomas:

Okay. Now, in the fusion area, I was actually surprised to learn that there was legislation in 1980 that backed those efforts. Did that shape what you were doing there at all?

Decker:

It’s an authorization bill. Mike McCormack, from the state of Washington, was the sponsor of that bill. I remember hearings on it at the time. Part of the program would have placed a big neutron source for testing materials out at the Hanford site and so that didn't hurt Mike's interest [Laughter] in all of this, but he was really enthusiastic about fusion. It was an authorization bill, and I don’t know how many times I've seen a situation where a big authorization bill passes and the funding for the program doesn't increase or it goes down. That's the reality of…

[ed. President Carter signed the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act of 1980 into law on Oct. 12, 1980. The final legislation was a compromise between an original bill sponsored by Rep. Mike McCormack (D-WA) and another sponsored by Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-MA). See Physics Today coverage: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2913825]

Thomas:

Yes. Well, you just now have the CHIPS and Science Act and…

[ed. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 set ambitious funding targets for the DOE Office of Science, National Science Foundation, and National Institute of Standards and Technology that were not close to being met at the time of this interview.]

Decker:

Exactly, yes.

Thomas:

Yes, exactly. Let's see. You, yourself, became Director of the Division of Applied Plasma Physics in 1978?

Decker:

That sounds about right.

Thomas:

Did that change the scope of what you were doing? You were a program officer before that.

Decker:

Yeah. What it meant was that -- well, before that, I became a branch chief. I was the branch chief for the experimental work in the applied plasma physics program. Then, of course, when I became the assistant director, that meant I had responsibility for all of the theory, experiments, and the MFE computer center.

Thomas:

Okay. So, was there a balance between funding projects and funding research? Did you view it in those terms? So, you would fund like a facility like they had at PPPL, but then a series of smaller projects, or were their research grants? How did that work?

Decker:

We had a lot of work in universities out of the applied plasma physics program. That was sort of the typical grant process: proposals, reviews, decisions for funding. Then we also had, of course, the programs in the national laboratories. That has sort of a similar process, but it was a bit different.

Thomas:

Were you paying a lot of attention to what was going on in Europe with JET for example? Was that a model for what was going on here?

[ed. The UK-based Joint European Torus started operating in 1983.]

Decker:

Yeah. It became very clear that in fusion, if you build larger and larger devices, it’s probably going to require international participation. So, yes, we were certainly watching all this going on in the rest of world and we had proper agreements with other countries. Of course, then we got into a design effort under the IAEA with INTOR. That preceded ITER and that was a big international effort.

[ed. INTOR was the unbuilt International Tokomak Reactor.]

Thomas:

Would it make sense to move to ITER at this point or should we wait? There’s such a large number of things that happens when Al Trivelpiece is the Director under the Reagan administration that I'm not quite sure how we want to structure all that. Would it make sense to talk about that later or in this context?

Decker:

I think we can talk about it in this context.

Thomas:

Okay. What’s some of the background of that? You’ve talked about some of the projects running up to that, but ITER is kind of at another scale. Of course, it's still in the works today, so, what can you tell me about that?

Decker:

Of course, we went through two design phases of ITER. Let's see. The first -- and probably I should start someplace else, I guess. Originally, the ITER project started out of a summit meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan. I wound up being the person who negotiated the first agreement for the United States. I don't have a lot more to say about it. I mean, it…

Thomas:

Was it part of a larger summit?

Decker:

Yeah, it was. That was part of a larger summit, but that whole thing had been worked behind the scenes. I think Al was involved. I’m trying to think of the Russian’s name right now. Evgeny Velikhov, I got it. I think Evgeny was involved. We had a lot of contact with Evgeny. Then this just came out of the broader summit after all this work had been done behind the scenes. Then of course it went through two phases of design. We were forced to pull out of the second design phase by Congress, so we were out for a while, and then got back in when they were headed toward construction.

Thomas:

Okay. I feel like we're probably moving quite a ways to the…

Decker:

Yeah, in time, we’re moving forward.

Thomas:

All right. So, to anchor ourselves back in where we were. How much difference did it make to go from presidential administration to presidential administration?

Decker:

For the Office of Science, we were not impacted all that much. The applied energy programs in DOE are much more affected because it's just a difference in philosophy as to what the government role should be. The Democrats are in favor of the government being more active and taking technology into actual use. The Republicans want to favor basic research as the government’s role. I mean, that's sort of a general statement. You can't make it about every Democrat or Republican administration, but that's generally the way it works.

Thomas:

Of course, there's a lot of interest in energy research in the Carter administration but then when Reagan came in, I think there was hostility to the Department of Energy as a concept. Of course, it was only a few years old at that point.

[ed. During his campaign, Ronald Reagan indicated he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy, which was created in 1977, and his first Energy Secretary, James Edwards, was hostile to the department as an organizational construct.]

Decker:

Right, right.

Thomas:

Did that raise any concerns where you were or among the national labs that they were going to be hostile to what they were doing?

Decker:

I'm sure that the people were concerned. I don't remember personally being all that concerned, but I didn't think it was going to go any place. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Right.

Decker:

That was really funny. My next-door neighbor worked for [the Department of] Commerce and I remember the proposal was to put a lot of DOE into Commerce.

Thomas:

Under Reagan?

Decker:

Yeah, and he was in a lot of the meetings. He said, “You know, this is like the…” I’ve forgotten exactly the phrase he used, it’s like a mouse swallowing an elephant. [Laughter]

Thomas:

So, let's see. All right, so we discussed your move to being the Director of the Division of Applied Plasma Physics, but then you became the assistant to the Director of the Office of Energy Research in the same time period, ‘82, I think. What did that entail?

Decker:

That was interesting. Al gave me a variety of assignments.

Thomas:

Just to anchor us, we should say that Al Trivelpiece came in as Director in 1981 with Reagan.

Decker:

Yes. So, my assignments involved a number of things. He wanted me to work in international, so I did quite a bit of international work. Let’s see. There was the high-performance computing. It was pulling out what is now the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, and I actually was the first director of that program. At the same time, I was working for him on a lot of other projects [Laughter] and he told me in no uncertain terms, I was to keep my office down in the Forrestal Building. And I got involved in the supercomputer issues at the time because there was a concern that the Japanese were really moving forward with supercomputers much faster than we were. So, I wound up chairing three committees for the White House on supercomputing. So that occupied a lot of my time.

[ed. The Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C. is where DOE headquarters is located.]

Thomas:

On an interagency basis, was DOE in the lead on this?

Decker:

Yeah, we were by far the biggest users and advocates for high-performance computing. Other agencies, NSF was not in the business at all at that time. I helped them get into business, actually, through these committees. DOD was not involved with supercomputers at all. In fact, I remember one hearing where I testified with a number of other agencies about supercomputers. Basically, the person representing DOD was the head of DARPA and said, “Well, we don't really have a use for supercomputers,” [Laughter] which was pretty interesting.

Thomas:

This eventually does lead to -- how do you pronounce it, NITRD, the interagency initiative.

[ed. NITRD is the interagency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, which was established in 1991 as the High Performance Computing and Communications program.]

Decker:

Yeah, it did. Before that, we had these three committees. There was one on, I think kind of focused on hardware. There was one on access. What was the third one? Anyway, there was a third one. As I said, I was chairing all of those committees.

Thomas:

Now, within DOE, I've run into references of wanting to use the computers that were being used for fusion for other kinds of science and that that was controversial?

[ed. In an article titled, “Al Trivelpiece and the Origins of NERSC,” Trivelpiece wrote, “One of my early concerns [as Director] was the lack of use of high-performance computing in support of some of the other programmatic activities in energy research. I created some uproar by allocating five percent of the time available on the fusion computer system for projects in energy research other than fusion.”]

Decker:

Yes, when Al became the Director of the Office of Energy Research, which is what it was called at the time, he had of course been responsible for setting up the MFE Center to begin within the fusion program. Then he thought, “We really ought to look at expanding the use of supercomputing to the other Office of Science programs.” So that's what he did. He basically opened up what was the MFE Center to, essentially, all of the programs in the Office of Science.

Thomas:

But there was resistance to this?

Decker:

Well, the fusion program people weren’t particularly happy with it [Laughter] at first, but I don't remember any other resistance really. That was…

Thomas:

Okay. It's easy to overstate it sometimes.

Decker:

Yeah, that was the major thing. In the end, we were able to buy some additional computers and I don't think we ever cut back on the use of that computer center by the fusion program.

Thomas:

Okay. Now, there was a White House Science Council review of the national labs by David Packard. Were you involved with that at all?

Decker:

No, that was kind of before my time in the sense that I was not downtown. I was out in Germantown, and really was not all that aware of that study at that time. Of course, it had quite a bit of an effect and so I kind of learned about it later. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Oh, can you tell me about that effect? I don't know too much about. I've seen references to it in the history of the Advanced Light Source and that sort of thing, but never anything detailed.

Decker:

You know, I really couldn't. I really can't answer that right now. I’d have to think about it. I just don't remember.

Thomas:

Okay, that’s fair enough.

Decker:

I don't remember the details.

Thomas:

You took on your position that you would ultimately have for about 30 years, Principal Deputy Director, in 1985. Now, that was not a new position at that time. Of course, we've been reporting on it. It’s appearing and disappearing recently, but it wasn't new at the time?

[ed. The DOE Office of Science discontinued its Principal Deputy Director position in early 2023 after having re-established it in 2020.]

Decker:

Let’s see. No. Jim Kane had held that position. Jim had been the Associate Director for the Basic Energy Sciences program and then -- yeah, so when Al came in, he brought Jim in as his deputy. Before that, when Ed Frieman was the Director, he brought in [Doug] Pewitt.

Thomas:

Actually, we've just acquired an oral history with Pewitt that I read.

Decker:

Oh, is that right?

Thomas:

Yes.

Decker:

I’ll bet that’s interesting.

Thomas:

It is. [Laughter] He's a very outspoken guy. [Laughter]

Decker:

He is, yes. [Laughter] I haven't seen Doug in years but yeah.

Thomas:

What was that conversation then with Al Trivelpiece when he wanted you to take on that position? What was the portfolio he was giving you that was different from what you’d had in the assistant position?

Decker:

Then you wind up — of course with Al you kept all your old assignments, you just got a new one. [Laughter] No, being his deputy just -- it was, again, involvement in essentially all the programs within the Office of Science.

Thomas:

Right. Yeah, I'm kind of trying to gauge what I can and can't ask you, what you would and would not know about. If we go back in time a little bit to a few years before that to the controversy surrounding Isabelle at Brookhaven National Lab. Were you involved with that? How much of an effect did that have?

Decker:

I really wasn't involved in it. Most of that happened before I went downtown.

Thomas:

You’re moved from Germantown to downtown. That was with the principal deputy position or with -- no, that was with the previous one?

Decker:

No, I was just a special assistant when I first went down there.

Thomas:

As special assistant, okay. [Laughter]

Decker:

With Al you kept getting assignments [Laughter] and so that's -- I think I've already mentioned that I kept all of the assignments that he had given me before this new office of scientific computing was established, and then he wanted me to run that.

Thomas:

You mentioned earlier that he was having you do international things. We discussed ITER, but what else was going on at that time? What sorts of places might you have ended up?

Decker:

I mean one of the things that happened was I became the chairman of the IEA Committee on Research and Development. Al got me into that and I did that for a couple of years. Not my favorite.

[ed. IEA is the International Energy Agency]

Thomas:

What was it about?

Decker:

It's just an international committee in, essentially, energy research. There are some cooperative agreements that came out of that.

Thomas:

Were they consequential or is it just one of those things where you agreed to be friendly with each other?

Decker:

No, I think they were trying to — they were useful. I’m trying to remember. Yes, I think our cooperative agreements on fusion came under the IEA…

Thomas:

Was it mostly with Europe or are you working with Japan quite closely?

Decker:

Both. Yeah, we worked with both. At first, we did a lot more with Europeans and then we got involved with the Japanese as well.

Thomas:

Were there any interactions with China at that time? I know that they were beginning to—

Decker:

No. No, we did not have interactions with them.

Thomas:

But you did with the Soviet Union? You had contact with them, yes?

Decker:

Oh, yes. That actually was one of the interesting things, is that the cooperation that we had in fusion kept going through the Cold War. Even at times when relations got so bad that every other interaction between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was shut down, the fusion cooperation kept going. It was sort of interesting because, in some ways, we provided one of the few windows into what was going on in Russia at the time.

Thomas:

Did it seem to play an important role diplomatically in establishing relations elsewhere? Sometimes science is viewed as kind of, along with things like sports, as a way to break the ice.

Decker:

Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that. It certainly didn't hurt.

Thomas:

Were you going to places like Moscow?

Decker:

Yeah. The first trip I made, we went to Moscow and then we went out to Leningrad.

Thomas:

What were those trips like? Was it just kind of a scientific collaboration? Was it more of a diplomatic setting?

Decker:

No, it was scientific collaboration.

Thomas:

Okay. So, shifting gears a little bit. One of the things that I'm really interested in is how DOE oversees things that are going on in the national labs: projects and that sort of thing. Can you comment generally about some of the shifts? I know that in my research, I ran into the work that Ed Temple was doing, for example, on assessing projects, but I don't know much about it.

Decker:

As you know, the Office of Science builds a lot of big scientific facilities, and so one of the best things that we ever did was establish the Ed Temple organization to do project reviews. What Ed would do is assemble a team, usually made up of people from other laboratories, other DOE laboratories, sometimes some outside people. It was a constructive kind of review. They were not “gotcha” reviews. They were really designed to find problems in projects, work with the laboratories building the project, and get them fixed. So, they were white-hat reviews in many ways, and those reviews were an outstanding way to keep projects within budget and scope and so forth.

Thomas:

Was it kind of like a standing review process or did it take place like at a certain stage gate? Would they have it multiple times throughout the course of a project?

Decker:

Yeah, there will be multiple reviews throughout the life of a project. Depending on the status of the project — the frequency of the reviews varied but they were very effective. Ed did a great job as did his successor, Dan Lehman. I would credit those reviews as being really key to the fact that the Office of Science built most of its projects on time, on budget. They had a very good record -- we’ve got a better record than people building parking garages.

Thomas:

Right. Sometimes the instances like the Superconducting Super Collider stand out in people's memories. But if you look at the portfolio as a whole, it’s exceptional.

Decker:

That's a whole other discussion. What happened with the management of the SSC was not usual for the Office of Science. Yeah, I don't know if you want to talk about that now but—

Thomas:

I think we should probably handle that as its own subject.

Decker:

Yeah, I agree.

Thomas:

In terms of how projects got started, I know that like the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee started doing their long-term planning exercises in the late 1970s. Then I've run into other instances where the Advanced Light Source -- there were some controversies surrounding its origins because Berkeley Lab had essentially done a deal with Jay Keyworth at the White House, and it got moved into the budget somehow.

[ed. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director George (Jay) Keyworth II. See Catherine Westfall, “Retooling for the Future: Launching the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence's Laboratory, 1980–1986,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2008) 38 (4): 569–609. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2008.38.4.569]

Decker:

Yeah, that all happened before I went downtown so I wasn't involved really in any of that. Yeah, I don’t know quite what to say about it.

Thomas:

I know that it was after you moved downtown that there was what was called the Trivelpiece Plan, I think in 1986, where they wind up a series of projects. It's kind of a negotiated solution to a lot of these things.

[ed. The Trivelpiece Plan established a set of five facilities projects that the Office of Energy Research would advance: the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley Lab, the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab, and the Advanced Neutron Source, which did not advance and was replaced by the Spallation Neutron Source project at Oak Ridge National Lab.]

Decker:

Well, the origin of that was the fact that the environmental cleanup program had just really come on the screen and the magnitude of it, which is huge, it could eat up the whole department's budget for a long time. So, what Al did was put together this facilities plan and sold it to -- the Secretary, who was [John] Herrington at the time, and the Under Secretary was Joe Salgado, and he said, “Look, we need a plan to keep the United States at the forefront of these fields, and we need a facilities plan to go along with this environmental cleanup plan.” Joe Salgado was the first one to buy that and the Secretary did too. So that's how the whole plan actually got started, the Trivelpiece Plan. It was pretty well thought out, actually, and there are always political aspects to these things, too, and that was thought through.

Thomas:

From your perspective, how much, kind of, jockeying among the national labs was there at this time? Did it seem like a collaborative relationship or did it seem like there was a certain amount of zero-sum thinking?

Decker:

Well, you always have that and there’s always a certain amount of competition, and that's not bad if it's controlled. Where it gets out of control is when you start having individual laboratories going off to Congress and trying to get their stuff funded sort of around the normal decision process, but that got pretty much under control. So that doesn't happen the way it did at one point in history, I think.

Thomas:

Right, right. Some of the national labs at this time, my understanding is they were seeking new strategic directions. Berkeley Lab, of course, was famously the center for high energy physics, and then it became something else altogether. That happened to SLAC later on. Was there sense of a need to aid that process of realigning their missions in new directions?

Decker:

Yeah, when it made sense. [Laughter] Yeah, I think that has worked out very well for SLAC, given what they've done with the light source out there. They have two light sources. It has been very productive.

Thomas:

What are your recollections of working with the White House? We're back in the Reagan administration now. We can maybe do a little compare and contrast as well? How involved was Keyworth, for example, from your perspective?

Decker:

My interactions, personally, were not with Keyworth. Al had that relationship, but it was a good relationship. [Laughter] I remember one time I had to go over and talk to PCAST about the SSC. It was sort of amusing. Ed Teller was part of that group. Ed Teller took the position that we ought to wait for high-temperature superconductors to be developed before we built the SSC. Well, I was pretty much ready for that. I think it’s probably the only argument I ever could have won with Ed Teller. [Laughter]

[ed. Edward Teller was a member of the White House Science Council, the predecessor body to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).]

Thomas:

Let's see. [Pause] I guess with high-energy physics in general then -- this is the period when the Tevatron accelerator was under construction, and there were proposals being circulated for SSC. What was your role or perspective on these developments, say, in the mid-1980s before SSC was approved?

Decker:

I’m trying to think where to start. Al is the one who really put together the arguments to convince the president to fund the SSC. I remember working with him on his speech to the president about the importance of building the SSC. Yeah, I don't know quite where to go. What aspect of this do you really want?

Thomas:

I’m kind of trying to establish, I guess, the Department of Energy's views on the project, to what extent you were privy to them versus somebody like Al Trivelpiece or…?

Decker:

Al was obviously the main person who was involved in all the discussions.

Thomas:

Maybe to help me frame my questions, maybe I should back up and kind of ask about what your duties were versus the duties of the Director, and who you were interacting with, and that sort of thing.

Decker:

I was not very directly involved in the beginning. That was really Al working with the Under Secretary, the Deputy Secretary, and the Secretary, because there was a lot of work that had to be done with other agencies because the whole thing went before the Domestic Policy Council and it was a lot of work that Bill Martin, who was the Deputy Secretary, and probably Joe Salgado who was Under Secretary, John Harrington was the Secretary, I’m sure he was involved -- but they did a lot of work with the other agencies to try to get the vote lined up. That was a major undertaking.

Thomas:

Was all of that visible to you in your position?

Decker:

I knew it was going on, but I was not directly involved, except I would kind of rehearse some of his presentation material. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Just on a day-to-day basis, what sorts of things would occupy your time? Were you involved with formulating the budget requests for example, working with the program offices more directly in your position as principal deputy?

Decker:

Oh, well, it was all of those things. And a lot of it was interactions with the Secretary’s office, and the Under Secretary, the Deputy Secretary. I spent a lot of time doing that. One of the things that I think probably is not fully appreciated is when the DOE was set up, the Office of Science was a very important organization -- the Office of Energy Research it was then. The Director was the Secretary’s science adviser and I know Al claimed, and I never really looked into this, but in the enabling legislation for DOE that, as far as succession was concerned, the Director of the Office of Energy Research was like fourth in line or something like that. Essentially, higher than the assistant secretaries were, and that was always a problem for us in department because the title of assistant secretary sounds like it's higher than an office director.

Thomas:

But they're not Senate confirmed, the assistant secretaries?

Decker:

Oh, no, they are.

Thomas:

They are? Okay.

Decker:

They’re all Senate confirmed.

Thomas:

Oh, for the applied R&D offices.

Decker:

That's right. Where was I going with that?

Thomas:

The role of the Director and the line of succession.

Decker:

Yeah. As the science adviser to the Secretary, the Director of the office was involved in all the budget process. When I was acting [Director], the first time I was acting, I was involved in all the budget hearings before the Secretary for all the programs, and asked my opinion about it. Of course, any time there was any kind of a congressional hearing that related to science, it was the Office of Energy Research, the Director, who would testify. That all changed, of course, when the Under Secretary for Science was created. The Office of Science was actually downgraded quite a bit in terms of its influence within the department.

Thomas:

This was under the George W. Bush administration?

Decker:

Yeah, when Ray Orbach came.

Thomas:

Though of course he wore both hats.

[ed. Ray Orbach was Director of the Office of Science through most of the Bush administration and in 2006 took on the role of Under Secretary for Science as well.]

Decker:

He wore both hats, right. And that didn’t make any sense either. You shouldn't have an Under Secretary with one organization [i.e., the Office of Science] reporting to him. [Laughter] It doesn't make any sense.

Thomas:

Of course, there have been a lot of reorganizations since -- now this was after you left, where they would have the Under Secretary for Science, and then it would be for Science and Energy. Now it's [the Under Secretary for] Science and Innovation.

Decker:

Right.

Thomas:

Do you have any views on those sorts of -- what makes more sense or what's the most efficient? Is it better to have the Office of Science connected to the applied R&D offices or…?

Decker:

It depends a lot on exactly what the Under Secretary does. Office of Science funds basic research. The applied energy programs have been pushed more into development and deployment, and so there’s kind of a gap in terms of who supports long-term applied research. That’s been an issue for years. At one point, in EERE, there was a program that was devoted to sort of the longer-term applied research, but one assistant secretary decided to divide that program up and put the various pieces with the actual applied programs. Well, a rule in research is that applied research will drive out basic research because there are the demands to meet milestones in the applied programs, and money will get moved to support those applied programs meeting those milestones. So, that’s just a rule of research in my experience.

[ed. EERE is the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.]

Thomas:

[Pause] I was about to ask a question about things that happened after you left but…

Decker:

So then, it depends on -- with the organization with the energy programs and the Office of Science under the Under Secretary, it depends on the Under Secretary and how much they lean on the Office of Science to do more applied research, which is what’s happening now.

Thomas:

Complete change of direction: coming back to the Reagan administration, this is the period when the CEBAF project got started and Jefferson Lab was set up. Was it unusual to be creating a facility like that, that wasn’t at one of the established national labs?

Decker:

It probably was unusual. I was not involved in the early stages of that, so I really can’t comment on exactly how that evolved. In the end, competition -- I don’t know exactly how or what drove the competition to begin with. I’m not quite sure. But in the end, the new lab was created because they wanted competition. And the same thing happened in a way with FRIB. That wound up being a competition between a national lab and a university.

[ed. DOE selected Michigan State University to host the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) in 2008. Argonne National Lab also competed to host the facility.]

Thomas:

That is very unusual. So, where does that come from? When you say you want a competition, does that come from the Secretary? Does it come from the Director, somewhere else?

Decker:

Well, there really is a process within the department to decide how to go with a major new project. This is the Order 413 that governs the project process within the department. But there is a process establishing, first, the mission need, and then you make a decision about how are you going to -- once you decide there’s a need, how are you going to build the project?

Thomas:

So, Al Trivelpiece left in 1987. He’d been there a while. It wasn’t unusual that he left. Was there any particular rationale that he gave at the time for why that was a particular moment for him to leave?

Decker:

I think it became -- I’m not sure how much I should talk about this, to be honest. I mean, it was really a financial decision. If you’re wealthy and you come into these presidential positions, that’s one thing, but if you’re not and you’re maintaining two residences, and there are expenses to this job here, then…

Thomas:

Well, there’s a reason why they call it public service. If you’re in a high-level position, you tend to make a sacrifice for it. So, I think that that’s very sensible.

Decker:

Yes, I think that’s right.

Thomas:

So then, you stepped in as acting Director for the first of what would be several times. Can you tell me about that experience?

Decker:

I want to take a break first. Do you want something to drink? [Pause]

Thomas:

Okay. So, we were just discussing a little bit, the origins of the Human Genome Project, which was also among the many other things going on, another mid-1980s development.

Decker:

Yeah. I wasn’t directly involved in the beginnings of the Human Genome Project. Al and -- Charlie DeLisi was the one -- Charlie I guess convinced Al, and Al was able to sell it to the Under Secretary, Joe Salgado, and he reprogrammed some money to actually get it started. He left, and then I was involved in getting the appropriation -- testifying before Congress, the first time on that project. [Laughter] We didn’t really have any opposition at the time to starting the program. Getting NIH involved was interesting. What happened was Jim Wyngaarden was the Director of NIH at the time, and Jim is a really good guy. He had trouble with his community getting into the Human Genome Project because every researcher that he funded thought that, “Well, this is a big project.” I mean, it was estimated to be -- I forgot how many billions at the time, and every researcher was concerned that was going to take away from their $200,000 grant, and so there was a lot of opposition among the NIH community. I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, until I was talking to Jim at a cocktail party some years later, and he sort of filled me in on the story as to why he could not, in the beginning, get NIH involved. It was interesting. I also remember having a meeting with a very prominent biologist. This was several years after the project had started and so forth, and she sheepishly admitted she was one of the people who had [Laughter] opposed the project. It was all over budget. That was the concern.

Thomas:

As far as the rationale for getting DOE involved, I mean, you had the BER program -- I don’t know what it consisted of at that time …

[ed. BER is Biological and Environmental Research]

Decker:

The rationale that we kind of used was our need to better understand at the genetic level things like the biological effects of radiation. That was kind of our hook for getting into it in the first place.

Thomas:

Did the computing capacity you have, have anything to do with it or wasn’t that a factor at that moment?

Decker:

I don’t remember that being a big factor at that time.

Thomas:

Okay.

Decker:

I think some of the scientists in the DOE labs who were behind it were at Los Alamos. That’s about all I remember.

Thomas:

Okay. Well, so now back to what we were about to get to, which is your move into the acting Director position. So, what can you tell me about that experience?

Decker:

Yeah, Jim Kane, who had been Al’s Deputy, left to go back to Berkeley. I stepped in, and it was -- I had about a year, I think, of experience at the deputy level before Al left. Then I found out a lot about what it was really like to be in the job, [Laughter] you know, the interactions you had to carry out with the front office, and the Secretary, and doing congressional testimony, and all that. I used to remember how many congressional hearings I testified at, but it was a significant number.

Thomas:

Well, this was just as the SSC was getting going as well, right?

Decker:

That’s right. That was a very challenging time. It really had not gotten too far off the ground. I mean, it had gotten approved, and we had some R&D money, but we had not gotten into construction yet. That didn’t happen until, I think, Bob Hunter came in as the Director. So, I could go down that path if you want. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Yes. I think that’s a fine path. Well, one thing I do want to ask about, though. So, there’s of course been an entire book written about the SSC episode.

[ed. Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (University of Chicago Press, 2015).]

Decker:

Right.

Thomas:

I mean, there are just little points that I think that are interesting to fill in. So, at one point, there’s a reference to you as an acting Director, your ability versus somebody who is a political appointee to operate around what was happening. Can you comment on that?

Decker:

Well, in general, when I was acting, which I did many times, I just did the job. I mean, it didn’t make a difference to me that I was acting -- I didn’t hold off making decisions. I just made the decisions. The SSC was different, and the reason it was different was because there was so much involvement by the Secretary’s office. Bob Hunter, when he came in as Director, a lot of his experience was really DOD. I remember one meeting that Bob arranged that involved the Secretary and a number of admirals and generals to discuss how we should do this project. So, there was kind of a big DOD influence in a way at the beginning of the SSC. Then we had this -- the Secretary, [who was] Admiral Watkins, and the Deputy Secretary was Henson Moore. They were well-motivated. I mean, they really wanted to make it a success and did everything they thought was right to make it successful. But the problem really was that we wound up with a strange reporting relationship where the Project Director, who was Joe Cipriano, reported to the Secretary’s office as well as to me. Well, that’s not a good arrangement, so that simply did not really work very well. I think we did a pretty good job of building projects in the Office of Science, and bringing in a lot of DOD approaches to this didn’t work very well for us.

Thomas:

Well, so this seems to be one of the key tensions is that, of course, it was a physicists’ project, and you had URA coming in -- Well, that’s the other kind of detail that I wanted to ask about is apparently they had submitted an unsolicited M&O proposal before it, and the Tunnel Visions book isn’t -- it’s a little ambivalent about whether or not that had a chance of being approved. What they say is that there was a moment when it could’ve gone through, but they decided that they could take more time -- and I mean DOE here -- that DOE can take more time to think about it and that ultimately that created space for this more military type of approach to come in. Does that ring any bells?

[ed. Universities Research Association (URA), which operated Fermilab, also received the contract to construct and operate the SSC.]

Decker:

Not really.

Thomas:

Okay.

Decker:

I don’t remember it that way. I was not involved in the very -- well, it was odd because first of all, there was a decision about who would be the contractor. Actually, that was made under Al Trivelpiece, and Al was in favor of URA who brought the experience of running Fermilab. So, as I remember, that got pulled together fairly smoothly.

Thomas:

Okay.

Decker:

But then, Al leaves, Admiral Watkins comes in, and Bob Hunter came in, and then we wound up with more of a DOD approach because, as I said earlier, Bob was, I think, more familiar with DOD and their way of doing business. Then, of course, the admiral was [Laughter] familiar with DOD, and so…

Thomas:

So, when we talk about the DOD approach, we mean very close oversight to the project, or does it have other connotations to you?

Decker:

There was a proposal to have a huge DOE office down at the site with more direct hands-on management, and we had gotten away from that. Al was the one who really pulled the Office of Science away from that type of DOE management of projects. I mean, there was a period of time when the operations offices out in the field were really managing the projects, and that was an AEC way of doing business. So, you had the plants built for the nuclear weapons program. They were all built under the supervision of the field office, the operations offices. So, that was a way business was being done. When it came to build CEBAF, the Oak Ridge office wanted to manage it, and Al said, “No, the contractor’s going to manage it.” And Al won that battle and that’s the way going forward projects were built in the Office of Science. It was going to be the labs and their operators essentially building those projects, and that worked a lot better. It was much more efficient.

Thomas:

So, from the DOE perspective, was there a lot of visibility then into what was going on in Texas? Or maybe we should talk about the selection of the Texas site first. Do you have a good perspective on that?

Decker:

Yeah. This is where I really get into disagreements with a lot of people in the community, I have to say, looking back at this. There were these people who think we should’ve built it around Fermilab. That would not have worked, and the reason, one of the problems was that if you look at -- of course, you’ve got to get it the right-of-way. This is subsurface right-of-way, and it involved -- boy, I can’t remember how many landowners out in Illinois. I mean, it was like -- I don’t know. For some reason, the number, like 1,600 sticks in my mind.

Thomas:

This is the Chicago suburbs, yeah?

Decker:

Yeah. Then when you tunnel in that area, you’re likely to run into various issues -- water issues, et cetera. I mean, the Texas site, you’re dealing with really a very few landowners, and then you had that chalk formation that you just bore through, and you knew what you were getting into. If the choice had been Illinois, there would have been, in my view, a lot of cost overruns just in the tunnel. We had experience even in the Fermilab site with tunneling issues.

Thomas:

From the Tevatron.

Decker:

Well, from -- what I remember is another experiment … NuMI?

Thomas:

Yes. I think that was later, though. Wasn’t it?

Decker:

It was later, yeah. We ran into issues tunneling, water issues, if I remember correctly. I remember that was my first meeting with Frank Blake who came in as Deputy Secretary. It was about the overrun in that project. This is not a good way to start your relationship with the new Deputy Secretary. [Laughter] But I got through that just fine, explaining everything to him. But the choice of the Fermilab site, in my view, just would not have worked out. We’d have had a lot of cost overruns and schedule slips.

[ed. The Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) facility at Fermilab began operating in 2004. The project was rebaselined in 2001 following delays and cost increases, which stemmed in part from tunneling contracts that were costlier than expected. See Kurt Riesselmann, “NuMI Project Ready to Move On,” Fermi News 24 (16), Sep. 28, 2001. Frank Blake was Deputy Secretary of Energy from 2001 to 2002.]

Thomas:

So, it was really a non-starter.

Decker:

In my view, it was. Of course, there was a fair amount of opposition, local opposition out there, which was an issue.

Thomas:

Opposition…?

Decker:

To building it out there.

Thomas:

At Fermilab.

Decker:

Yeah.

Thomas:

Local opposition.

Decker:

Yes.

Thomas:

Right.

Decker:

There was a team that was evaluating these proposals, and when they went to the Fermilab site, there were a lot of protesters, and that wasn’t helpful. [Laughter] Whereas they welcomed it in Texas.

Thomas:

How insulated or not was the process from the political end?

Decker:

Very much so. I’ll tell you, that’s another thing. Of course, there were an awful lot of rumors in the community that just were not right, but I can tell you, if there had been any political interference, the whole DOE team would have quit. And in fact the team made it pretty clear from the beginning. [Laughter] So, there was not political interference.

Thomas:

Right. Right.

Decker:

There were a lot of rumors in the community that said there was. There wasn’t.

Thomas:

So, you have the project management oversight angle, and then you have the management of the project itself, Roy Schwitters specifically. There were tensions in that process or in the management arrangements?

Decker:

Yeah. In the beginning, it wasn’t someone who had really big project experience. Roy was the Director, but there really wasn’t the project person with experience on a big project, and that became a real concern. Secretary Watkins really pushed on that. That’s what led to the hiring of Ed Siskin, who came out of the nuclear industry. I think he had worked for Shaw, if I remember correctly.

Thomas:

Who is Shaw?

Decker:

Shaw was a company.

Thomas:

Oh, okay.

Decker:

That’s how they hired Ed Siskin to try to bring that project discipline to the project, which we had not had.

Thomas:

How effective in your view was that or was that not in imposing -- I mean, obviously, in the end, there was a lot of cost growth, but how did it work out?

Decker:

Well, it’s a very complex story, and sometimes the complexity of it is such that I’m not sure I understand it all. We had issues on cost that became very public because when the Clinton administration came in -- and there was a bunch of stuff that happened behind the scenes and all kinds of stories that I can tell you -- but they put a cap on annual spending. Well, when you do that -- I mean, we had a budget profile for the project. They capped the annual spending well below what the peak was supposed to go to.

Thomas:

This is for the project. The cap is on the project, right?

Decker:

Mmhmm.

Thomas:

All right.

Decker:

So, we did not know what that cap meant because we did not do a bottoms-up cost estimate, given that budget profile. We weren’t even sure we could build it that way. So, there were a lot of just wild guesses on the project under that circumstance, and that all was happening as Congress was voting on the project and we were losing support. So, it made pretty much a mess of things. [Laughter]

[ed. Decker’s important point here is that when the administration decided to impose a cap on its own requests for SSC’s annual budget shortly after President Clinton took office, it upset existing plans for the project and would necessarily have led to schedule delays and increases in the project’s overall cost, potentially even making it infeasible to carry out. Congress cancelled the project before those consequences fully manifested.]

Thomas:

So, what was the visibility? How quickly did you learn about things that were happening with the project itself? If there was a cost overrun, for example, coming up, did that come as a surprise on your end? Were you able to tell? What was the visibility?

Decker:

Well, we did not have good visibility, or at least I didn’t feel I had good visibility. Part of the problem was that the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary wanted to streamline things, get around a lot of the DOE processes that they thought were going to really add to the cost and stretch out the schedule and so forth, and so the Office of Science normal reviews didn’t happen. So, we did not have a good picture of what was going on with the cost.

Thomas:

Was this totally exempted? We were talking about the Temple review process earlier.

Decker:

Yeah, that just didn’t happen.

Thomas:

It just didn’t exist? Right.

Decker:

As I said, it was a desire of the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary to get away from a lot of what they thought was sort of red tape holding up projects. Joe Cipriano came in as the project manager on the government side. There’s an interesting story I’ll tell you about that, but the way the Secretary set things up, Cipriano had a dual reporting relationship. He was reporting up to the Secretary’s office, primarily to Henson Moore the Deputy Secretary, and supposedly to me. Well, a dual reporting relationship has got problems to begin with, but who is Cipriano going to talk to? Is he going to talk to me or is he going to talk to the Secretary’s office? It wasn’t me. [Laughter] So, anyway, that led to issues. Joe didn’t understand our process. He came from DOD, so he wanted to get rid of things like our project reviews, I’m sure. [Pause] So, that was unfortunate. The stories of the SSC, there just were a lot of rumors going around in the community and a lot of them weren’t true. I think some of those actually made it into Riordan’s book. The choice of Joe Cipriano as a government project manager, he [Riordan] thought that Admiral Watkins knew Cipriano and it was the admiral who made the choice. It wasn’t true at all. Admiral Watkins had never heard of him.

[ed. Thomas asked Riordan about this detail after this interview. The book states that Watkins contacted Cipriano about the position and that Cipriano had known Watkins during their time with the Navy, which could be taken to imply they had a prior relationship. Riordan noted that Cipriano had indicated to him in an interview that he had had several interactions with Watkins during their time with the Navy. Riordan speculated that Watkins might not have remembered these encounters.]

Thomas:

So, how did he get picked?

Decker:

Well, we had gone out recruiting. We had advertised the position. We didn’t have any takers. So, one day I’m walking down the hall, and I ran into the guy who was managing the new production reactor project, Dominic Monetta. So, Dominic says to me, he says, “Hey, are you still looking for a project manager for the SSC?” I said, “Yeah, we are.” “Well,” he said, “I know this guy over at DOD. He seems to have a good reputation. He wants to get back to Texas. That’s where he’s from originally,” and so forth. So, “Yeah, okay, glad to talk to him.” So, he applied, but the admiral never knew anything about him, didn’t know him personally. There was an admiral working for Admiral Watkins, his name was Wertheim. Anyway, he reviewed the resume and was sort of part of the decision to bring Joe on board.

Thomas:

I’m going to push this a little closer to you since we have a lot of background noise. [Pause]

Decker:

Where were we?

Thomas:

Where were we? [Laughter] Well, we’ve been talking about the project management, but we can go on to whatever at this point.

Decker:

I mean, to sum it up, the unfortunate thing was that the Office of Science project management system was totally out of it because of decisions that were made by the Secretary’s office. And we had a good record of building the project, but eliminating what was the Ed Temple and then Dan Lehman reviews, well, that was such an important part of our process. We really actually didn’t know quite what was going on in the project as a result.

Thomas:

There’s a story in Riordan’s book about a report on one of the cost increases, that there was like a very turbulent meeting at DOE headquarters with Admiral Watkins. Do you have memories of that? No?

Decker:

I’m not sure I was in that.

Thomas:

Okay. Apparently, there was a lot of shouting involved, but I’m not -- it doesn’t come to mind exactly what point in the process that was, but I think it was fairly far along.

Decker:

No, I don’t. For some reason, I don’t remember. I may well have been in the meeting, but I don’t remember.

[ed. Thomas is referring here to a meeting on Nov. 9, 1989, at which SSC Director Roy Schwitters informed Watkins about the major cost implications of a decision to widen the aperture of SSC’s magnets. This triggered an extended effort to establish a new cost estimate.]

Thomas:

So, at what point did you get the sense that, if you can pinpoint it, when things were starting to not go well with the project?

Decker:

I mean, I can’t really pinpoint that. Again, from the headquarters then, we did not have our usual view inside the project that we would have had had we been doing the normal project review with Ed Temple. I can’t remember, I guess it was maybe Dan Lehman by then. I’ve forgotten exactly when Ed left. So, yeah, we were a bit blind compared to our usual knowledge of what was going on inside a project.

Thomas:

As a bit of a tangent: so, there were so many things going on during Al Trivelpiece’s time as Director. Was this more or less dominating the agenda at that time or were you juggling it and a number of other things?

Decker:

There was an awful lot under me when Al was Director. I mean, we had ITER starting, the whole facilities plan, widening the scope of the computer center. There was a lot that had happened under Al, including setting up all of the FACA committees.

Thomas:

Oh, that happened at that time?

Decker:

Yes. Al started those.

Thomas:

You had HEPAP, and the nuclear physics one started a little bit earlier, I think.

Decker:

I don’t remember exactly when HEPAP started.

Thomas:

I think it was the ‘60s.

Decker:

Yeah. HEPAP, I think you’re right, but then we have new advisory committees for Basic Energy Sciences and Fusion.

Thomas:

All of those?

Decker:

Yeah.

Thomas:

So, let’s see. Let’s close up the SSC story, I guess. It starts under the Reagan administration, and it generally has support under the first President Bush, but it was -- that lasted until ‘93, so Congress starts to sour on it before the Clinton administration?

Decker:

I don’t remember exactly the timing when things started to go south with Congress. Of course, as soon as we made a site decision, although the states said they would continue to support it, I don’t think they did. [Laughter] So, I think that certainly was a factor. But when the Clinton administration came in, I don’t know quite what happened behind the scenes. There was so much that went on that I’ve heard about over the years. The competition with the space station was a big part of it.

Thomas:

If you’re familiar with the appropriations process, it seems so novel that you would have one thing that’s in CJS and one thing that’s in Energy and Water, and then there being, in some sense, put off against each other. I mean, it seems very novel, but that’s the story that I’ve heard, is that you’re going to get one or the other.

[ed. Meaning, either the SSC or the space station. DOE’s budget is appropriated through the Energy-Water appropriations subcommittees and NASA’s budget is appropriated through the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations subcommittees, and tradeoffs between specific projects are typically not made across different subcommittees.]

Decker:

Yeah, I mean, I think in practice it did work out that way. But remember, there are always budget caps that people will -- that Congress is faced with, too. I mean, the allocations that come out for each of the committees and so forth. At some point, it comes together and there’s a competition for funds, for sure. The space station people were very clever in terms of they had contractors lined up in every state in the country, so there was support coming from every state nearly. We didn’t have that. That was one of the issues. The Clinton administration did not support it strongly. That was an issue. Lots of stories about that. I don’t know exactly what’s true. Supposedly, Ann Richards told Bill Clinton she didn’t care about it. Then we had this problem where, what was the motivation for capping the budget so that clearly the cost was going to go out of sight, which is what OMB did. So, they weren’t killing the project directly, but they sure didn’t help it either.

[ed. Ann Richards, a Democrat, was governor of Texas at this time. OMB is the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has authority over most elements of the president’s budget request.]

Thomas:

Did you work directly with OMB in your position as principal deputy?

Decker:

Sure. No, I worked a lot with OMB.

Thomas:

Do you have like a variety of different experiences depending on who was there or was it pretty consistent?

Decker:

Your experiences always depend on the individuals you’re dealing with to some extent. Sure. There was quite a bit of variation.

Thomas:

Okay.

Decker:

We had some good supporters. We had examiners who asked very hard questions who were very good. In general, I would say our interactions with OMB were pretty good.

Thomas:

But the cap on the SSC was mysterious.

Decker:

I don’t know exactly how that came about.

Thomas:

Right.

Decker:

Whether that originated in OMB, I sort of doubt it. Whether it originated someplace else in the White House, I don’t know.

Thomas:

Was it novel to have -- every so often you have a project that has a cost cap on it, like at NASA, it’s the James Webb Space Telescope. When that ran into trouble, they put a cost cap on it. When they put it into cost cap on this, do you think because it was a project that was already in trouble or was it just kind of a budget control mechanism?

[ed. The cap on JWST was imposed by Congress and was a cap on the project’s total cost.]

Decker:

Well, I’m sure that at the time they said it was a budget control initiative. But in effect, if you run a project way off an optimum budget profile, you’re going to run the cost way up, and that’s what happened. As I said earlier, we did not know what the SSC would cost with the profiles that we were given, and so there were just wild guesses coming out. So, it made it look quite like, well, the cost is totally out of sight. We didn’t know.

Thomas:

Was there a tension between, on one hand being DOE is in effect the champion of the project, but you’re also trying to keep it under control and it’s not under control? Did that feel like a tension, like you would go and say a particular message to Congress, but then also you’re trying to -- you’re coming back with like a lot of cost problems and that sort of thing from Texas?

Decker:

I don’t really remember that going exactly that way. With the absence of our project reviews, we did not have a good window on the actual costs and the increases as I remember it.

Thomas:

If I can ask you specifically about the Directors you worked with on the project. Of course, you were yourself acting Director on a couple of different occasions.

Decker:

Yes.

Thomas:

Hunter was not there long, and I guess that he was essentially pressured out because of the way he was trying to control the project. Is that correct? No?

[ed. Robert O. Hunter was Director of the Office of Energy Research from Aug. 1988 to Nov. 1989.]

Decker:

No. Bob’s leaving had nothing to do with the SSC.

Thomas:

Okay.

Decker:

Changes in Directors and so forth, it didn’t help as I indicated before. Bob had mostly a DOD background, and so DOD has a very different way of managing projects. I don’t think they have a particularly good record on cost and schedule, but that was Bob’s experience. Of course, that was Admiral Watkins’ experience at the time. I remember there was one meeting that Bob put together, it was retired admirals and generals to give us advice on how to run a project. Well, [Laughter] scientific projects and military projects are different.

Thomas:

So, why was it then that he left?

Decker:

It had to do with the changes that he was trying to make in the fusion program.

Thomas:

Oh okay.

Decker:

It was all about the fusion program. I mean, at the time, I was actually kind of on my way to OSTP. Bromley wanted me to work for him over at OSTP. And I go on through all my interviews with the security people and so forth over at the White House, and then I get this call from Bromley one day and he said, “Admiral Watkins and I have talked, and we think you should stay where you are.” [Laughter] That’s when I knew that Bob was on his way out.

[ed. Allan Bromley was OSTP Director under President George H. W. Bush.]

Thomas:

Okay. So, what was going on with the fusion program at this time? We’re coming back to an earlier thread.

Decker:

Well, it’s interesting. Bob kept me totally out of it. Bob said to me, he said, “Look, I want to do some things with the fusion program. It’s going to be messy, it could really get ugly, and I’m going to keep you out of it.” Bob’s view was that inertial fusion was more promising, and so he wanted to really convert a lot of the program from magnetic over to inertial. Of course, that led to the admiral getting a lot of phone calls from people. [Laughter] Then after Bromley called me, about a week later, I get this call from the admiral, from his office, “Admiral Watkins wants to see you. Come on down here.” He went in broadcast mode for about an hour [Laughter] about the issues he was having. He was getting a lot of phone calls from the fusion community.

Thomas:

Yes. So, Watkins’ name has come up more than other Energy Secretaries. Is that just because it’s a function of the era that we’re in when these issues are so prominent, or was he particularly interested in the science aspects?

Decker:

Well, he was interested in the science. Most of these Secretaries of Energy that you get are not scientists and not engineers. There are a few exceptions to that. Sam Bodman, for example, was a chemical engineer by training, had a PhD in chemical engineering. But Admiral Watkins was more connected to the science. I mean, I had a sort of an interesting situation, because on paper at that time I was reporting to the Deputy Secretary, Henson Moore. Well, Henson didn’t -- he was not a scientist. He didn’t have that much management experience. And they had a good working relationship, Moore and Watkins. So, what I would do when I had a decision that I needed out the Secretary’s office, from somebody up there, I would work with the chiefs of staff of both of them and say, “I think I ought to take this decision to Secretary Watkins.” I didn’t want to upset Henson Moore, and we usually worked it through, and I got the right decision made by the right people.

Thomas:

Just to put a little context on the fusion issue. Now, of course, we left the conversation when there were pretty high budgets, and now they’re actually going down, like in absolute terms, not just [compared to] inflation.

Decker:

Yes. This was in the ‘90s, and the budget was cut by a third. We did not know that that cut was coming. We were very surprised by it when it happened. It was all engineered in the House appropriations subcommittee by the staff, and they did a very clever thing. Normally, that would have been fixed by Senator Domenici on the Senate side, but what they did was they -- if I remember correctly, they kind of eliminated LDRD in legislation. Well, that was very important to Los Alamos. So, Domenici, he had to pick what battles were most important to him, and so he protected LDRD, and I forgot, maybe he had some other issues. Consequently, the fusion program suffered this big cut of about a third, and that’s when we had to make some really difficult choices. Do we continue to operate TFTR or what do we do? You have to make a decision between continuing to operate TFTR or killing off a lot of the university program, for example. So, we made the decision to terminate TFTR operation. There were other things that went along with that, which were really bad for the program. I mean, Fusion Energy is an applied program. It has a clear mission. It makes it different than the rest of the Office of Science. And all of the technology development program in Fusion was eliminated, essentially. No more system studies. Well, that’s really a mistake for an applied program. I mean, you need to know where you’re going, and system studies were very important to guiding the program: what’s economical, what’s not economical, what’s technically feasible. System studies were, in my view, very important. Gone. Part of that decision was driven by an OMB examiner at the time, as well as the appropriations subcommittee staff. So, that was a real blow to the fusion program from which it really -- maybe it’s recovering now, but it was the wrong decisions to make on the part of Congress, in my view.

[ed. The fusion budget was cut by one-third in fiscal year 1996. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) was chair of the Senate Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee. LDRD is Laboratory Directed R&D, which is a portion of the budget of a national lab that it is allowed to use to fund research at its own discretion.]

Thomas:

Did you have a lot of interactions with the appropriators in your position?

Decker:

Oh, yeah. Oh definitely. Sure. But I had no heads up that this cut was coming.

Thomas:

[Pause] We got onto this subject because we were talking about Bob Hunter, but what about Will Happer? We haven’t brought him up at all. So, what are your recollections of his time as Director?

Decker:

Will is an exceptional scientist. He’s a really a very good scientist and very sensible. He came into the job not fully understanding the full breadth of the Office of Science programs, which, well, I mean, that’s no surprise. It’s a pretty broad set of scientific programs. He wasn’t a fan of the big facilities when he first came in. He wasn’t sure that the scientific productivity was there compared to the smaller science programs.

Thomas:

So, you said the big facilities. We’re talking about the…

Decker:

We’re talking about light sources, neutron sources. I think once he got exposed, he changed his views. Will is a very sensible guy. He certainly understood the science very well. So, yeah, I always liked working for Will.

Thomas:

He was supportive of the SSC.

Decker:

Yeah, yeah.

Thomas:

Okay. So, the process by which the SSC was cancelled, I mean, there’s been lots and lots of writing on this. I don’t know if you have any particular perspective that you want to add to that. It’s just broadly known in the story.

Decker:

I don’t know, there were a lot of things going on. I do not have a complete picture, I’ve decided. I think Al Trivelpiece had a bit of a better picture than I did. He knew a little bit more about some of the things going on behind the scenes than I did. I think there were just a number of factors involved. Competition with the space station was important. I think that had a lot to do with it.

Thomas:

One thing we haven’t discussed is -- one of the factors that’s often remarked on is the conflict within the physics community over it.

Decker:

Well, look. I mean, this is just characteristic of the scientific community. Something that looks like it’s going to cost a lot of money, all the scientists supported by that program have a concern. Is it going to come at the expense of my grant?

Thomas:

Just like with the Human Genome Project.

Decker:

Just like the Human Genome Project. I mean, I remember -- well, I only talked about that. NIH could not get involved because the scientific community didn’t support it. Jim Wyngaarden said they were all afraid it was going to take money away from their grants. The same thing was true with the SSC. Then of course, you had other fields of science, those communities being concerned it’s going to take away from their budgets. So, that’s what happens within the community. I’m not sure that it’s unusual human behavior. [Laughter]

Thomas:

When I listen in on presentations from people from the Office of Science at the advisory committee meetings, they’ll often say, “Squabbling scientists get no money, so please decide on what your priorities are and let’s stick to them.”

Decker:

Exactly. Yeah, that’s very important. In fact, that’s very important for the scientific programs in terms of being able to make the case to Congress. If you have an advisory committee that has a clear plan, that’s very much appreciated, by OMB, Congress, et cetera, that the community has agreed to a path forward.

Thomas:

Is that something that you think got better over time, because these FACA committees became more numerous and powerful?

Decker:

I think they’ve been very important for the Office of Science. I think Trivelpiece’s vision was very accurate in terms of how they could be helpful.

Thomas:

I want to bounce forward, actually, on this point a little bit to Ray Orbach. We did an oral history with him a couple years back, and he said that at a certain point, he went to Congress. He said that he could get them to support what the Office of Science was doing, provided they did a prioritization. So, there was a big multi-FACA-committee prioritization exercise very early in the George W. Bush administration. Does that reflect your understanding of what happened, that that was a particular pivotal moment of deciding what you were going to prioritize? Or was it more of a continuous process with what had come before?

[ed. In 2003, the Office of Science released the cross-program report, “Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook.”]

Decker:

I mean, OMB and Congress likes to see that kind of an exercise for sure. They like to plan, like to know what they’re buying into, because they’ve probably heard about all kinds of expensive facilities that people would like to build. So, having a plan makes a big difference in selling to every part of the government. So, Ray put this plan together, and I think it was fairly effective in terms of selling to all parts of the government. The way Ray put it together was he said, “Well, it’s based on the science.” That’s a pretty tough thing to do when you’re comparing facilities from high energy physics against another research community, a light source in BES or something. That’s a pretty tough thing to do. I don’t think you can really do that very well. Nonetheless, it worked.

Thomas:

Maybe it works a bit better within programs than between them.

Decker:

Oh, yeah. It’s just not easy when you do it between them, because those comparisons, they’re kind of in the eye of the beholder. [Laughter] There are other factors to take in, not just the science. I think you have to think about: what does the United States need to do to maintain leadership in a number of fields? In my mind, that kind of thinking is something you factor into these kinds of decisions. And there are institutional issues that come into play. It’s a difficult exercise. Ray did it, and I think he was fairly successful. I would have done it differently, but it worked.

Thomas:

Did you have the impression that there was a lot of individual lobbying of members of Congress from people within the community, so that they would be exposed to more projects than necessarily DOE was putting forward?

Decker:

Yeah. I think all these communities are talking to their elected representatives about what they see as important to their future. I’m sure Congress gets a lot of input, and that’s one of the reasons why they really appreciate a plan. Because, let’s just take the DOE lab system, well you’ve got different labs coming in and selling different things, and these people are sitting there -- “Well, what’s most important here? We can’t afford all of this. Somebody needs to sort this out for us.”

Thomas:

Is it your impression that Congress tends to gravitate towards project funding more so than topline funding? That it causes issues when they have a particular line item that they can fund?

Decker:

I don’t know. I think there’s a tendency to fund new things, and maintaining infrastructure, for example, is not very sexy, and so that often gets shortchanged compared to building some new thing, having some new project that sounds very exciting scientifically. That’s kind of understandable. But I think many times it is just easier to sell new things than maintaining levels of effort or even providing some increases in important scientific areas. Sort of the big, new, shiny object has more appeal. [Laughter]

Thomas:

So, coming back to more of the chronological story. So, we’re in the Clinton administration. The SSC has been cancelled. So, there’s, well, A, the winding down of the SSC, but also what’s going to happen next with the US high energy physics community? So, maybe you can just kind of walk me through that particular moment in time and how DOE was handling that.

Decker:

Yeah, that was a very difficult period of time. One of the things, of course, that happened out of all of that was a significant participation by the US in the LHC. I’m not sure how that all came about in Congress. I assume that there was lobbying behind the scenes and members of Congress sort of thinking, “Well, we just cancelled the SSC and that’s sort of the future of high energy physics here in this country.” So, the LHC became -- that participation, which was fairly significant. It was 500 million or something like that. That was kind of the next step of trying to figure out the future of Fermilab and other parts of the U.S. program. That was a struggle.

[ed. The LHC is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.]

Thomas:

It seems to me that there were a series of reports starting as early as, I think, ‘94 with the Drell report, but then there was one that Fred Gilman ran, and there was like a Bagger-Barish report, and then eventually we get to the P5 process. How effective were those exercises? I mean, early on, they were advocating for the ILC, and obviously that didn’t happen, but just in general in trying to reorient the community?

[ed. ILC is the unbuilt International Linear Collider. The Drell Report is the 1994 HEPAP Subpanel Report on Vision for the Future of High-Energy Physics. The Gilman Report is the 1998 report of the HEPAP Subpanel on Planning for the Future of U.S. High-Energy Physics. The Bagger-Barish report is the 2002 report, “The Science Ahead: The Way to Discovery” report produced by the HEPAP Subpanel on Long Range Planning for U.S. High Energy Physics, co-chaired by Jonathan Bagger and Barry Barish. The P5 is the HEPAP Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, which has now had several iterations.]

Decker:

Yeah. I think there was a lot of turmoil in high energy physics community in those days, and it was -- again, there needed to be some mechanism to set priorities, and the P5 panel did that. I think it was pretty effective. But again, there needed to be some structure brought to the decision-making to put a plan together this community can stand behind and that the people who were responsible for the funding can understand.

Thomas:

But it took a while to it to put it together.

Decker:

It took a while. Oh yeah, it took a while.

Thomas:

So, in the meantime, I think this is really the period in which the Basic Energy Sciences program is experiencing a lot of growth. So, there’s a lot of anxiety in HEP, but there’s a lot of activities elsewhere, particularly the light sources. This is when ALS came online, APS. The Advanced Neutron Source didn’t go forward, but you eventually had the Spallation Neutron Source. What can you say about that?

Decker:

The need for those facilities, for the light sources, I think it was growing at that time as people saw how they could be used to determine the structure of biological molecules, et cetera. There’s a lot of NIH-funded use of those facilities, those light sources. There was a surprising amount. Then as the applications to sort of material science pieces that DOE traditionally supported, the growth of demand for light sources really just bloomed. Then, of course, the plan was light sources with somewhat different capabilities. I mean, I don’t know what more to say about it.

Thomas:

I’m always astonished by the number of users that are serviced by these facilities.

Decker:

It is a huge number. Of course, some of it has been kind of automated.

Thomas:

Is kind of what?

Decker:

Automated.

Thomas:

Right.

Decker:

Structure of biological molecules, a lot of that’s been automated. So, the user, I don’t really think has to go to the facility anymore.

Thomas:

Yeah, I think particularly since the pandemic, they’ve been doing a lot of remote work at those.

Decker:

Actually, that started before the pandemic.

Thomas:

So, I mentioned the Advanced Neutron Source, and that got -- it wasn’t going, so I guess it didn’t get cancelled, but it ran into problems shortly after the SSC cancellation. My understanding of that is that it had to do with the fact that it was supposed to use highly enriched uranium. Is that your understanding of that?

Decker:

Yes. The White House, there was somebody, what’s his name, from Princeton who was at the White House at the time and OSTP, very strong on nonproliferation. Of course, we were pushing people all over the world to convert from highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium.

Thomas:

Von Hippel wasn’t there, was he?

Decker:

Von Hippel.

[ed. Frank von Hippel is a physicist and longtime proponent of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. He served as OSTP Assistant Director of National Security from 1993 to late 1994.]

Thomas:

That’s him? Okay.

Decker:

So, there was a lot of pressure on us to go to LEU. Well, you can go to LEU. You could build the source, but the reactor became a lot larger and became a lot more expensive. It just looked like a path that was going to be too hard. We probably couldn’t withstand the cost increases alone. Then there were other pressures. That led to the decision to go to the Spallation Neutron Source.

Thomas:

Was it pretty smooth to make that transition to the Spallation Neutron Source? Have any trouble getting started?

Decker:

Didn’t have trouble getting started. We had issues as the project was being built, but I don’t remember a whole lot of trouble getting it started.

Thomas:

The capacity -- this continues to be an issue for neutron scattering in particular. So the Advanced Neutron Source didn’t go forward, and then we had the closure of the Brookhaven reactor which, of course, was a big controversy in the late ‘90s. What’s your recollections of that? That’s another one of these cases where there’s a lot of scuttlebutt in the community about the role of Alec Baldwin and whatnot, but you had more of an inside view of that, I suppose.

Decker:

Yeah, that was a difficult time. [Pause] Yeah, HFBR. That was certainly an unfortunate thing, because the amount of tritium that leaked was not significant really, but that’s pretty hard to explain to the public. I mean, we had meetings in the department. I mean, I was involved every day for some long period of time trying to deal with the issue, to deal with the public up there. We had to treat the groundwater and get that going. Anyway, in the end, it seemed pretty difficult to get HFBR restarted on Long Island. The Secretary made a decision to avoid all the political turmoil over that… probably cost, because it probably would have been extended for a long time before we could actually get any productivity out of it. Anyway…

[HFBR is the High-Flux Beam Reactor. It was closed in 1999 after radioactive tritium was discovered to have leaked from its spent fuel pool in 1997. The leak became a high-profile controversy that attracted attention from celebrities Alec Baldwin and Christie Brinkley. The Energy Secretary was Bill Richardson.]

Thomas:

Were there ever any issues that could have gone that way but just didn't because there wasn't that level of public interest? Not necessarily on safety, but just in terms of an issue that could have been controversial.

Decker:

Well, there have been leaks of radioactive material into groundwater at other sites. I mean, even at Fermilab, if I remember correctly, we had -- I think we had some tritium in the groundwater. But communities can blow this stuff up. A lot of this has to do with local politics. There was an interesting article, I don't know if you saw it, about Alec Baldwin's involvement in all of this. I just saw it recently, I did not know at the time that he had this idea he was going to run for political office and that probably influenced a lot of what he was doing.

[ed. Accelerator operations at Fermilab produce low levels of tritium that have been found in water on and near the site; see information on the Fermilab website. On Baldwin, see Robert P. Crease, “Inside Alec Baldwin’s crusade to take down a Nobel Prize-winning lab,” MIT Press Reader, May 15, 2023.]

Thomas:

I know it's certainly the perception within the community that the celebrity involvement and, just in general, the media circus around that was determinative of ultimately what happened. I mean, I've heard Bob Birgeneau talking about it, for example.

[ed. See William Thomas, “DOE Urged to Prepare for Oak Ridge Research Reactor Overhaul,” FYI Science Policy News, American Institute of Physics, Oct. 1, 2020.]

Decker:

Yeah, I think that did have a lot to do with it. I think it had a lot to do with influencing the Secretary's decision.

Thomas:

So, let's see here. Some of the Directors that you worked with then in the Clinton administration -- so Will Happer stayed on briefly. My understanding is that he had a disagreement with Al Gore and so left. I don't know if that's --

Decker:

Well, what happened was that Will went to a meeting over at the White House and Al Gore was not in the meeting. It was Katie McGinty I think who was there. And Will took with him some data that was interesting about -- remember Gore and the ozone layer and UVB radiation was going to cause cancer and so on. Well, there's actually a lot of data. It turns out there's about 50 years' worth of data at that point of UVB radiation, the intensity at monitoring stations, a number of places in the country. So, if you looked at the data, what it showed was that the intensity was actually going down, not up. [Laughter] Will had the audacity. This is Will. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Well, he's had controversies since then too, of course.

Decker:

Yes, right. So, Will showed the data. He was fired before he got back to the office, I think. [Laughter] Irwin Goodwin wrote up the story about it…

Thomas:

Right, in Physics Today.

Decker:

…in Physics Today, and it was accurate. Irwin did a good job.

[ed. See Irwin Goodwin, “Happer Leaves DOE Under Ozone Cloud for Violating Political Correctness,” Physics Today 46 (6): June 1993. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2808934 — Happer’s more recent controversies involve his emergence as a prominent opponent of consensus views on climate change.]

Thomas:

Okay. [Laughter] Then Martha Krebs came in, and she had been at Berkeley awhile, so she is actually familiar with the…

Decker:

Yeah, the great thing about Martha coming in was she had a great respect for the lab system. She knew it well. Yeah, she always certainly tried to do the right thing by the programs and the labs.

Thomas:

Generally, that was quite helpful, like actually having that previous experience with a national lab?

Decker:

Yes. That definitely was very helpful. She really understood the system.

Thomas:

Then very later on Millie Dresselhaus came in, but that was quite brief --

Decker:

Correct.

Thomas:

Yeah.

Decker:

Yeah, Millie was terrific. I liked her very much, but she was really doing two jobs at once. I mean, every weekend she was flying back to Boston and working with the students, and then she'd get up early on Monday mornings and fly back to DC. In some sense I don't think she totally got into the job because she was really doing two jobs.

Thomas:

So, this was towards the end of the Clinton administration. Was her expectation that she would just stay a short amount of time or was she thinking that she might stay on into a follow-on?

[ed. i.e., stay on under a Gore administration had he won the 2000 election.]

Decker:

I don't think she had any great desire to stay longer. I mean, her love was her lab.

Thomas:

Right, right. Well, she was certainly excellent at that.

Decker:

Super.

Thomas:

Yeah. Okay. And as far as working with the White House is concerned, you had two OSTP Directors, Jack Gibbons and Neal Lane. Did you have a lot of interactions with them?

Decker:

Not so much with Neal, but we did with Jack Gibbons. Probably what's not known by a lot of people is that when the Clinton administration came in and they were developing their budgets for the future, the Office of Science was scheduled for a — I think was either a 200 or 300 million dollar cut. And Martha did a great job in working with Jack Gibbons and, I think it might have been T. J. Glauthier over at OMB. Martha and I had several meetings with them, made our case about why that cut shouldn't happen. In fact, in the end, we didn't get the cut. But anyway, that's what the Clinton administration had originally planned for the Office of Science.

[ed. T. J. Glauthier was OMB Associate Director for Natural Resources, Energy, and Science, and was Deputy Energy Secretary in the later years of the Clinton administration.]

Thomas:

It's a very peculiar time in science policy after the end of the Cold War because — based on what I know of more recent history, there are things like a cut to the DOE Office of Science that you wouldn't expect. And I was astonished to learn, actually, recently what their plans were for NIST, to really build that up and its industrial programs. I don't know, that’s more of a comment than question, I guess, but —

Decker:

No, but I think what a lot of people, especially in the scientific community, don't fully appreciate is there really is a difference in philosophy in support of science between Democrats and Republicans. It's not totally consistent, but the Democrats generally push the applied research, and, of course, often that comes at the expense of basic research. Whereas the Republicans believe that the government's proper role is to support basic research, and industry does applied research and development. So, that's the one significant difference between the parties. I mean, I told my clients before the Biden administration came in, I said, "You know, this is what you're probably going to get," and that’s what's happened.

Thomas:

Yeah, I mean, they've certainly been very focused on clean energy research, development, and deployment and, of course, we had the legislation around that.

Decker:

Right.

Thomas:

It's more of a general question: how often would you, I guess, feel national priorities in what you were doing in the Office of Science? I mean, you have that with the Biden administration, Gore in the Clinton administration who was very interested in certain subjects — the internet, the environment, and that sort of thing. After September 11, there was a big national security push. But to what degree would that work its way into the Office of Science priorities?

Decker:

It wasn't a major factor, normally. There would be administration initiatives that we have a part of. Nanoscience was a big thing, right?

Thomas:

I was going to ask about that, too. Yeah.

Decker:

So, we were a significant part of that and established a bunch of nanoscience centers. Yeah, you had those kinds of effects. If you go back further, back to what we were talking about a bit earlier with supercomputers, there was the big threat that the United States felt from all the big Japanese companies getting into building supercomputers. Of course, we played a major part in that. I told you earlier, I was chairing three committees on the subject, interagency committees. That all originated out of the White House. That was the administration.

Thomas:

It seems to me that this theme of special initiatives and grand challenges and whatnot has become more prominent over time.

Decker:

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because that's definitely what's happened. When I first became the deputy director in the Office of Science, it was typical for us to get inflation increases on programs. You made arguments for new projects. Today, I mean things are different in that I don't think you can just get an inflationary increase on a program anymore. You have to be doing something new. It's the new initiatives that bring in the new money.

Thomas:

Right.

Decker:

That's been the case now for quite a few … several decades.

Thomas:

Yeah, I mean you certainly have the quantum initiative —

Decker:

Yeah.

Thomas:

— and things like carbon capture and that sort of thing.

Decker:

Right. That’s right.

Thomas:

You had the nanotech initiative. This is a bit of a tangent, but this whole notion of the “grand challenge,” my understanding is that language goes back to Kenneth Wilson and supercomputing. And so I'm wondering, way back in the ‘80s, what kind of a role that played. Was it just, like, rhetoric or was there some sort of focusing aspect to it? Was the idea of the grand challenge real or was that just kind of something you told Congress?

[ed. See, e.g., Tom Kitchens, “The U.S. Department of Energy’s ‘Grand Challenge’ Program,” International Journal of Supercomputer Applications (1990) 4 (3): 3-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/109434209000400301]

Decker:

Phew, I'm not sure how to answer that. No, I think it was real. I mean, there really were important scientific problems that, you know, sort of got a new name. [Laughter] But they were important problems to various fields, and so, yeah … I didn't really realize that it came from Ken.

Thomas:

I think that that's the original coinage of the term “grand challenge.” And I think later on, Tom Kalil, who worked for both Clinton and Obama, he was a big fan of that sort of thing, just this idea that you're going to set an achievable but very, very difficult technological goal, and that that would focus your research efforts.

Decker:

Yeah, I remember Tom using those terms a lot. That’s true.

Thomas:

So, that would make its way into the kind of DOE agenda, in one way or another?

Decker:

Yes. Yes, and I think the term “grand challenge” worked its way down in the programs, too, not just at a sort of a national level, but within programs, that term, grand challenge became used a lot.

Thomas:

Yeah, I think there was a BESAC report that referred to grand challenges.

Decker:

Right, there was. You're right.

[ed. Between 2008 and 2010, a number of Office of Science programs and their advisory committees organized workshops addressing scientific grand challenges.]

Thomas:

Well, speaking of BESAC and BES, that's where this Basic Research Needs workshop, that construct comes up, and that's become more and more common as well. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how that's maybe affected how the research programs are structured or managed?

Decker:

Yeah. Actually, I think that’s been a pretty effective process that BES has used. I think that — first of all, BES does have a sort of a mission to support basic research, but basic research that underpins a lot of the work that the rest of DOE does. I don't know what to say about it other than, I think those workshops have made a significant difference. I don't know who thought of this first. I know I thought a lot about it and had some input to it, but Pat Dehmer may well have been ahead of me in using that approach.

Thomas:

Yeah.

Decker:

I think it's been pretty effective in helping to manage the programs, helping to sell the programs.

Thomas:

Tell me a little bit more about Pat Dehmer. Of course, she didn't have the same title as you afterwards but in a way she was your successor, and she led BES while you were there.

[ed. Pat Dehmer was the Office of Science’s Associate Director for the Basic Energy Sciences program from 1995 to 2007 and was then the office’s Deputy Director for Science Programs until 2016.]

Decker:

Right.

Thomas:

She is viewed as kind of a reformer, somebody who is really focused on, maybe to a greater extent than before, on program management, if that's the right way of framing it.

Decker:

Yeah, I think Pat did a very good job at BES. She is very focused on management. She loves projects. She loves project management. When they first moved to this area, she and Joe [Dehmer] were looking for a house. They almost bought a house which is just down the street from me. And Pat really wanted to build a house. [Laughter] She wanted a project, I think. Yeah, she had a significant focus on management, and it’s, I think, is a very good focus. One of the things that were learned as these Energy Frontier Research Centers came into being, [Energy Innovation] Hubs came into being, initially there were some management problems in these Hubs and they weren't that productive. Certainly, you couldn't say that the whole was bigger than the sum of the parts. The first thing that BES does now in reviewing EFRCs, they do a management review first, before they do a review of the science. They usually do a management review within, I think the first year. Frankly, as long as I've been around this business, one of the things that I've learned is the management of science, its importance is underestimated. As science has grown with more team activities and center activities than the single PIs, management becomes a real factor in terms of productivity.

Thomas:

So, that's become increasingly prevalent, too, is this idea that you have this sort of center construct? I mean, I know that NSF was supporting centers as early as the 1980s and it’s become increasingly common at DOE. Is that fairly novel within the scientific community that you'd have this sort of mid-sized construct? Of course, you’ve worked with the mega projects and there's the PI-level thing, but this whole notion that you're going to do something for, oh, five, ten million a year or something like that?

Decker:

Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how effective all of that has been. I don't know if there have ever been any reviews of centers as a method of doing scientific research. They are very difficult to make productive in the sense that you have multi-institutions involved. Generally, it's a group of universities form EFRCs although labs are involved to some extent as well. There's not a lot of experience with management in universities and so, what I've seen — and I do a lot of reviews of center proposals — the management piece is a significant weakness, trying to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Often at the early stages of proposals, it's like there are ten proposals pasted together. That's not the idea. [Laughter] Yeah, it's interesting, how effective has that been? I mean, it is certainly arguably the case that many of the problems that are important are multidisciplinary problems, and the idea of seeking expertise from multiple institutions seems like a good idea. There's a lot of management overhead associated with doing that. I don't know, I think it'd be really interesting to evaluate how effective these centers have been. Not an easy review to conduct.

Thomas:

I think we've got one administration left from your time at DOE and that's, of course, the George W. Bush administration. You were working with Ray Orbach for that whole time. You had John Marburger at the White House and, of course, he had been Director of Brookhaven, so very familiar with the national lab system. What, just in general, is your experience of that time?

Decker:

Well, you asked about Jack. Jack was a personal friend. I had worked with him in different ways over the years. He was the president of URA. It was during some of the SSC days and so I was talking with Jack all the time during that period. In fact, I think I had at least five phone numbers for him [Laughter] during those days as we talked through a lot of management problems. Jack, as the President's science adviser, was low key. He was far more effective behind the scenes than the scientific community ever realized, in my view. But that was Jack. Jack was low key. He knew how to play things, and that was the most effective way he could do it. He did it that way.

Thomas:

Is there something in particular that stands out in your mind that you would have worked with him on?

Decker:

Oh, when he was science adviser, I really don't remember. Sorry, I can't think of something offhand.

Thomas:

Well, let me pick a particular topic and Jack Marburger may or may not have to do with it, but this is when the US participation in ITER — to come way back to that subject again — gets going. What are your memories of that process? I know that when we interviewed Ray Orbach, of course, that took up quite a bit of his focus.

Decker:

Yeah. I had been the head of the US delegation to ITER for the first two phases, I negotiated both of those phases. When it came to the construction phase, I said to Ray, I said, "You know, these negotiations are going to be very, very time consuming. I don't think we can afford that both of us be involved." And he wanted to do it, his staff wanted to do it, and so he really took that over.

Thomas:

Looking at the long history of the project, you said there were a couple of design phases between when it was first negotiated in the '80s and in the 2000s.

Decker:

There was a conceptual design phase and an engineering design phase.

Thomas:

The US actually dropped out for the second —

Decker:

We had to drop out because of Congress.

Thomas:

Was that related to the budgets, again, that we were discussing earlier, or just because they weren't interested in pursuing it?

Decker:

They just didn't want to pursue it. I don't remember who all was involved in that decision. I think Jim Sensenbrenner was one member of Congress who was against it. I don't know. Maybe it was the idea that ITER was going to cost a lot of money. Maybe they just didn't have faith in fusion. I'm not quite sure, but anyway we were forced to get out.

Thomas:

Then in the 2000s, we get back in.

Decker:

Yes, and that happened — I don't know exactly what happened behind the scenes. I think there was a connection between some people in the fusion community and the White House that caused that to happen. I think the White House got more interested in getting involved in it because of that interaction than interactions with Ray and the department.

Thomas:

Okay. And by the White House, you mean the White House, not like Marburger for example? It's really at the top level?

Decker:

I don't know who in the White House. I don't know.

Thomas:

It just came in that we were going to negotiate to be a part of this?

Decker:

Yeah, I kind of doubt it was through Jack. I have a feeling it was either through maybe OMB. You never know what the political connections are. I mean, sometimes you do. [Laughter] But there are times when you don't.

Thomas:

Right. Well, so in fusion, in general, I mean you've had a view of it now for about 50 years, so I'm just curious as to your opinions on what you think about where we're at with it today. There are outfits like Commonwealth Fusion Systems that are being very optimistic about what they can accomplish, getting a lot of private funding. FES is growing again. ITER has had some technical difficulties recently and it looks scary from the outside, but I don't have good insight as to what's going on on the inside of that, but I don't know, what’s your view?

Decker:

Fusion is very difficult. I'm saying the obvious. Fusion is very difficult no matter how you look at it. The science is difficult and the technology may be more difficult. Whether or not there is an approach for fusion that could be economically competitive is a very open question in my mind. It's hard. It's actually hard to beat a lot of the newer fission concepts, I think. That's a sort of simpler technology, and it's proven technology. There are so many issues with fusion.

Thomas:

When you say the fission con—, like things like the small modular reactors, some of these advanced reactors?

Decker:

Small modular reactors, I mean — yeah I mean there are a lot of designs out there. I'm not an expert in those. But a lot of those ideas have been around for decades, many decades, and a lot the technology has already been proven. Fusion has a long ways to go, and whether it can be economically competitive in the end, I don't know. [Laughter] I guess I've learned over the years, it's kind of dangerous to predict some of these things. But I've been surprised at how much private money has come into the various projects.

Thomas:

It's just been in the last couple of years, and I have to say I'm surprised myself.

Decker:

Yes. I'm very surprised. I have to wonder exactly what due diligence the investors have done, and I have to wonder what they think the return on investment is going to be and when. I mean, there are angel investors who are just willing to — they're willing to accept the vision, "Hey, this is worth a shot." They put their money in. Then there are those who are looking for a return. Usually, it's in a few years.

Thomas:

I know it's been a big issue for energy R&D in general, that because it takes so much capital in energy generation that they've had traditional difficulties —

Decker:

Well, the trouble with fusion, I mean, when you start comparing it to solar or wind, and some of these other technologies, is that the initial investment is so large. I mean, you come up with a new idea for a solar panel, you can test it out for very little money by comparison, and you can do it much quicker. The development path for fusion is really an obstacle. It's just long and expensive.

Thomas:

So, you retired from DOE at the beginning of 2007. Before we cover that, I'm just curious if there's anything you would expect we would have talked about that I've skipped over. … I mean, maybe we should close the loop on high performance computing. That was another thing that Ray Orbach talked about in his interview with us, is that making those facilities into true user facilities that people can apply to he thought was a big — or who weren't otherwise engaged in DOE research was a new thing.

Decker:

Yeah. That was new under Ray. Yeah, I don't know how much more there is to say about it. I mean, I think we did a lot to move supercomputing forward back in the late ‘80s when there was the Japanese threat. My gosh, there were a lot of new companies that started up. Unfortunately, to keep that industry going, you need a stream of government purchases. I mean, yes, there are some purchases of those computers by the private sector, but they aren't going for the real top-end stuff, and it's the government with the need for programs like nuclear weapons, et cetera, that buy the very high-end computers. So, I think we did a lot to sort of move the industry forward at the time, but then there wasn't enough demand across the government to really sustain it, and that led to the United States starting to fall behind. It was picked up again by the NNSA folks. But then their problems were a bit different than a lot of the problems in the Office of Science, and their massively parallel machines weren't all that efficient on a lot of our problems. I remember one day I was sitting in my office and I got a call from John Gordon. John was having a meeting with the senior vice president of IBM, and John had been telling Nick Donofrio, had been telling him that we weren't all that happy with IBM's massively parallel computers and so I had to go down and talk to him about why, and it was a funny conversation because, at one point Donofrio said, "You mean you're not interested in peak flops?" I said, "No, we're interested in solving problems." [Laughter] But then, fortunately, Cray came to life again and IBM changed some things, and so I think they kind of got back on track. I'm not sure that government is still buying enough big computers to sustain the industry. I hope we are.

Thomas:

One question that's maybe more detailed than thematic. At a certain point there is that name change, Office of Energy Research to Office of Science. Do you know who proposed that?

Decker:

I can't tell you exactly where that came from. I think it came from some people in the DOE lab community, and the concern was that somehow the Office of Science didn't have enough visibility and clout and so forth in the department, and I like to look at that a couple of different ways. And one way that we lost influence from this move, especially now that the Office of Science is combined with — I think maybe I jumped subjects on you a little bit, because I was thinking about the creation of the Under Secretary [for Science] position. Especially now that the applied energy programs and the Office of Science are under one under secretary, that under secretary has to pay a lot of attention to the applied programs, especially when there's so much administration priority being placed on those programs.

Thomas:

Yeah, I think there was some surprise, because that’s Geri Richmond, of course, and she had been chair of BESAC earlier.

[ed. In the Biden administration, Geraldine Richmond was appointed Under Secretary for Science and Energy, and her title was later changed to Under Secretary for Science and Innovation, in both cases with authority over both the Office of Science and the applied energy offices.]

Decker:

For a long time.

Thomas:

Yeah, for a long time, but at the end of the day, you have to follow the administration's priorities and what's going on and what needs attention, I suppose.

Decker:

True. I don't know what pressure she's facing. Well, I do see things moving toward more applied, even in the Office of Science. But when the DOE legislation set up the department, all of a sudden the Office of Energy Research had a very powerful position in the department, because the Director was the Secretary’s science adviser, for one thing. And Al Trivelpiece claimed, and I never really looked this up, that if you read the enabling legislation, the Director of the Office of Energy Research was like fourth in line in succession planning in the department after the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and there was one Under Secretary at that time. Then the next person in line was Director of the Office of Energy Research. So, Al, I remember, and of course Ed Frieman and Deutch before him, would be involved in a lot of the Secretary's decisions. And when I was acting after Al left, then I was involved in all of the department’s budget meetings with the Secretary. Any time there was a hearing that involves science, I was the stuckee. Since this change has come into play here with the creation of the Under Secretary for Science, the Office of Science is removed quite a bit from the front office.

Thomas:

That's very interesting because I've heard, but not in a lot of detail, that there were people in the community who were involved in crafting — that’s through the Energy Act of 2005 (or Energy Innovation Act, whatever, the 2005 act), and I think the perception was that giving it under secretary representation would actually elevate it. And so your perspective from the inside that it tends to push it down is quite interesting.

[ed. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 created the position of Under Secretary for Science.]

Decker:

Yeah, and that's the effect, especially now. Of course, when Ray was the first Under Secretary for Science, he would have both jobs. I mean, I was still involved, when he was on travel or whatever, I mean I'm still going down the Secretary's office and participating in the Secretary's meetings, et cetera.

Thomas:

And that was Sam Bodman at the time, too.

Decker:

Yes, it was Sam.

Thomas:

He had a scientific background. Did that make any difference, do you think, that he had —

Decker:

Well, the first Secretary under Bush 43 was Spence Abraham. It was great to have Bodman come in, because Bodman had that scientific background, and of course he knew how to manage an organization. He had run Fidelity. He had run Cabot. I loved working for Sam. [Laughter] Yeah, I had a good relationship with him. In fact, just an aside, when I decided to retire, I was on a couple of trips with Bodman to the lab system, and he announced my retirement [Laughter] out in the lab system. He did a very nice job.

Thomas:

One other figure: in the Clinton administration, Moniz was the Under Secretary and of course he comes from MIT. Did he have a more active role in what the Office of Science was doing on account of that, or was he more focused on — I know he has multi-varied interests.

Decker:

Yeah, Ernie really did. I mean, he was interested in the national security side of the department. He had a big interest in that as well as, I mean, all the programs on the energy side. Yeah, it was great to have Ernie there. He was involved in quite a few of our activities, and it was a good involvement. Sometimes upper management involvement is not good. [Laughter] Ernie is good.

Thomas:

Terrific. Well, I feel we should probably wrap up around this point — I mean, if you want to keep going I'm definitely not going to stop you. You then decided to retire at the beginning of 2007. I mean, you'd been there a long time so I guess it would just be a natural thing to do, but was there any particular milestone or anything that made you think that that was a good time?

Decker:

Well, one of the things was that the change of administration, then I would typically be acting, and so I felt that I had to choose to leave sufficiently before a change of administration was coming so the new person could be in the role for a while. And if I didn't leave then, I was probably going to have to stay at least a year beyond the new administration. So, the timing for me was kind of set by that kind of thinking.

Thomas:

I see. Then of course your title, the Principal Deputy — this was what originally put us in contact is that I was not aware that that had existed before — but that then… So, Pat Dehmer, when she had the Deputy Director for Science Programs title, is that significant in your view?

[ed. The Principal Deputy Director position in the Office of Science was eliminated when Decker retired in 2007. Pat Dehmer then became the most senior civil servant in the office with the title of Deputy Director for Science Programs. The principal deputy position was re-established from 2020 to 2023, when it was again eliminated. An exchange with Decker concerning that development prompted this interview.]

Decker:

In my view, it is. I mean, before I left, I gave Ray all the reasons not to do that, not to eliminate the Principal Deputy, but I think he got convinced by some of his Scheduled C staff to do what he did. The acting person, when there's no presidential appointee, has to be able to deal with not only the program side, but you've got to be able to deal with the operations side. You're going to have a meeting in the Secretary's office, a regular Secretary staff meeting, and some operational, some issue with a lab that comes up, well you better be on top of it. So, I really feel that it's important to have a Principal Deputy Director who is routinely involved in both the program and the operations side of the business.

Thomas:

In your experience, were they pretty separate actually, that you'd be dealing with the field offices on one end and the programs on the other?

Decker:

Yes. They are, unfortunately, separated more than they should be in my view, because you get decisions made over on the operations side, some of which are not due to the site office, they're due to the administrative organizations in headquarters. There's a separation in headquarters that is not totally healthy. I mean, the people who are making the decisions, sometimes the administrative organization, don't have a connection to the programs. They don't know what the effect really is going to be on the programs, so there's often an unfortunate disconnect, and that also turns out to go down into the labs sometimes. There's a disconnect even in the labs sometimes. But the principal deputy I think gave the Office of Science a significant advantage through transitions especially. I know other parts of the department — you know, originally all of the assistant secretary-level organizations had a career principal deputy, and that went away in most organizations over time.

Thomas:

Yeah, those are mostly political appointees now.

Decker:

They now tend to be political appointees. Well, they come in from the outside. What do they know about how the programs really operate? Well, they don't know much, and I used to hear from my colleagues over on the applied programs, "You guys over in the Office of Science really have an advantage because you've got a career Principal Deputy who acts." What happens in an organization like EERE where there's not a career Principal Deputy but you got a number of deputy directors from different aspects of the program? You know, there’s one for Vehicle Technologies and one for Solar and so forth. Well, who acts and what do they know about the entire EERE program? It's an issue, in my view.

Thomas:

The career officials, of course, provide continuity, but you provided more continuity than most. You stayed in that position for a very long time. I'm wondering if you can discuss some of the advantages of that, having that long of a view of things? Perhaps disadvantages, if you think there are any?

Decker:

I think there are a lot of advantages. Just even having some institutional memory is a big help. You develop a lot of relationships, not only within the DOE complex but with Congress and OMB, and relationships in this town are extremely important. I used to spend many nights going to receptions, that kind of thing, around — I was doing a lot of international stuff so I would get invited to a lot of the embassies for embassy parties and receptions, and making those contacts with the science attaché in those embassies was really valuable for me. I'd run into a lot of congressional staff at these events, and having those conversations in that atmosphere were often very valuable. In fact, one of the things that, as a program person, if I was going to go up to the Hill to have a meeting, somebody from Congressional Affairs went with me. That was required. People up on the Hill never liked that, [Laughter] and so it was a great advantage to be able to talk to these people without having Congressional Affairs listening to every word.

Thomas:

Do you find that when you have a fairly deep set of experiences from which you can draw comparisons and contrasts with the present, that those tend to be applicable, that you can really draw on them, or there's so much change over time —

Decker:

Oh, yeah. Look, look, here's one of the things where I think it's really important — and I learned an awful lot from the SSC. I mean, I spend a lot of time on project management, and I think we have a very good track record in general on projects, but in practice — for example, Danny Lehman reported to me with his project reviews.

Thomas:

Sorry. Who is that?

Decker:

Well, Danny Lehman was running the — after Ed Temple, Danny Lehman was the person running all these reviews, and he effectively reported to me, and when he told me there were problems in projects, I mean I really paid attention. Sometimes we had to go to the lab director and say, "Hey, this isn't working. You've got to change your project director." That was not unusual. Yeah, I mean, that exp — If I had SSC to do over again, there are a lot of things that I would have done differently. I don't know what I could've done about the dual-reporting relationship with the federal project manager [Laughter]

Thomas:

That does seem to have stuck with you, yes.

Decker:

Well, that definitely didn't work.

Thomas:

I mean, I wonder about some of these lessons learned. I mean, right now, of course the big project is LBNF/DUNE, and it's an international project and has this LBNF piece and the DUNE piece and they’re both — one is purely international, the other is kind of international. And it seems to me that after SSC, it really got baked into the high-energy physics community: anything you do in the future has to be international. And I'm wondering if in some way that lesson may have been over-learned, or if it's good to have things that way? I'm just curious what your perspective is.

Decker:

Well, international definitely is a big complication. I mean, that's one of the things that you learn — I mean, I was involved in so many international negotiations and organizations and so forth over the years. You think maybe other governments work like the United States? Nope, they don't, and it takes you a while to learn all of that. I mean, that's sort of the government end of it. But international definitely is a complication for projects and you have to really make a hard decision about whether it's worth it. People have different ways of doing business.

Thomas:

Different accounting schemes.

Decker:

Yeah, different accounting. In Europe, they account for projects very differently than we do.

Thomas:

It's my understanding they don't account for manpower or —

Decker:

They don't. They don't account for manpower, and they're more interested in their annual outlay in something like CERN than they are anything else.

Thomas:

Doing policy reporting, I'm struck by the fact that in NASA you can have a $3 billion project and it's definitely just a — well, I mean, it has international contributions, but they're relatively small. It's a NASA project, whereas envisioning something like that within DOE, I mean at least the way they conceived LBNF/DUNE, it definitely had to be international. But they're the same-sized project and so it seems to me there are different standards at different agencies for what's realistic.

Decker:

Yeah. I mean, we had a lot of international involvement in other projects, but it was a U.S. project with contributions from other countries, and that’s much simpler, and we contributed to projects elsewhere. That's a much simpler model than trying to do a truly international project where you've got governance by multiple countries. That's tough. I mean, people have got different budget cycles and different — it took me a long time. I learned a lot in the ITER negotiations about how different countries operate. [Laughter] One of the curious things is that we got along better with the Russians than the Europeans on a lot of the negotiations. One of the differences was that I can make a decision at the negotiating table. The Japanese cannot do that. Everything has to be approved by Tokyo, and so if you'd be in a meeting and something that they hadn't planned on and gotten pre-approval would come up, and you're thinking, "This is a very simple thing. Why can't we get a decision?" Well, it turns out they had to talk to Tokyo before they can make a decision. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Looking at the history of the International Linear Collider, as transferred to being ostensibly centered in Japan, I mean there never is really like a definitive thumbs down on it. There always seem to be, "Well, maybe later," or something like that, and so it's just one of those things that kind of continually percolates over years.

Decker:

It's hugely expensive. It's huge. Yeah, Ray kind of bought into that and I always thought, "No, we're not going to be able to pull this off. This is just too big, too expensive."

Thomas:

When they were thinking about doing it in the U.S. you mean? Yeah. … So, I guess to wrap up then, of course for the past, I guess, 16 years you've been doing consulting. Can you just discuss a little bit what that business is and what sorts of clients you have?

Decker:

Yeah, it kind of varies from client to client, but I've worked with universities, national labs, some small companies, some larger companies. It's been a real variety of clients and it's been a lot of fun, but the type of consulting varies. I've been on a number of advisory committees of labs. I'm not doing any of that right now. On the board of directors for Jefferson Laboratory, I spend a lot of time on that. I do a lot of red team reviews on proposals. It's not a single-PI stuff, it's the larger centers, and that's been pretty interesting. I've got some colleagues that I work with kind of routinely in this stuff and one of the things that I usually wind up — as something I'm supposed to pay attention to are always the management plans. [Laughter]

Thomas:

You must have seen quite a lot of those over time.

Decker:

Yes.

Thomas:

You find that they vary, they’re definitely not like a cookie-cutter sort of exercise, they vary quite a lot in quality and in terms of people —

Decker:

Well, a lot of times you get PIs trying to put these proposals together who have never put together a center proposal and don't really understand what the agencies want to see.

Thomas:

I'm just glancing over my questions list to see if there's anything that I've forgotten. We've discussed testifying before Congress, but I'm just curious, coming from a policy position myself, if there are any particular members of Congress who stand out in your memory as particularly interesting or engaged or hostile or whatever you might want to talk about?

Decker:

Yeah, it was something I enjoyed, actually. There were times when I was doing too many hearings in a short period of time. I did four in three days one time, different subjects, which was not fun. But you had somebody like Bennett Johnston from Louisiana who took a real interest in science and high energy physics, and every year he would have meetings with Burt Richter and Leon Lederman and these people. He was really into it. He was a big supporter of the SSC, of course. I had a great working relationship with the House Appropriations Committee folks, Tom Bevill — that’s going back quite a few years — Tom Bevill and John Myers. When Democrats were in control of Congress, then Tom was the chairman. When Republicans were in charge, John was the chairman. And they were good friends. I mean, I wound up on a number of different occasions having dinner with the two of them and they were just good friends and worked together very well, and that was a great relationship. Usually, John Myers would start telling people I was his science adviser. [Laughter] I wasn't sure that was —

[During the 1990s, Rep. John Myers (R-IN) was the lead Republican on the House Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee and Rep. Tom Bevill (D-AL) was the lead Democrat. The House switched to Republican control in 1995.]

Thomas:

Separation of powers.

Decker:

Yeah, I wasn't sure that was the right thing, [Laughter] but John and I became good friends. I worked with Sen. Domenici quite a bit. Yeah, I had good working relationships with a lot of members of Congress, I'm pleased to say.

Thomas:

Yes, notwithstanding things like the SSC, it seems to me that generally it's a pretty calm area of congressional activity, that there's a lot of bipartisanship and so forth.

Decker:

Yeah, I mean science is fortunate to have bipartisan support for the most part. I mean, there are these differences between the parties that we talked about earlier.

Thomas:

Right. Applied versus basic.

Decker:

Yes, but in general the hearings that I was involved in weren't contentious. I was involved in a couple that were, that's no fun, but yeah, according to the congressional staff I was a pretty decent witness. But I knew my job was to make the committee members look good, and sometimes that was difficult because —

Thomas:

I mean — sorry. Go on.

Decker:

I was just going to say sometimes it's difficult because a member will ask you a question and the question makes no sense. So, how do you make the member look good and what do I say? So, I would think, "Well, I think the member is asking about this and so I'll give this answer," and the member's staring at me like [Laughter] — of course, the question came from the staff anyway. There were a few times when there were members on both sides of the aisle, and god, they would ask questions where I could not figure out what they were talking about.

Thomas:

Well, covering these in a journalistic way, I mean typically the chair or the ranking member will have a couple of points that they want to make and maybe there are one or two interested members of the committee, and then you get like a lot of kind of miscellaneous sorts of questions, and so it seems to me that there's a real art to answering those and —

Decker:

It is. I was okay when I was doing a lot of hearings. And then there was a period where I wasn't doing very much because I actually had a boss, and then I had to go in and do some hearings and I was out of practice. [Laughter] But I’ll tell you one funny story. I think I testified at what might have been the first congressional hearing on climate change. Again, any science hearing I got to go if I was acting, and so it was Tim Wirth, senator from Colorado, who was holding this hearing and he was going off on me because the department wasn't spending enough money on nuclear energy, which of course is carbon-free. I'm sitting there listening to this and Tim Wirth has always been anti-nuclear, so I'm thinking, "Well, this is odd." He goes on and on, and then he gets through and he kind of goes, “I can't believe I just said that." [Laughter] That just cracked me up, but I'll bet you that doesn't show in the Congressional Record, because in those days the record got modified. The senator’s staff —

Thomas:

They could get it struck.

Decker:

— modified the record, and even witnesses could modify the record to some extent, and they stopped that. [Laughter]

Thomas:

Well, now that they're all on video, you know —

Decker:

I had another one time — there used to be a lot more subcommittees of the Science Committee in the House, and I was testifying before Congressman Scheuer from New York, and he was going on and on about the President's Chief of Staff John Sununu. It was something to do with an environmental issue and Scheuer was going on and on and on about this, and he stops and he says to me, he said, "I don't suppose you'd like to comment?" "No, sir." [Laughter]

Thomas:

Sometimes they just have a point they want to make. I mean, they do tend to be kind of staged in a certain way. So, you have your interactions prior to a hearing with the staff or maybe with the member themselves, but —

Decker:

No.

Thomas:

Not really?

Decker:

Most of the time, no. No. I mean, it depends on the committee and the staff, I suppose. I never had that many interactions before hearings.

Thomas:

Okay. You didn't have —

Decker:

One time I —

Thomas:

Did you have a sense of what was coming, like what questions they were interested in asking?

Decker:

Well, no. What you do is you do some — you look at who's on the committee and you figure out what their interests are, and sort of guess what questions they might ask, and so forth. Prepare as best you can. Do murder boards with your staff. I remember one time I was up there when — god, what was his name, a congressman from Texas. He had been a schoolteacher, he was a real character. One of his staff comes to me and he said, "Well, would you like to talk to the Chairman before the hearing?" "Okay," so I go in and this guy starts telling me all kinds of Gary Hart jokes, [Laughter] but that was his nature. He loved to tell stories and jokes and, “well that’s an interesting meeting.” [Laughter] He was a Democrat, too. He switched parties at one point, I think. I think he was still a Democrat when he —

Thomas:

Okay. [Laughter] There are so many from Texas that I'm not sure I can guess which one, but…

Decker:

I’ve forgotten him.

Thomas:

My historical memory isn't that great either.

Decker:

Yeah, it'll come to me. Al Trivelpiece said to me, one time he said, "I have perfect recall," he said, "but I don't promise same-day delivery." [Laughter]

Thomas:

Well, that's the other thing, "I'll have my staff — I’ll get back to you on that particular question." I mean, does that come up quite a bit where they ask you something and you don't know the answer, and so it's like, "Well, I'll submit it later for the written record."

Decker:

Yeah, you do some of that. I tried not to do very much of that, but yeah.

Thomas:

Okay. All right, well, I think that that probably exhausts the questions that I have. Is there anything else that you'd like to add? … Well, this has been very useful. I think it’s given us an excellent tour of 30, 40 years of Department of Energy history. If we have any further questions, I'm sure we can be back in contact, but I think it's very helpful. Thank you very much for your time.

Decker:

Okay. You know, if you have any follow-up questions or whatever, let me know.

Thomas:

All right. Okay. Thanks.