Saturday, October 20, 2012
DoE contractors take a lot of international trips
Anonymously contributed:
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DoE contractors take a lot of international trips
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Lookee here at this. It reports 90,000 contractor international trips over 6 years, with only 100,000 contractors on the payroll. Looks like a lot of contractors get to go on a lot of international trips. Perhaps it is just one of the compensating factors for the salary structure.
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'According to the Department's centralized travel database, the Foreign Travel Management System (FTMS), Federal and contractor employees made approximately 109,000 individual international trips at a cost of about $360 million from Fiscal Year (FY) 2007 through FY 2012— a 6-year period. Consistent with the Department's organizational structure and its significant reliance on contractor assistance, the vast majority of these taxpayer-funded trips, in fact about 85 percent, were taken by contractor employees. This equates to over 90,000 contractor employee foreign travel trips in the period with a cost to the government of just over $300 million.
Despite the sizable expenditure of Federal funds, the Department had not made a concerted effort to reduce contractor international travel costs. In particular, we found that the FTMS was not being fully utilized to identify overall trends in foreign travel, potential wasteful practices, and possible strategies to reduce the Department's international travel expenditures. Further, while the Department implemented a mandatory 30 percent reduction in Federal employee travel, management officials informed us that parallel action had not been taken to manage or control foreign travel by contractors. Based directly on the information sourced from the FTMS, had the Department applied the 30 percent reduction criteria to the international travel costs incurred by its 100,000 contractor workforce, as much as $15 million could be saved each year.'
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/DOE-IG-0872.pdf
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"Further, while the Department implemented a mandatory 30 percent reduction in Federal employee travel, management officials informed us that parallel action had not been taken to manage or control foreign travel by contractors."
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Not true. At LANL management has made it extremely clear that they want little, if any, travel. This includes both domestic and foreign travel and includes travel in support of important operational programs that affect national security (not just research conferences).
In fact, lab travel has been cut so severely that science is now suffering but science has long ceased being an important part of LANL's efforts since LANS took over.
However, do not fear. LANS did find plenty of money to send Director McMillan, Brett Knapp and a bus load of other top executives on a nice "vacation" to Russia last fiscal year. First class all the way, of course!
There are people who abuse this privilege. They are the people in charge of large source of money. It hurt the honest scientist.
And right on the heels of telling Lab staff that travel was being severely curtailed, Charlie crowed about his splendid trip to Russia complete with pictures.
It was an excellent way to reenforce the understanding that LANS management is a privileged class, and the people who actually do the work must know their place at the bottom.
Does Charlie really seriously believe most of the staff would be in awe of his story that the Russian weapons lab staff were in awe of Los Alamos, when many of us were actually stunned by the kick in the teeth we got knowing our big travel savings must have gone to send him and his minions to Russia?
I had a manager who will remain nameless because I do not have a recorder (this would violate rules of conduct and actually against the law in some states), but I have heard a lot of managers over my time refer to conference as "vacations". It is simply their word against mine.
This manager said she or he was going to so and so and having a little vacation with his or her spouse.
Managers are simply above the law and they know it and do not care. You have no power to change it.
You just have to scratch your head sometimes. Is Charlie so tone deaf that he really has no idea how poorly his messages are received by the workforce? Or does he have a circle of advisors that are intent on leading him down the path to early failure? Either way, it's not looking pretty.
I don't see what the problem is. We need more big international trips, like the one Tomas took to China. There are a few other managers still left at LLNL who take an unusually large number of foreign trips each year. One, I think, uses these junkets as a form of therapy (or more likely avoidance from a sad existence).
Either way, your tax dollars at work, helping improve management mental health and morale, while also supporting the travel and entertainment industries globally.
Looking at the numbers, indeed foreign travel looks excessive. I was first thinking about wasteful conference travel but quickly focused my attention on some of the regular program travel exchanges involving lots and lots of people for what amounts to a mostly social event to mix with foreign counterparts. While that social element of exchanges may be an important part of the community, it is not a core essential part. It would ease the financial burden on both sides to change the format of these exchanges or scale them back. I know many enjoy these trips. But sorry, I gotta call a spade a spade, and these trips are of limited value compared to other priorities.
Some of these scientific conferences sure look a lot like vacations. Has anyone looked at how many lab contractors were in England around the time of the Olympics for a technical meeting? Just sayin...
This story may spell trouble for the Labs now that it has run in the Washington paper.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/energy-department-spent-360-million-on-foreign-travel-vast-majority-by-contractors/2012/10/22/5d3dc8b8-1c5c-11e2-ad90-ba5920e56eb3_story.html
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