There has been some rumors for the past few months of a voluntary separation or layoffs at LANL. On the face of it they do not seem very likely as Mason said budget wise things look good. However Mason also said that the lab needs to reduce indirect costs. I guess this has something to do with fear of Doge and reduction of overheard rates. NSF and NIH have been seen as having way to high of overhead so it seems like DOE/NNSA labs could be next. In fact there was story the other day about DOE money overhead rates needing to be cut (see link below).
This is what I think may actually be possible. DOE/NNSA will be told you need to reduce overheard or indirect costs , so they will not be able to put everybody on direct costs so they will have to let people go one way or another. Indirect costs is of course management , admins, outreach and such but also LDRD.
Here is the link on DOE cutting university overheard rates to 15%. It could be that the will do the same for NNSA. I doubt an overheard rate of only 15% is feasible because we do not have students paying tuition but they could still ask for a big cut in overheard at the NNSA labs. 50% of the lab budget is indirect right now if we have to cut 25% of our overhead rate than a layoff of 10-15% of the lab workforce could be possible. Of course it also means that LANL looks horrible because for the past 6 years we have been told to hire, hire , hire. Interview 50, hire 50 and grow. There was even some voices who said that we should not get ahead of ourselves because we do know what the next administration may want.
https://www.science.org/content/article/energy-department-cuts-university-overhead-rates-to-15-on-research-grants
17 comments:
Let’s be honest. LANL management overhead is insanely high. Most upper managers produce nothing and provide no genuine services. They are parasites.
Honestly, I welcome a massive reduction in overhead costs. First, it's very difficult to convince sponsors to fund a program when they can go to Lockheed or Lincoln Labs or Sandia and pay a lot less for the same or better results. Second, we actually pay twice for overhead, which mostly goes to hire an army of regulatory compliance and safety people. You pay once for their salaries, and then you pay again when they slow your progress to a crawl. Finally, less overhead necessarily means less BS to deal with. If LANL cuts costs, performance will actually increase.
4/15/2025 1:11 PM
I agree but I think they run into all sorts of violations if you cut " army of regulatory compliance and safety people." I think you need to change the rules and regulations of NNSA before you change this. The mass overheard is driven by crazy rules. If they violate a rule it just costs huge amounts of money. There is huge bloat in the system but unless some higher ups change some of the rules, regulations and so on I do not see how you get rid of it.
1:11 is spot on. You could literally fire half the people at Los Alamos and double productivity.
Actually, the new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, has already started doing this. He recently implemented a new rule to provide streamlined permitting and reduced regulatory burden for construction projects. It was on the LANL news and home page. Plus, there is talk he will RIF 40% of DOE, so I think the stubborn Biden/Obama holdovers will be seeking a new line of work and won't be here to stop him.
I heard in a group meeting directly from a program lead that NNSA asked for a few million dollars back from some of the LEP programs.
I have doubts on the whole thing. Suppose they do get rid of 40% of the workforce, who would that be? Would they really get rid of dead wood and bureaucrats? Even if they did that in 2 to 4 years when the Dems are back in power they could have mandate to hire everyone back like some kind reparations for what Trump did to you. We will have lawyer adds all over TV "Did get fired between 2025 and 2026, well under the new AOC law you maybe be entitled to compensation and return of work as a victim of political discrimination"
I see lots of ways of this going wrong. However if they randomly did get rid of half the workforce and insisted the rest people work 8 hours a day I think it would not be that different. You have have do some reorganization but I doubt you would see much drop in actual work done. The big thing I notice and this is even well before Covid is the lack of people working their hours.
It is likely there already exists EIT lists (6-12 month layoff conveyor belt) at the labs or have tabled targeted employee names in closed meetings.
I hope the labs will sincerely review past EIT tragedies, and move to treat employees with the dignity and respect they deserve.
Mason was pretty clear that we aren't having a layoff this FY, but I would expect one in FY26 unless something changes fast, probably by Q2 of FY26. Lots of people are underfunded this year and because LANL can't bank funds, there isn't much of a cushion to continue that for very much longer. Mason basically said as much when he mentioned that a lot of folks will have to either move over to weapons or AI or find the door.
Meanwhile LANL currently has 326 job openings posted.
When I worked at LLNL, there were advertise job openings where the candidate was already selected. It was either someone from the inside or a friend or family member of an LLNL employee. The only serious true openings were for a scientist.
True, if it's not a PhD scientist position, then it's most likely already been filled by somebody's relative in Espanola. When interacting with the support staff, it's very obvious that everybody knows each other and most of them are related.
At LANL even managers are mostly inside picks that everybody knows is going to be picked. Everybody complains about having this long drawn out searchers and interviews and they just choose the person who we already know they wanted.
For the support staff I have heard that they're unofficial Dons in Espanola that get you the job in Los Alamos. It is pretty much village politics.
The mere notion that HR is somehow there to uphold the law or secure fairness in LANL hiring decisions is patently absurd. They should be among the very first employees fired by DOGE. They produce nothing but dishonesty.
DOGE is illegitimate. Anything they do is illegal while Congress is asleep.
“For the support staff I have heard that they’re unofficial Dons in Espanola” that makes sense as what’s going on.
Livermore is losing support staff due to wages for the support staff not keeping up with the Tech wages / housing costs. A few of my Techs/ machinists that supported my projects were in this situation and I told them to apply at LANL and they all never got a reply and ended up leaving DOE. Meanwhile we have a backlog of projects waiting on classified manufacturing support. While I have better luck getting support from LANL than SMMF this is affecting the programs. greatly. Meanwhile still waiting on SNL and KC for delivery as well, so this is a complex wide problem now. The director at LLNL just said her idea was to use AI and AM to deliver manufacturing support.. I guess she worked on a different tolerance band than our NNSA requirements.
"LLNL just said her idea was to use AI and AM to deliver manufacturing support.. I guess she worked on a different tolerance band than our NNSA requirements."
At LANL the manages keep going on this weird AI mantra that it will do all of science, and save the lab, speed things up by 100 fold. So far nothing, I get the feeling they really have no idea what AI is and think that if it can write a mindless empty memo faster that it must be able to do everything. It is off the wall seeing them talk about AI and getting everything wrong. It is just repeats of the what you see on CNN which lacks depth, is just crazy wrong, not AI. For example they keep saying quantum computing is AI. Not AI, that protein folding was solved by ChatGP, protein folding was a solved and the results they are talking about are not even a language model. It just goes on and on. Now even the LLNL lab director is saying this crap?
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