Skip to main content

Hold Bodman and D'Agostino accountable

Having seen this post on the LANL blog does anyone know what LLNS total cost will be to LLNL and is there anyone who really cares? I wonder if POGO cares since they're so concerned about excessive government spending and misappropriation of tax payers funds, or have we given them all they need to complete their mission.

_______________________

Criminal Malfeasance

A comment from the A recursive post on the future of WFO at LANL post suggests that Tom Udall go after Bodman and D'Agostino with charges of criminal malfeasance. I'd like to point out, however, that the GAO has proven itself to be LANS, LLC-friendly, given that the sum total of action taken by the GAO against LANS over the KSL $41 million 2007 slush fund expose has been a big, fat zero. Nil. Nada.

Not a bad suggestion from Udall's perspective though. It would provide an opportunity for him to grab some political sound bites. Sort of like he did when he told Anastaso to ignore NNSA's WFO guidance, and instead lead LANL in a new initiative to go after renewable energy WFO money.

-Gus

_________________________________________________


4:59 is exactly correct with the clarification that the total cost of LANS to the LANL budget isn't $200M, it's greater than $1B over the 7 year LANS contract. LANS will cost taxpayers over ONE BILLION dollars in nonproductive costs over the UC's previous cost of running LANL.

Congress needs to hold Bodman and D'Agostino accountable for this astounding waste of Federal funding, so astounding that it perhaps rises to the level of criminal malfeasance. Are you listening, Rep. Udall? This is your chance to stand up for your district; ask the GAO to investigate!

Comments

Anonymous said…
I expect things will get a lot worse.

Congress's poor performance on passing a budget for FY08 will look great compared to FY09. With a soon to be out of office Republican president, a Democrat-controlled Congress, the real budget negotiations won't start until after mid-January in 2009.

Look for more and harder cutbacks for DOE and NNSA since Congress has already shown that they don't believe in the DOE mission anymore.

Those who support the labs will be history, so anticipate cuts of $500M or more to NNSA's weapons account and the loss of many more employees as time goes on. By 2014LLNL will be down to ~4000 employees and even that may be to many for the mission.

The fun has only begun and most of us need to stay employeed until age 65 but who is going to want you as you get older.

Popular posts from this blog

Plutonium Shots on NIF.

Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...

Trump is to gut the labs.

The budget has a 20% decrease to DOE office of science, 20% cut to NIH. NASA also gets a cut. This will  have a huge negative effect on the lab. Crazy, juts crazy. He also wants to cut NEA and PBS, this may not seem like  a big deal but they get very little money and do great things.

LLNL un-diversity

Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it.  Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!