Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Any budget news?

Anonymous wants to know who/what is getting funded and who/what is getting cut.
Any news?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

See: www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/nonproliferation/articles/fy2008_approps_nuclear_nonpro_highlights.pdf

Highlights:
- RRW is ZEROed
- $270M new money for Non-Proliferation, includes:
• an additional $60 million in “proliferation detection to expand research in critical research and development for high-risk, high return nuclear detection capabilities”
• an additional $20 million for the implementation of a sustained research and development capacity in nuclear detection and nuclear materials security.
• an additional $20.5 million for nuclear explosion monitoring.

- National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center: $15 million (down from the FY2008 budget
request of $16.9 million and up from FY2007 spending of $13.3 million) for nuclear forensics research to improve the scientific and technical capability to identify the source, nature and use of nuclear materials.

Based on these firm numbers, shouldn't we be focusing on building up the nuclear non-proliferation program at LLNL rather than over-hyping the nuclear forensics area? Why would there ever be a large investment in learning about "after the fact"? Isn't it a better investment to attempt to stop the event from happening?

Anonymous said...

Well I don't have any general budget news - other than the fact that the continuing resolution means we're stuck at 2 years ago budgets until at least march.

I just have a few LDRD related news and rumor. It seems the lab is spreading the LDRD even thinner than in previous years. One of my ER accounts just got halved. They say it's fine to cut the deliverables too. They are delusional enough to think that the deliverables that I write down are more important than completing the real aims of the project!

Someone else I know had their ER essentially cut in half although oddly they told him he was getting 100% of what he asked for. Seemingly they just had the wrong dollar amount written down in the first place. Unbelievable!

And it seems they intend to fund as many SIs as possible at a low level rather than make proper investments in a few larger projects. This is known as the the "s**t at the fan" approach. It's clear that the management is even more clueless and even more scared to commit to anything than they've ever been.

LLNS Contract discussion

SUGGEST NEW TOPICS HERE

Submit candidates for new topics here only. Stay on topic with National Labs' related issues. All submissions are screened first for ...