Another senior official has departed the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as of this week.
John Tapia, LANL’s acquisition service management deputy division leader, according to his LinkedIn profile, managed a staff of 150 people with an annual operating budget of $16 million. He is no longer employed by the laboratory after a tenure reportedly dating to 1988. His exit, without explanation, was confirmed by a LANL spokesperson on Thursday. Tapia is also president of the Jemez Mountain Electric Cooperative Board of Trustees.
The departure follows an earlier exit this year of a senior manager who was Tapia’s supervisor during various periods of his employment, LANL Executive Director Richard Marquez. Marquez was reported to have left the laboratory, and a nearly $500,000 a year job, without notice in February.
Both men had been discussed in relation to laboratory procurement scandals in past years. These disruptions led to a change in lab directors in 2003 and 2005, followed by a change to a profit-making public-private partnership in 2006.
LANL recruited former Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Glenn Walp to bring some integrity to internal investigations, but he was summarily fired along with his associate Steven Doran within a few months of starting the job. During congressional hearings in 2003, Walp cited Marquez and Tapia among a group of several lab managers who “attempted to cover up, change and conceal information from our office.”
In his own congressional testimony, Marquez denied wrongdoing in the case, and also supported Tapia. However, he admitted that “we prescribed a tune-up when an overhaul was probably required.”
The Department of Energy has said the lab’s management and operations contract, held by Los Alamos National Security through September 2017, will be put to bid. The consortium, which has held the contract since 2006, consists of the University of California, BWXT Government Group, Bechtel, and AECOM subsidiary URS. It has been criticized for a series of operational and safety failures, including being the source of a container of radioactive material that spewed open at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014, forcing the facility to halt waste storage operations.
