Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
5/23/2014
Former Carnegie Mellon President Jared Cohon and former Deputy Energy Secretary T.J. Glauthier will chair a nine-member Congressionally mandated Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this week as he announced the members of the panel. Moniz selected the members of the panel from a list of 27 possible candidates submitted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST originally submitted 18, but another nine were needed because of scheduling conflicts). In addition to Cohon and Glauthier, the panel includes: former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, Aerospace Corporation President and CEO Wanda Austin, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Charles Elachi, Yale Engineering and Applied Physics Professor Paul Fleury, former MIT President Susan Hockfield, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dick Meserve, and Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean Cherry Murray, a former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory executive.
Notably, Glauthier and Augustine are serving on the separate Congressionally mandated National Nuclear Security Administration governance panel. “The Energy Department’s national laboratories are a leading force in driving U.S. scientific and technological innovation and advancing the Department’s science, energy, environmental, and national security missions,” Moniz said in a statement. “I want to thank the Commission members for their expertise and look forward to working with them to ensure we leverage the national laboratories’ unique capabilities to fulfill our missions.”
Who Didn’t Make the Cut?
PCAST initially submitted 18 names to Moniz, but scheduling issues limited the number of officials that could serve on the panel, and the group submitted another nine names, which included Glauthier and Fleury. Of the original list of 18 names submitted, those not selected included: former Deputy Energy Secretary Charles Curtis, former DOE Office of Science acting Director Jim Decker, former Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Sigfried Hecker, Manifest Energy CEO Andy Karsner, former New York Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R), former Michigan Congressman Vern Ehlers (R), former DoD Comptroller John Hamre, Tufts University Professor Kelly Gallagher, Xerox Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns, former DuPont Chief Science and Technology Officer Uma Chowdhry, and Chevron Vice President and Chief Technology Officer John McDonald. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy declined to provide the rest of the names submitted to Moniz that were not selected for the panel.
The commission, created by a Senate-drafted provision in the Fiscal Year 2014 omnibus appropriations act, has a broad mandate, as language in the bill tasks it to examine whether the national laboratories are properly aligned with DOE strategic goals, are not “unnecessarily redundant and duplicative,” effectively support current and future national security challenges, are sized correctly, and provide a benefit to other government agencies. The commission is also expected to weigh in on whether there are “opportunities to more effectively and efficiently use the capabilities of the national laboratories, including consolidation and realignment, reducing overhead costs, reevaluating governance models using industrial and academic bench marks for comparison, and assessing the impact of DOE’s oversight and management approach.”
