The Department of Energy’s (DOE) laboratory-directed research and development (LDRD) program supports positions that are considered part of the national laboratories’ “workforce pipeline for recruitment,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a newly released audit.
The LDRD program promotes “creative and innovative” projects that are meant to “maintain the vitality of the laboratories’ defense-related scientific disciplines,” the report noted. The GAO said that of the total 28,143 positions at the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore national labs in fiscal 2015, 4,556 of them, or 16.2 percent, were supported by LDRD funding for some amount of time. Of those, 1,015 were supported by the funding for a majority of their time, meaning at least 50 percent or more of their time at work was paid for by LDRD; and of those, 167 were supported by LDRD funding for the majority of their time from fiscal 2012-2014, it said.
The GAO noted that of the 1,015, 38.9 percent were researchers and 54.8 percent were students or postdoctoral researchers, “positions that laboratories told us were part of their workforce pipeline for recruitment.” Of the 167, 74.3 percent were researchers and 15 percent were students or postdoctoral researchers. Basic science and exploratory research conducted through LDRD has long been considered key in attracting new technical talent to the national labs, where an aging workforce has become a concern regarding continuity of knowledge within the nuclear enterprise.
The DOE’s contractor-operated laboratories spent over $13 billion in fiscal 2015 on research and development in support of nuclear security, energy, environment, and science programs; $542 million of that – about 4.2 percent of the labs’ total operating budgets – went to LDRD programs, the report said. It also found that the funding cap for LDRD programs – 6 percent of the national security activities’ funding – remained the same throughout the DOE complex, but that they were higher than the cap on similar programs at Department of Defense laboratories, which were at 3 percent of total funding.
