LANL CUTS GET POLITICAL

There are signs that budget rollbacks and jobs cuts at Los Alamos National Laboratory are entering the political arena, with an email blast to reporters from Republican Senate candidate Heather Wilson framing the problem in terms that suggest the partisan battle to come. Wilson, who served on the National Security Council and represented Albuquerque in the House of Representatives, is the leading Republican senatorial candidate to replace Democrat Jeff Bingaman, who is retiring at the end of his current term. In the missive sent by her staff, Wilson accused the Obama Administration of reneging on its promises to fund nuclear modernization in exchange for Senate support for the New START Treaty, an issue with an acutely New Mexican angle after the decision to defer construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility. With the CMRR-NF decision still fresh, the lab said Tuesday it was hoping to cut 400-800 jobs through voluntary buyouts. That effort “will affect a lot of families and businesses in Los Alamos and Rio Arriba County,” Wilson said. “I’m afraid it is only the beginning. I expect there will be hundreds more jobs lost unless we change direction.” 

She also took a shot at the federal bureaucracy, in terms that echoed the recent findings of a National Academy of Sciences lab review panel. “One of the best ways to provide for our defense needs would be to reduce excessive red tape from Washington and move more of the budget into programs. The President’s budget includes almost $500 million a year in National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) administrative costs. We would be better off as a nation if most of this money were moved to programs like CMRR at Los Alamos. Having helped create the NNSA as a semi-autonomous agency attached to DOE, it is now clear to me that the change did not take hold. The priority should be science—not paying for layers of bureaucracy.”