Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s nuclear-weapons acquisition czar in the Donald Trump administration, was appointed to fill one of four slots on a new commission charged with scrutinizing the Defense Department’s budgeting process, according to a congressional press release.
The leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees each were allowed to nominate one person to serve on the new Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform, created by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2010.
An employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory was busted by the DOE Inspector General (IG) for classifying documents without any authority to do so, the IG wrote in a report published this week.
According to the report, the employee, under the impression that he was an unofficial derivative classifier/reviewing official marked up five documents over the course of a year. The Inspector General stepped in when somebody complained that the offending employee had marked a document as unclassified controlled nuclear information in 2020. Some lab organizations, the IG said, decided to unofficially appoint their own derivative classifier/reviewing officials because they felt there were not enough such people on the lab’s official list.
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved John Plumb’s nomination to be assistant secretary of defense for space policy, a recently created Pentagon role with some responsibility for nuclear weapons programs, including coordination of the Nuclear Posture Review.
The full Senate had not scheduled a confirmation vote for Plumb as of Friday afternoon. In his confirmation hearing, Plumb personally opposed a “categorical” no-first-use-of-nuclear-weapons policy for the U.S., though he pedaled softer about whether it ought to be the policy of the U.S. that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack from an adversary. Biden nominated Plumb in August.
The Sandia National Laboratories and the Los Alamos National Laboratories had early dismissals and stay-at-home days this week as a gargantuan winter storm lumber on a northeasterly path through the continental U.S.
Sandia sent folks home early on Wednesday. The same day, Los Alamos called off work for non-mission essential activities. The Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, frozen solid by last year’s infamous ice storm, had a delayed opening on Thursday but escaped damage on the scale of last year’s blast.
