The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) still has not decided how much funding it will steer to an upcoming contract to keep the JASON group of independent science advisers on life support through most of January, or whether the agency wants to rely on the group over the long term.
A spokesperson told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor on April 25 that the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency had neither “finalized the estimate for the contract’s value,” nor ruled out the possibility of dropping JASON after Jan. 31, 2020: the date through which the agency expects to keep the group of experts on the job.
JASON refers both to a group of civilian scientists advisers and to individual members of the group, which historically was funded by a Department of Defense contract with the nonprofit MITRE Corp. During a congressional hearing earlier this month, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) broke the news that the Pentagon, which has funded JASON since the late 1950s, was dropping the group’s contract.
In a procurement note released last week, the NNSA said it expects to award JASON a new contract in June. The group’s current contract expired this week, the agency said in the note.
JASON is working on, or plans to work on, three studies for the NNSA. The topics of those studies, the agency has said, are: plutonium aging, nuclear detonation detection, and cybersecurity of operating equipment.
The agency has not yet begun “market research” that will determine whether it keeps JASON on past the end of January, the spokesperson said.
MITRE Corp. brought in more than $1.5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2017 according to an audit of the group’s 2017 tax returns. The JASON contract that year accounted for only about $6 million of the amount: less than half a percent of total annual revenue for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2017. That included work for the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.
MITRE gets nearly all of its revenue from managing Federally Funded Research and Development Centers: essentially, independently operated government laboratories and think tanks dedicated to long-term research on national security, cybersecurity, aviation, and other topics.
JASON scientists have done many studies for the NNSA, some of which the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists has curated online. A 2007 JASON study found that many of the plutonium pits that power the first stage of U.S. nuclear weapons have an expected lifespan of around 100 years.
