October 07, 2014

Stanford Proposing Major Lab Governance Pilot Program for SLAC

By ExchangeMonitor

Stanford University is proposing a contracting pilot program that would dramatically reset the Department of Energy’s relationship with its national laboratories, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Board of Overseers Chairman Bill Madia told a Congressional panel examining the effectiveness of DOE’s labs yesterday. Speaking at a meeting of the panel in Alexandria, Va., Madia said Stanford was interested in opening up discussions with DOE on a “hybrid” contracting model for SLAC that would combine the “best attributes” of less-restrictive cooperative agreements that are often used on smaller facilities and the current management and operating contracts utilized by the Department of Energy. The hybrid approach would serve as a pilot for the national laboratory system, Madia said. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has expressed frustration with the current contracting model governing the labs, and three separate Congressionally mandated studies are underway looking at the labs or lab governance.

Madia also serves on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Task Force on DOE National Laboratories, and he said Moniz approached the panel two months ago asking for bold ideas. “Everyone wants to do something big and bold,” Madia said. “We think this is big and bold. This is not on the margins. This would be a major reset.” Details of exactly what the new model (which Madia dubbed CMOA, for Cooperative Management and Operating Agreement) would look like would have to be negotiated with DOE, but he suggested that Stanford would run SLAC using its own standards rather than having to “contort itself” to DOE guidelines and regulations. The experiment would run two or three years, Madia suggested, allowing time for it to be fully evaluated. “We want this to be a very robust experiment with a lot of people looking at it,” Madia said. “At the end we need to write a lessons learned and say, ‘Is this a go or not?’ ”

He acknowledged that answer might be different for some of the more complex national laboratories, like Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, and even more complicated for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s three nuclear weapons labs. Questions of fee, liability, risk, and how to deal with some federal acquisition regulations are likely to prove challenging to work through, Madia said. “We believe we can go up the food chain from the simple science labs,” Madia said, adding: “Hopefully after a couple of years, we’ve run this experiment, we’re trying this, and we’ll have some better insights on how it might be applicable to the more complex laboratories.”

Comments are closed.