By George Lobsenz
In a move that lab officials have acknowledged was partly tied to the Energy Department’s recent hiring of a new operating contractor for the nuclear weapons facility, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced last week announced it was laying off 440 scientists and up to 100 other workers due to shrinking federal dollars and rising costs.
In an all-hands speech to lab employees Tuesday, Livermore Lab Director George Miller said the cuts were “painful but necessary” to assure the lab could operate within tighter budget constraints.
The Livermore layoffs follow a similar down-sizing at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, the department’s two other nuclear weapons research facilities. Los Alamos in January announced voluntary buy-outs of 570 employees, averting layoffs, and Sandia also has shed hundreds of employees.
Altogether, Livermore and Los Alamos have reduced their workforces by some 2,000 employees apiece over the last two years. Sandia officials say they have only lost 500-600 jobs because the lab has managed to pick up other work to replace nuclear weapons missions that have been cut back.
While lab officials attribute the layoffs to budget realities, Miller surprised senators at an April hearing by asserting that the most recent round of job cuts at his facility were largely related to the recent changeover of the lab’s management from the University of California to Lawrence Livermore National Security (LLNS), a consortium led by the university and Bechtel Corp.
In testimony before the Senate energy and water appropriations subcommittee April 16, Miller said the shift from the university–a tax-exempt, nonprofit institution–to the private sector consortium sharply raised costs because LLNS as a private sector entity had to pay taxes and had higher medical benefit and pension costs than the university. He said those unexpected transition costs, along with inflation, had resulted in an additional $200 million in expenses, forcing the layoffs.
A similar change in management was made at Los Alamos, where DoE replaced the University of California with a consortium led by the university and Bechtel to succeed the university.
DoE officials said that by bringing in Bechtel’s operational expertise, the consortiums would be better able to tackle financial management, security and safety problems that have plagued Livermore and Los Alamos under the university. Under the consortiums, the university was to focus on research and Bechtel on operations.
At the April 16 hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) expressed concern that the latest layoffs at the labs were the result of “unintended consequences” from the Bush administration’s decision to hire the consortiums at Livermore and Los Alamos. She and other subcommittee members asked for the labs to submit detailed reports to Congress on the unexpected cost increases associated with the management changes at the labs.