1990s panel blunted 'surplus labs' claim
In 1994 the Soviet Union had dissolved and the Cold War was considered over. A resulting and obviously debatable line of thought held that the national laboratory system, which was considered by many a Cold War appliance for winning the nuclear arms race, was obsolete.
Even less informed ideas were gaining traction, such as applying military base-closing criteria to the labs, or arbitrarily reducing the system by 25 percent. In that environment, the then Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, appointed a committee, formally named the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Task Force on Alternative Futures for the DOE National Laboratories, to observe the labs' actual missions and activities and propose options for future management and directions.
Robert Galvin, the retired CEO of Motorola, which was the winner of the first Malcolm Baldrige Award, was appointed to lead the task force. Other heavy hitters on the 19-member team included Richard Lester of MIT; Shirley A. Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in theoretical physics; and Nobel Laureate Henry Kendall.
With the prospect of labs on the chopping block ORNL took the Galvin Commission dead seriously. To understand why, it would be useful to consider the Lab in the early '90s. The newest major facility was the High Temperature Materials Laboratory, built in 1987. Most other facilities were built in the 1950s or '60s. What is now the east campus quad and its surrounding buildings was a parking lot, as was the current location of the Chemical & Materials Sciences Building. A rusting array of Quonset huts was a central campus landmark and served as offices for several organizations, as did the creaky and raccoon-ridden Building 1000 on the west campus. Both are long since demolished.
The Advanced Neutron Source, ORNL's proposed research reactor anchor facility, was in budgetary peril as its cost climbed toward $3 billion while nuclear reactors remained politically unpopular. The ANS was, in fact, like the mammoth Superconducting Super Collider project, about to be cancelled. At the time the Spallation Neutron Source site was a pristine ridgetop woodland -- the SNS itself wasn't even an idea at Oak Ridge.
The Laboratory leadership felt that, if there was hit list for eliminating DOE facilities, ORNL might be vulnerable due to its age and perceived fuzziness of mission. What wasn't apparent, however, were emerging strengths in basic materials science, neutron science and scientific computing.
But ORNL Director Al Trivelpiece also saw it as an opportunity. "In the past, committees of this type have become salesmen for the national laboratories after they had developed an understanding of their capabilities," Trivelpiece said. Associate Director Jim Stiegler observed the Galvin group would be "an activist committee," many of who "support the labs but will look at us critically."
Trivelpiece organized a Mock Galvin Task Group to prepare for the Galvin Commission's scrutiny. The group of Lab managers also included former Director Herman Postma, who was only too happy to provide input, and National Medal of Technology winner Bill Manly, a figure revered by tech-transfer acolytes.
The Laboratory also prepared a self-assessment based on the Baldrige awards and defined "core competencies." Ten were identified, organized under four technical foundations -- Physics, Chemical and Materials Sciences; Biological, Environmental and Social Sciences; Engineering Sciences; and Computational Sciences and Informatics. With the additions of neutron sciences and global security, those foundations resemble today's Lab Agenda.
Visit and report. The committee members who arrived on August 18, 1994, were Galvin; Lester; leadership consultant Bob Boyland; Linda Capuano, founding member of Conductus, a superconducting tech firm; Cornell's (later Louisiana State University's) Lynn Jelinski; Rensselaer Medal for Mathematics winner Daniel Kerlinsky; and former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Herbert York. The group went through a packed day of presentations and tours and a closed discussion that focused -- laboriously, it was reported -- on missions and core competencies.
The commission's report, issued in early 1995, called for a new scheme of managing the labs, which were hobbled, it said, by "excessive micromanagement" by Congress and DOE. The Galvin report called for the government to "corporatize" the labs, which entailed being managed by an independent nonprofit corporation with a presidentially appointed board of trustees. Galvin predicted lab budgets could save as much as 30 to 60 percent under such a system. There was precedent in the form of Amtrak, TVA and the U.S. Enrichment Corporation.
The commission recommended a focus on basic research, energy and environmental research and national security, but also advocated moving away from cooperative R&D partnerships with industry, which they found to be "unfocused."
The commission's criticism of micromanagement was popular with the research community, but O'Leary and others were unconvinced that corporatization was workable. DOE's laboratory management has mostly remained with the government owned, contractor operated system ever since.
For ORNL, the exercise was valuable. The Laboratory was compelled to look at its future and its relevance to emerging missions. "We did a lot of things that I believe did strengthen us as a laboratory," said Stiegler, who led the preparations. "The report indicates that they developed a pretty good understanding of us."
Indeed, the Galvin Report observed, "the laboratories research role is part of an essential, fundamental cornerstone for continuing leadership by the United States" -- a realization that has been arrived at by others several times since 1994, as was their observation that the public was generally unaware of the labs' scientific prowess.
