Bodman Disbands DOE advisory board

Samuel Bodman, secretary of the US Department of Energy, has disbanded the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB), DOE’s highest-level independent scientific advisory panel. Several weeks ago, after talking with his senior advisers within DOE, Bodman sent “thank-you” letters announcing the end of SEAB to the board’s 28 members, which include two Nobel laureates in physics.

The independent advisory board is no longer needed, said DOE spokesman Craig Stevens, because the “course for the department has been pretty well set by White House priorities.” With the administration’s unveiling its Advanced Energy Initiative and the broader American Competitiveness Agenda, Bodman “believes that, for at least the foreseeable future, our course is set,” Stevens said. Because of that, he continued, “there is nothing that the secretary wanted from the board.”

SEAB member Burton Richter, director emeritus at SLAC, said he learned the board was being disbanded when he read about it recently in the news. “Then I got a letter [from Bodman] thanking me for my service,” he said.

Richter didn’t bemoan the end of the board, saying he believes it “became useless” when DOE’s attorney put restrictions on how SEAB could deliver its controversial nuclear-weapons infrastructure report last year. In the past, Richter said, dissenting opinions were allowed and reports could simply be presented. With the weapons-complex report, which recommends the immediate design of a reliable replacement warhead, “we couldn’t just [present] the report, we had to endorse it,” Richter said.

Those members who didn’t endorse the report’s findings were put in an uncomfortable position, he said. The new policy changed the nature of the board and “wrecked it,” he said. Richter said he didn’t know of a direct connection between the problems with the weapons report and the decision to end SEAB.

Stevens said disbanding the board is not “exclusionary,” and that Bodman will still be getting advice, “solicited and unsolicited,” from scientists and others both inside and outside the department. “He appreciates the efforts and expertise of the board, and if there is a reason to reconstitute it for any particular study or research endeavor, the secretary has agreed to do that,” Stevens said.

SEAB was established in 1990 as a replacement for the Energy Research Advisory Board, which began in 1978. There are several lower-level outside advisory boards for DOE science programs, and Stevens said they will continue.