Obtaining higher efficiency and greater cooperation remains ellusive at Department of Energy
SEP 17, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024679
Science : Yesterday morning the US Department of Energy’s advisory board met to hear a briefing by the department’s undersecretary for science, Steven Koonin. Koonin’s topic was the effort launched by the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to improve efficiency and cooperation in the department’s sprawling research enterprise. Science‘s Eli Kintisch attended the briefing and reports that
After a year and a half on the job, however, [Koonin has] found the R&D capabilities of DOE “far richer than I supposed.” But the job of making the department’s various branches cooperate, he said, was “much more difficult than I expected.”
Koonin cited the department’s bureaucracy and the difficulty of digesting millions of dollars of stimulus funding as the chief obstacles.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
