With Domenici’s departure, DOE labs to lose their top Hill advocate

Many lawmakers will be retiring when Congress adjourns at the end of this year, but none will be missed more by the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories than Pete Domenici (R-NM).

The veteran senator, often referred to within the laboratory system as “St. Pete,” cited his diagnosis of a rare degenerative brain disease in announcing this past summer that he wouldn’t seek a seventh term in 2008.

“Almost everyone in the national lab system owes an enormous debt to Senator Domenici for caring about all of the science that is done at the labs,” said Bruce Tarter, former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “At the moment, he’s almost irreplaceable.”

“He was much more than the savior of Los Alamos,” echoed former Los Alamos director Siegfried Hecker. “He was the patron saint for science and technology in the US.”

Unparalleled influence

A combination of seniority, key committee chairmanships, forceful personality, political horse-trading skills, and what many who have known him describe as a genuine interest in DOE’s programs have given Domenici a degree of influence over the department and its labs that is unparalleled for a decade or more. While a few other lawmakers, notably former House Science Committee chairman George E. Brown Jr, also have been ardent science backers, none were as well-situated as Domenici to provide for the labs. Since the mid-1990s the senator either has chaired or held the ranking minority member position on the Committee on Appropriations sub-panel that funds DOE. As its chairman, he authored the Senate’s versions of the annual energy and water development spending bills for fiscal years 1996 through 2007 (with the exception of FY 2002 and FY 2003 when Democrats briefly seized control of the Senate). Domenici has used his position to unabashedly shower funding on the labs—always ensuring that New Mexico’s own Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories got first dibs.

Although his clout has diminished with this year’s Democratic takeover of Congress, the clubby culture of Appropriations provides that the minority’s needs and requests will be considered in near-bipartisan fashion. Domenici remains the senior minority member of the panel, a post he also holds on the full Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, the panel with jurisdiction over all of DOE’s nonweapons programs. Fellow New Mexican Jeff Bingaman (D) now wields the gavel there.

No state is more dependent on federal research laboratories and dollars than sparsely populated and economically challenged New Mexico. But while Domenici’s ability to secure more funding for his home-state labs is legendary, the largesse spilled over to the rest of the lab system, and DOE’s science programs, as well.

“Everyone says he was the patron saint of the New Mexico labs, but in supporting them, he supported all parts of DOE,” said William Madia, who just retired as the overseer of the four nonweapons DOE labs managed by Battelle Memorial Institute. “It was the rising tide [that] lifts all boats.”

Backed genome project

Few lawmakers have the enthusiasm for science that Domenici displayed on his frequent visits to the labs, noted Tarter. “You would see visible excitement,” particularly when the senator was reviewing biological research activities, he said.

Indeed, Domenici has been credited with providing the political backing for DOE to initiate the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s, when the biomedical research establishment at the National Institutes of Health scoffed at the notion of sequencing the entire 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Hecker recalled how as a rookie in 1986 he had approached Domenici with the idea for the project. Although the senator liked the idea, he insisted on first hearing from the pharmaceutical industry and academia before throwing his support behind it. “It was a great act of statesmanship for him to bring in the other communities,” Hecker said.

James Decker, the long-serving ex-deputy director of DOE’s Office of Science, pointed out that Domenici also was behind the initiation of an ongoing DOE research program on the health effects of low-dose radiation.

Domenici also stood up for the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, which allocates 6% of each laboratory’s budget for R&D programs of the director’s choosing. A periodic target of budget hawks over the years, LDRD is deemed essential for maintaining the scientific health of the labs, Decker asserted.

The Battelle-run labs, which include Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Brookhaven, have benefited from Domenici’s support for nuclear nonproliferation R&D and from the funding he doled out to establish multiple “nanoscience centers,” Madia said. The senator’s backing for Oak Ridge’s Spallation Neutron Source scientific user facility was “invaluable” to its completion, he said. Common to each of the programs are the significant roles that New Mexico’s labs, particularly Los Alamos, played in them.

Seen as parochial

But one former Appropriations staffer who worked with Domenici maintained that the senator’s support for the labs and DOE science extended only as far as his home state. The staffer, who declined to be named, said he hadn’t met a lawmaker during his 35 years on Capitol Hill who “was as strongly parochial—mired and bogged down in his own backyard” as Domenici, “even when it was not necessarily the right policy for the country as a whole.” He pointed to the long-stalled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project, which Domenici, despite his staunch support for nuclear power, did little to advance.

Domenici did ensure that the budget for the nuclear weapons program remained stable throughout the ongoing period in which no warheads are being built and no new design efforts begun. But his strong backing of DOE’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship program, which is supposed to validate the viability and safety of the existing nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing, didn’t prevent him from threatening to kill one of its key elements, the National Ignition Facility, as the cost of the 192-beam laser ballooned from $1 billion to $4 billion. Hecker said he was once asked directly by Domenici whether he should try to terminate NIF. He advised against it.

“It was a lot harder for us to get the more controversial projects through,” Tarter admitted when asked about NIF, “but they’re still on track.”

Hecker credited Domenici with writing legislation to spur commercialization of technologies from the labs and for initiating multiple programs designed to secure nuclear weapons materials and find new jobs for former weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union. There, too, the benefits to New Mexico’s labs and economy were obvious.

“I always considered him to be an incredibly dedicated statesman who also knew how to take care of his constituents,” Hecker said.

A blow to labs

But whether he was motivated by statesmanship or parochialism, the loss of an advocate of Domenici’s stature does not bode well for the labs in the coming years. Although a handful of lawmakers, including Livermore’s local representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), are broadly supportive of the labs and their programs, Tarter lamented, “No one is logarithmically within the same range” of influence as Domenici. Bingaman, though also a strong supporter of the labs and science generally, lacks the critical seat on Appropriations and has “a different personal style,” as Hecker diplomatically put it. Scandal-tainted Larry Craig (R-ID), an Appropriations member from a state with a significant DOE lab presence, was in line to succeed Domenici as ranking member on the energy committee until announcing he won’t seek reelection in 2008.

Madia called Domenici’s position at the apex of energy and DOE budgetary policy a “singularity,” and his retirement will be a “huge loss” for the labs. “We haven’t seen any strong leaders emerge with the same sort of long-term understanding of science.”

“It will be difficult times for Los Alamos, New Mexico, and DOE,” Hecker said. Domenici’s retirement comes at a time when the labs already are “under enormous siege and fighting for their survival.” Currently undergoing painful downsizings and preoccupied with day-to-day management crises, the weapons labs haven’t had the opportunity to develop the long-term vision and strategy they need to justify their continuation in the post-cold war era, he said.

“[Domenici] was able to buy the labs some time to allow them to regenerate. The immediate impact of his departure,” Hecker said, “will be to not buy [the labs] more time.”