Director Charlie McMillan
In a memo sent to all employees Friday, Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Charlie McMillan announced that he will call an all hands meeting at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday.
On the agenda is information regarding the budget.
In early December, with LANL facing a potential budget shortfall of $200 million, McMillan formed a panel to oversee spending cuts. He appointed Lab Executive Director Rich Marquez to head up the Laboratory Integrated Stewardship Council, created to make staffing and spending decisions and approvals “in order to keep Laboratory spending in line with the budget realities we face.”
The panel also included leaders from the Lab’s five principal directorates: Alan Bishop from Science, Technology and Engineering; Bret Knapp from Weapons; Terry Wallace from Global Security; Carl Beard from Operations and Business and Paul Henry from Capital Projects.
McMillan said at the time that the panel would operate through the end of Fiscal Year 2012 and would make decisions for all hiring and procurements over $100,000.
“The LISC is tasked with bringing prudent financial management to our current budget situation while at the same time ensuring that we continue to meet our national security mission and research and development assignments,” he said in the memo.
McMillan explained that the purpose of the panel was to mitigate the impact of the uncertain budget situation facing the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Lab.
“I recognize that this will require us to start making harder choices in our spending actions, but it is necessary in our current economic climate,” McMillan wrote. “We must be aggressive in our management of costs early in the fiscal year to avoid having to take more drastic actions later.”
Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS) has been the managing and operating contractor at Los Alamos since 2006. In its annual performance evaluation report released last month, LANS received 89 percent of the available performance-based fee from NNSA for managing and operating LANL in fiscal year 2011. The fiscal year 2010 score was 88 percent.
NNSA also awarded LANS an additional contract year, extending the current agreement through Sept. 30, 2017.
