In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Energy has quietly begun a new competition for the contract to run the United States’s sole dedicated particle physics laboratory.
, the rebid comes 1 year after Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , which is managed in part by the University of Chicago , failed an annual DOE performance review and 9 months after it named a new director.
In 2021, DOE gave Fermilab’s performance a B, whereas a B+ is needed to pass. In five of eight main subcategories, the lab earned failing marks, including a C on science and technology program management and a B- in business systems. In particular, DOE reviewers lamented Fermilab’s poor management of the largest project the 56-year-old laboratory has ever undertaken: “The laboratory’s biggest initiative is struggling.
FRA officials acknowledge that Fermilab was not adequately prepared to run a huge construction project. In 2019, the lab was managing about $150 million annually dedicated to big projects, says Juan de Pablo, vice president for national labs at UChicago and a member of the FRA board. Now, that number approaches $700 million, he says. “There were all sorts of things that the lab did not have the capacity, the size, the scale to be able to take on so quickly.
Many physicists say the lab also has problems beyond the neutrino experiment. Fermilab often lags in disbursing funding to collaborators at universities, multiple sources say. Even gaining entry to the lab site has become an ordeal as it tries to tighten security, physicists say. The lab requires occasional users to apply for site access 4 weeks in advance and repeat security training for each visit, the theorist says.
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