SCIENCE AT A STANDSTILL ... IN SPOTS
Varying shutdown impacts: At two iconic local research centers, effects very different
As the partial federal shutdown hits historic levels, it isn’t hitting all federal agencies equally, including in the sciences
Now three weeks in, thousands of government researchers and scientists from the Department of Agriculture to the U.S. Geological Survey are furloughed and forbidden to so much as check office email or answer work phones.
Many government science websites aren’t being updated, although the National Science Foundation, which funds research at universities and laboratories, says on its site that even while the agency is closed it’s still accepting funding proposals.
In Hampton Roads, the two
most visible federal research facilities — NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton and Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News — are impacted in disparate ways.
At Jefferson Lab, which employs 678 full-time employees engaged in world-class fundamental physics, the shutdown is causing barely a ripple.
That’s because the lab operates under the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, which already has a fiscal year 2019 budget in place, approved by Congress and signed by the president last fall, that funds operations through September of this year.
“Everything is going as sched- uled,” spokeswoman Kandice Carter said. “We’re gearing up to begin CEBAF operations in the next couple of weeks.”
The CEBAF, or Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, is used to probe the building blocks of matter by smashing a particle beam into specific targets at nearly the speed of light to study the interactions. Thousands of physicists travel from around the globe to use the accelerator, and experiments typically are selected and scheduled years in advance.
Meanwhile, NASA Langley, which employs about 3,500 people, nearly half of them contract workers, is operating on a skeleton crew.
Communications staff are absent and forbidden to speak with the media, but instructions on the NASA headquarters website posted last month by Chief Financial Officer James P. Herz direct centers on how to operate when the federal government shutters.
NASA’s shutdown plan mandates staffing only at a level necessary “for the protection of life and property.”
This means, for instance, that astronauts aboard the International Space Station are taken care of and satellite missions already operating are maintained for the safety of the satellite and its data.
But federal employees and contractors not deemed essential for critical operations are furloughed.
This constitutes the vast majority of employees at NASA centers.
At Langley, for instance, which normally employs 1,803 civil servants in various capacities, a NASA chart shows exceptions from furlough for only 27 full-time em- ployees. Some 133 personnel are on call.
Additionally, and specifically to protect life and property at the center, exceptions are being made for 42 full- and part-time positions. Another four full-time staff are being funded outside the lapsed appropriation.
For the roughly 1,700 contract employees at Langley, only those deemed essential to the civil servant workforce — as they protect life and property — are allowed to work.
Herz notes the agency will take “all possible and prudent steps” to minimize costs for essential work that its contractors, partners and grant recipients incur during the shutdown.
One of those contractors, Alutiiq-Fusion Joint Venture, provides about 200 employees to Langley for administrative, media and professional services under a one-year contract that began last June, with four more yearly options. Alutiiq is a subsidiary of Alaska-based Afognak Native Corporation.
Afognak’s vice president of corporate affairs, Malia Villegas, said in a statement that the company’s Langley contract employees have been able to telework for Alutiiq off-site during the shutdown.
“So there has been no interruption in pay or benefits to date,” Villegas said.
So far, she said, the government has confirmed nothing about back pay beyond the funded contract date.