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unidentified
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Can you give us an opinion last week on Scala Vento and what's going to happen with the flights? | |
| Is they abide or not? | ||
| Is there a loving government that bites or not? | ||
| You want to address that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, listen, he did an about-face very quick like, and that was appropriate. | ||
| And if he wants to send his own presidential plane to pick up his folks, we welcome that. | ||
| It saves American taxpayers money. | ||
| I think that's a great thing. | ||
| And, you know, I think other foreign leaders should take his cue and send their presidential planes and pick up their folks who don't belong here. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are happy to send them back. | |
| So I think it's a good trend. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Good to see you all. | ||
| Finally getting up. | ||
| Well, now later today, President Trump will speak to House Republicans at their annual policy retreat in Miami from the Trump National Dural Resort. | ||
| You can watch live coverage of that starting at 5 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at our website, c-span.org. | ||
| And we take you now back to a forum on nuclear deterrence, live coverage on C-SPAN. | ||
| We join this in progress. | ||
| The Australian Submarine Force, six Collins-class submarines, very highly capable, pretty big. | ||
| I don't know, Greg, are they still the largest diesel boat in the world? | ||
| Could be, it's close. | ||
| They were at the time. | ||
| So they're really capable, quite big diesel boats. | ||
| Six of them, crew of about 42-ish sailors. | ||
| Virginia crew is 135-ish sailors. | ||
| And it's almost three times as big. | ||
| And then SSN AUKUS will be a third bigger yet. | ||
| So if you just think about something as simple as the sizing of the pier, setting aside the shore power and the radiological aspects, just the sizing of the pier from an infrastructure perspective is a significant investment as it goes forward. | ||
| We can talk more about that as we go, give you guys an idea of what HII is doing with respect to AUKUS, and then I'll lateral it over to you, Mike, if that's okay. | ||
| So we obviously have a significant play in Pillar One as one of the two companies that builds Virginia-class submarines. | ||
| So we're very engaged in that. | ||
| I talked to Matt Napoli earlier, so in accordance with naval reactors requirements, everything to do with the submarine will be handled in the government-to-government space under something that looks like the 1958 Mutual Defense Agreement. | ||
| I know where Matt is sitting. | ||
| Nothing was thrown at me, so I think I got that right. | ||
| So the submarine herself will handle in a very different pipe. | ||
| What HII has done is create three different sovereign Australian corporations. | ||
| If that's for me, I'm super busy right now. | ||
| We have three sovereign Australian companies, very creatively named HI Australia and HI Nuclear Australia. | ||
| And then we have a joint venture with Babcock International. | ||
| It allows us to bring to the field in Australia really the only Western, the only team in the Western world that designs, builds, sustains, and disposes of nuclear-powered submarines on behalf of the Australian government. | ||
| So that's a significant reach back for them. | ||
| We just recently completed executing supplier uplift activities on behalf of the government of South Australia and we'll do a run for them here in the next couple of weeks for the government of Western Australia to uplift suppliers to prepare them to get qualified to sell into our industrial base. | ||
| Believe pretty strongly there's no better way to become qualified to manufacture peace parts for nuclear-powered submarines in Australia than to start as early as you can. | ||
| It helps relieve some of our challenges in the supply chain. | ||
| We're looking to do that on a federal basis as well in collaboration with Australia. | ||
| We also have created the AUKUS Workforce Alliance, which is a consortium of universities to facilitate workforce development in Australia for Australia and help train and develop workforce. | ||
| And then last but not least, we have restructured part of the Mission Technologies Division to really hone and focus all the resources necessary to bring nuclear capability, | ||
| workforce development and training capability, and then fleet sustainment capability into the Australian theater in support of AUKUS, the creation of our new global security group with all of those groups rolling into our team now to really provide that full window through which the full capability that HI has will come into the Indo-Pacific for that. | ||
| So with that, over to you, Mike, on Bechtel. | ||
| Yeah, sounds good. | ||
| The first thing I want to do is I'm going to deviate a little bit. | ||
| You're okay with that. | ||
| I'm shocked. | ||
| He's worried now. | ||
| October 1962. | ||
| What happened then? | ||
| It's a big detour. | ||
| Cuban missile crisis. | ||
| Cuban missile crisis. | ||
| That's when I was born. | ||
| I was born smack dab in the Cuban missile crisis. | ||
| My dad was a test engineer, designed for North American the Atlas engines that went on some of our first ICBMs. | ||
| My first job was on the Peacekeeper program, and today I have the privilege to work on the Sentinel program with Northrop Grumman and the Air Force. | ||
| And so deterrence is kind of in my blood, literally, for my whole life. | ||
| And so I've had the privilege of working with some of you at Los Alamos, and it's just been an incredible mission. | ||
| What we're doing down in Australia is that we're working closely with the Aussies down there, the Australian Submarine Agency, to really focus on their needs around infrastructure that's capable of not only sustaining but building their fleet. | ||
| Some of the work that we've done with the U.S. Navy has allowed us to do the things that are necessary not only to master plan the Henderson defense precinct down outside of Perth, but to really master plan and then play out scenarios that allow them to pick the best solutions, their analysis of alternatives that are necessary to build that shipyard, which, as you know, | ||
| gives freedom of navigation and access to the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. | ||
| Very, very important job. | ||
| A lot that we've learned from our public shipyards is getting plowed into the sustainability mission that they have down there, working closely with ABCOC and HII to come up with what we feel to be the best approach for sustainability. | ||
| They're very fortunate. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| A greenfield project, if done right, you could figure out how to sustain more ships and meet the availabilities that are necessary to defend freedom around the globe. | ||
| The customer is a great customer. | ||
| They're learning, and I believe their eyes are wide open to the complexities of what we just have taken for granted in the kind of work that we do for the U.S. Navy and the work that's done with the Royal Navy and the UK. | ||
| But let's face it, it's a very, very steep learning curve. | ||
| I remember we were at a session with Admiral Richardson a couple years ago, and his way of describing AUKUS was, AUKUS is going to be hard, and then it's going to be harder than hard to do this right. | ||
| And I think if you're a history buff, you're going to go back in the mid-40s when we started to communicate some of our nuclear requirements and information to the British government. | ||
| With all the starts and stops that they had at the time, it literally took them about 12 years to really get things up and running. | ||
| And we're trying to compress that schedule right now and really think through this in the best way possible. | ||
| We are doing sustainability work, not Beckle, but the U.S. Navy is doing sustainability work out at HMAS Sterling, which is close to the Henderson Defense Precinct where we're planning the work. | ||
| And I think that was the first great step in the two nations really cooperating and placing sailors on board our boats so they can learn what it takes to actually operate a nuclear-powered submarine with some of the U.S. equipment. | ||
| And everything that we're learning there, our knowledge or skills or influence in the nuclear engineering arena, are really supporting their efforts to plan the next phase of work for the Henderson Defense Precinct. | ||
| The other thing that we're doing is we've started, much like Michael and his team, the focus on nuclear engineering learning and the things that are necessary to get their folks up to speed on the things that we've just taken for granted. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Greg, I know Floor is very engaged. | ||
| I know you've spent a lot of time in Australia. | ||
| Why don't you tell everybody what you guys are doing and who you're doing it with down there? | ||
| Yeah, thank you, Michael. | ||
| I'm happy to share our corporate strategy with 600 of my closest competitors. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Okay, it's going to be all right. | ||
| So our situation is a little bit different. | ||
| So the government group in Floor is called Mission Solutions, and we, Mission Solutions, don't have a presence necessarily in Australia, but Floor does. | ||
| Floor's actually been in Perth and with Floor Australia for 70 years, and for DJ, that's five years more, and just like the Seventh Riverside would be 75 years that they're celebrating this year as well. | ||
| But so Floor Mission Solution knows nothing about doing work for the government in Australia, and I'm sorry, Floor Australia, and the government doesn't know Floor very well. | ||
| So we teamed up with Worley, which is a company a lot like Floor. | ||
| It's a global engineering procurement construction company. | ||
| And Worley doesn't do much work for the government of Australia either. | ||
| On the other hand, we have great capabilities that we can offer. | ||
| So our first year has been more getting the lay of land, getting established, getting people to understand who we are, and all that's paying off. | ||
| We've had a lot of visits, and we're at the point now where people are actually reaching out to us because they know our capabilities and what we have to offer. | ||
| Just like Michael said earlier, the question is, you know, do you work what they call in Australia above the line or below the line? | ||
| Above the line means you're basically a direct contractor to the government. | ||
| Below the line, you're a contractor that's actually in more in the delivery side. | ||
| So read that as a government consultant versus a government delivery contractor. | ||
| We spent a lot of time with the Australian Submarine Agency over the last 12, 14 months. | ||
| And I would tell you that just learning who's who in the zoo is complicated. | ||
| So there's the Australian Submarine Agency, ASA, there's the Australian Submarine Corporation, ASC, Australian Naval Infrastructure, ANI, Naval Security and Support Group, the ones at Henderson and NSG, Security and Estate Group, SEG. | ||
| None of them talk to each other very well. | ||
| And so it's a question of who's in charge and how are they going to make decisions and how are they going to go forward. | ||
| And over the course of the last year, a lot of the people we've talked to in ASA have actually departed and left. | ||
| So there's some reorganization going on. | ||
| And as we said earlier, it's hard. | ||
| It's harder than hard. | ||
| But when you think of the Australians, they're taking on an almost insurmountable task. | ||
| Well, the numbers all vary, but you might call it $450 billion that they have to do to get these technologies in place, to get the infrastructure in place, to get the submarines in place, to get the people trained. | ||
| And they have nobody that's done that before. | ||
| So it's a huge challenge and a very steep hill for them to go up. | ||
| And as we wouldn't be surprised, it's taking some time. | ||
| Most of industry is kind of getting impatient, but things are happening. | ||
| But again, knowing just the Australian procurement system is different. | ||
| So we're used to a big, you know, U.S. agency would say, how are we going to do this? | ||
| And they'd come up with an acquisition strategy and then maybe an industry day followed by a draft request for proposals and then an RP and et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| That's not the way the Australians work. | ||
| And so one of their key things that they have to battle, and I think the term in Australia is what's the crocodile closest to the canoe. | ||
| It's HMAS Sterling, because in 2027, they have to be ready for the submarine rotational force west to put submarines there. | ||
| And so we were waiting and waiting what's going to happen, only to find out months later that work has already started because they take what they call a panel and they just start giving work to these panel contractors to start things going. | ||
| And that's good for the smaller projects that they have. | ||
| It's not good for the bigger projects and the nuclear interface projects. | ||
| So the Australians are faced with not only an organizational challenge, but a procurement challenge. | ||
| And they know they need to help, like the three of us up here with the companies that we represent. | ||
| They're not quite sure how to get that. | ||
| And so that is a bit of a challenge. | ||
| And there's some work that's going on to help with, just like what they were talking about, some of the big major infrastructure projects, those are going to be probably full and open tenders, full and open competitions, but we don't know when, and the whole timing, the sequence, is slower. | ||
| So in the meantime, like I say, we've got our partnership established and we've getting things registered. | ||
| Earlier, if you were here this morning, there was a lot of talk. | ||
| How do you get onto the bases in the U.S.? | ||
| Same for over there. | ||
| How do you get on the bases? | ||
| Are they going to recognize U.S. DOD clearances? | ||
| Are they going to recognize U.S. DOE clearances? | ||
| The answer almost has to be yes, but they haven't said that yet. | ||
| So there's a lot of things that still have to go on. | ||
| So it's been a learning process as probably slower than we might like, but we are making some slow, steady progress. | ||
| So a couple of quick just additions to that. | ||
| So when you think about clearance, reciprocity is something that clearly has to be in place amongst all three partner nations to have a chance. | ||
| And just a real easy data point in the back of your mind is that to get a DV or a top secret clearance in the UK requires 10 years of residency in the UK. | ||
| So a lot of us are 10 years late in that application process. | ||
| And by the time we're done, the milestones will have moved past us, right? | ||
| So there has to be an opportunity to do that. | ||
| And also, if you think about what we call the AUKUS passport, so if we train a welder to weld to nuclear quality, I'll say at Newport New Shipbuilding, it does not necessarily mean that they are qualified against the standards to do that welding in accordance with the union requirements in Australia. | ||
| So we need to harmonize those and get some reciprocity and a way to track that, grant reciprocity, and enable folks who get training in one place to be qualified in the other. | ||
| Our DOE folks will recognize this discussion for a long time, right? | ||
| And we've been working on that for a long, long time. | ||
| I thought I'd also just real quickly, I skipped just a quick geography lesson. | ||
| Not everybody has a picture of Australia in their brain, and we've been talking about cities. | ||
| So if you just picture Australia, it's a country about the same size as the United States with a population about the same as Florida. | ||
| So when you think about the intensity, the requirement to develop the workforce from a national endeavor perspective, it's a pretty small universe of folks to draft from. | ||
| The interpretation the Australian government has taken with respect to who would be qualified to do that, natural-born Australian citizen shrinks that pool ever more in a material way. | ||
| So there is just a challenge in the number of people available to do the work. | ||
| But if you picture Australia in your mind, on the left-hand side where we would see San Francisco or Los Angeles is where Perth is. | ||
| Henderson and Sterling Naval Base are really right around Perth. | ||
| So a little bit apart, but right around Perth. | ||
| Over on the right-hand side is Canberra. | ||
| That's the capital is. | ||
| That's sort of where we're sitting now. | ||
| And then down where we would see New Orleans is Adelaide, and that's the build yard. | ||
| That's where they're going to build SSN AUKUS and where they house the Australian Submarine Corporation, which is a government-owned company. | ||
| So I normally say just let that settle in for a minute. | ||
| That's where they have their build yard. | ||
| They also have operations out in Henderson where Mike was talking about our collaboration on that project together. | ||
| So as we kind of go through this, there's any number of threads to explore. | ||
| But Greg, I thought I'd start with you. | ||
| You talked some of the hurdles just to get set up there, right? | ||
| What are you thinking about how other companies, what are the biggest hurdles that companies that are U.S. companies that have the capability to support Australia who does not have the national capability to do this, are facing just to get capability into the country? | ||
| Well, part of it is, like I said earlier, it's the get it, you have to get registered to do business in Australia. | ||
| You have to hit a facility clearance process to do business with the Australian government. | ||
| And so basically the way most of us would proceed down that is get a good Australian consultant to kind of walk you through that whole process. | ||
| And then you do that. | ||
| One of the other things is you have to figure out what services you're going to really offer. | ||
| And as I said, what they really need is a lot of what I would call the hardcore nukes. | ||
| Not necessarily nuclear engineers, but they need people that are used to working in this industry. | ||
| And because we know the rules, the regulations, and I've explained that to some of a lot of the Australians, is you don't need nuclear engineers. | ||
| You need engineers that understand the interface with nuclear. | ||
| So 85 to 90 percent of your current engineers are just fine. | ||
| You just need to train them on the interface and some of the limits and restrictions and the extra requirements that come along. | ||
| And so if in the meantime, if you don't have those resources, you'll have to contract them out and the U.S. or the UK could provide those. | ||
| It's going to be very expensive. | ||
| And I think there'll be some sticker shock for the Australian government when they pay those. | ||
| U.S. salaries are higher than Australian engineers in general. | ||
| And then you're looking at the exchange rate, then you're looking at the uplifts and the per diems and everything that comes with sending an expat to the other side of the world. | ||
| So it's for a company that's just starting out, you need to factor all that into your business plan. | ||
| And so don't think it's going to be as easy as just signing up and submitting it, responding to an RFI that I can go do this. | ||
| It takes a lot more prep work to get ready. | ||
| It's a time and money investment, right? | ||
| It's going to be a slow, slow payback. | ||
| And I think the Australians, like I said, they're a little slow to take up the offer in many of these areas because they truly want the sovereign ability to do everything that you discussed. | ||
| And so they've hired a lot of people. | ||
| They're not trained and they're not used to it. | ||
| So they're going to need help. | ||
| I'm thinking it's a five to seven year process to get all those people up to speed that then they could say, okay, contractors, exit, now let yourself perform. | ||
| I don't know that they've quite ready to take that leap of faith just yet. | ||
| I think that's fair. | ||
| You know, Mike, as we've looked at Henderson and other pieces together, I think your comments are right. | ||
| I mean, Henderson's not totally greenfield. | ||
| Adelaide's more greenfield. | ||
| And your comment about if you plan it right, it's great. | ||
| If you don't, it's a disaster, I think is really an important way to think about it. | ||
| What are some of the major priorities? | ||
| If you were talking to the PM, what would you tell them, hey, the next two or three things that we've got to do out west from a scheduled priority perspective to jumpstart this process? | ||
| What would that be? | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| I think that right now aligning ourselves with the right engineering contractors in the region are super important because we do things differently. | ||
| We're pretty fortunate. | ||
| We're like you, Greg, we're an APC firm, and so we do a lot of our own engineering. | ||
| But in this environment, you're going to have to get used to the fact that it's not just going to be U.S. companies doing work down in Australia. | ||
| There's going to be some fairly significant partnerships that need to be forged with subcontractors and other AE firms down there that do like work and have the ability to be developed to do the kind of work that we're talking about. | ||
| But that kind of starts right now. | ||
| You want them to be in a position where they could start investing in the development of their people. | ||
| That's so important. | ||
| The other thing I would say, if you're going to do construction work that requires some degree of labor, you need to understand local laws and all the nuances of running a labor relations organization in Australia. | ||
| We've been very fortunate over our 70 years. | ||
| We must have showed up at the same time. | ||
| We're right down the street in Perth. | ||
| The offices are like 10 minutes apart. | ||
| So, you know, so 70 years of experience and being down in that continent have afforded you the ability to have the relationships with the unions and really understand labor laws and the things that are necessary to be in a position where you can lead and manage that work. | ||
| We're very, very big on building an Indigenous workforce, which is so important. | ||
| The interface between the work that we do here at CONUS and in-country is hard. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| You have to think through the gaps. | ||
| You have to think through the nuances of how you communicate, what systems you use. | ||
| Those systems, whether they be on the engineering side or procurement, construction, doesn't matter. | ||
| They need to operate seamlessly across all the parts. | ||
| And you just can't show up tomorrow and say, we're going to turn this thing on, and it's just going to start spooling up and we're off and running. | ||
| And so that doesn't work. | ||
| And so that's a big part of it. | ||
| And the other part of it is just starting to get focused on the supply base down there. | ||
| And I think, Michael, you guys have done some really good things with your strategy where you guys have focused on the things that you can do to build that Indigenous manufacturing capability that's necessary for you. | ||
| Maybe a start, you know, they're down there. | ||
| You have qualified suppliers that are producing hardware for Columbia class and Virginia class to support the needs and demands that we have here. | ||
| I know that Admiral Rucker and the submarine workforce industrial-based team that's been focusing on building capability in the U.S. to do this really well, we have to do that with our partners. | ||
| And if we're not, we'll continue to struggle here. | ||
| And I just don't believe that that's necessary. | ||
| We could work this smarter. | ||
| No, I really appreciate that. | ||
| I think that's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, we've been saying for over a year now in Australia that if we don't look at the end when we're done with AUKUS, we haven't actually improved the industrial capacity and capability of all three partner nations, then we probably didn't do it right. | ||
| This is an incredibly important industrial-based integration opportunity to leverage all of us. | ||
| I will just mention one thing I think that, and we can go to some questions. | ||
| As you think about the AUKUS timeline, everyone focuses on the submarine and focuses on the workforce to do the nuclear work and the submarine sustainment work. | ||
| And, you know, I don't, we're not an EPC. | ||
| We don't have an office in Perth. | ||
| I have people in Perth, and they tell me it's a hardship, although I told somebody that every time I go to Perth, it reminds me of San Diego without any traffic. | ||
| I mean, it is absolutely fabulous. | ||
| They've convinced me it's a hardship tour. | ||
| I don't know how that worked out. | ||
| I'm going to have to revisit that. | ||
| I'm going to go to Perth and we'll talk about it for a week or so. | ||
| But I think ultimately what people are underestimating, the need to deconflict the workforce to actually do the construction of the infrastructure. | ||
| The uplift in that alone, I mean, you know, Mark think LANL, right? | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's the trades to do construction, not necessarily just the trades associated with the submarine itself or the sustainment work of the submarine. | ||
| It is also going to require a national endeavor. | ||
| I mean, it's a massive set of infrastructure projects between what you and Worley are thinking about, what we're talking about at Henderson, what they're doing down in Adelaide, and then if they build the base out on the other coast, it's non-stop, multiple billions of dollars of infrastructure in a country that I don't think has the craft to do that activity, separate and distinct from the craft necessary to do the sustainment on the submarines. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that we focused on when we put this global security team together is the fact that we now have more than 1,000 people doing fleet sustainment literally all over the world on our team that are in Australia, in Guam, all over the Indo-Pac, doing sustainment on, I think it was 80% of the U.S. Navy ships last year. | ||
| So we brought a global reach for sustainment into the team, tie that together with the capabilities that our friends here have. | ||
| It's a really compelling package for Australia to have an opportunity to tap the resources that we have in the companies represented here. | ||
| But it's not going to be easy, to Greg's point, to enable that process. | ||
| Okay, so we have about 14 or so minutes left. | ||
| I thought I would see if there are any questions from the floor. | ||
| It normally goes one of two ways. | ||
| Either there are 8,000 questions because it's AUKUS or... | ||
| Well, we'll start with one. | ||
| Hi, Scott Melby with Uranium Producers of America. | ||
| And my question pertains to fuel. | ||
| And I would assume that the initial load of these reactors would be built in the United States. | ||
| Should we see this as a new demand on either existing U.S.-origin unobligated uranium stockpiles or a new source of demand that we have to fill from industry? | ||
| So watch this. | ||
| You know, this is not my first time. | ||
| That is an excellent question to ask the government. | ||
| To say yes. | ||
| What? | ||
| To say yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So what other questions? | ||
| It was a really nice try, by the way, though. | ||
| So we could expand on that a little bit if you can. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So the Virginia-class submarines, basically they get three with an option for two more. | ||
| They're going to be submarines that are in service today. | ||
| They're not getting them fresh out of the shipyard. | ||
| And in fact, at one conference I was at last year, one of the Australian groups was upset about that. | ||
| You know, we're getting used submarines. | ||
| And I said, well, they're all good runners, so you should be fine. | ||
| But in fact, they're getting the whole package. | ||
| And as part of that, and I don't know the details of what happens when the submarine is decommissioned, but that class of submarine is designed to have a lifetime core. | ||
| So they shouldn't have to worry about it. | ||
| But long term, they are making plans for how they manage that fuel. | ||
| From our side, it's actually, we need that submarine, whether we give it to the Australians, or I should say, whether they buy it or not, or we keep it ourselves. | ||
| Our national security interest is that submarine is at sea in the South China Sea, somewhere on a good day, perhaps, but certainly somewhere in the Western Pacific or in the Indian Ocean because a national security threat that Australia and the U.S. and many others also face. | ||
| So it might be a little bit more demand signal to the shipbuilders, but it's one that's overdue and we need anyway as a nation. | ||
| So most of us think that whichever crew is on that submarine, the important thing is the submarine is over there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, just like the integration of the industrial base benefits all three Alliance members, at the end of the day, AUKUS is actually about submarine availability, meaning how many submarines you can have at sea on any given day. | ||
| So the implementation of AUKUS is designed to increase the number of ships at sea. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| Hello. | ||
| I'm Ben Massinger with the Simpson Center. | ||
| I just have a question primarily towards HI and working with Australia. | ||
| You laid out a good concern for infrastructure in Australia. | ||
| Given a more protectionist measure within the current administration, is there any concerns that, well, within the AUKUSA framework, shifting more to U.S. priorities to pump out more submarines in favor of U.S. needs over Australian needs? | ||
| And so I would start in the same place, frankly, that Greg did. | ||
| Look, America hasn't stepped onto a battlefield since I think the War of 1812 when Australia wasn't there beside us. | ||
| So to say that we have national interests that are aligned, probably a significant understatement. | ||
| So the Alliance increasing the number of submarines it has available at sea to do what the combatant commanders want it to do is good for everyone. | ||
| United Kingdom, the United States, and the Commonwealth of Australia. | ||
| So as you focus with that in mind, where the submarine went to sea, the crew that is running the submarine becomes less important than the submarine being at sea doing its job on behalf of the alliance and the national security of all three of those partners. | ||
| From the HII perspective, collaborating with the industrial base in Australia actually helps us potentially open up additional sources of supply. | ||
| Post-COVID, we have a number of supplier or sequence-critical material items that are single or sole source, which means you can only get them from one place and they're making them as fast as they can. | ||
| So it's not a diversion from the U.S. | ||
| It's actually an expansion of capability across the alliance in a way that provides a unique opportunity to offset some needs that we have while we train their industrial base to be sovereign capable to do it in the future to the benefit of the full team. | ||
| Yeah, we were just briefed on Secretary Rubio's meeting with the Australian government. | ||
| They solidified their support for them. | ||
| I think what could change is the roadmap to get there. | ||
| I mean, I think that's in question right now. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, I think that's fair. | ||
| Australia has dedicated an enormous amount of money to this endeavor, so it's really important to approach this from the perspective that Australia has budgeted for this. | ||
| Australia is paying for this in many, many ways. | ||
| It's not a gift from the U.S. to Australia. | ||
| It's a mutually beneficial alliance arrangement. | ||
| Hi, Mark Shadowick, Los Alamos. | ||
| Can you comment on the extent to which you've felt you've been welcomed by the Australian people? | ||
| I thought we had talked about you not asking any questions. | ||
| Well, you know, we're close allies, but Australia doesn't have a lot of depth in nuclear. | ||
| They have an accelerator in Canberra and they have, I think, one reactor. | ||
| I'd be interested to hear your views on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate that, Mark. | ||
| So I'm going to tell you what I found, and then we can turn it over to the team. | ||
| I think that they've been very welcoming. | ||
| We've worked with more than 300 suppliers across the spectrum, small, medium, large suppliers. | ||
| We've visited factories. | ||
| We've interviewed them. | ||
| As I said, we've executed supplier uplift activities with them. | ||
| I think the capability that we find in Australia from a supply chain perspective is phenomenal. | ||
| What we think we need is obviously scale and throughput. | ||
| But to be fair to them, they're meeting the demand that they have had. | ||
| This is a new uplift in demand, so it's a collaboration in that aspect as well. | ||
| But we have, by industry-to-industry participation and in our collaboration with government, the Australian Submarine Agency, and the minister's office, up to and including the Deputy Prime Minister, it has been a very, very collaborative experience. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| And I think truly excited about the opportunity that it brings for the nation. | ||
| What is your experience? | ||
| I would say, just to probably be a little more blunt, it was a great answer. | ||
| We need to check our egos at the door. | ||
| And we need to remember that they live in a tough neighborhood and respect that. | ||
| We go to work every single day, become really good partners with them. | ||
| Build trust, and good things will happen. | ||
| But if you were that close to what the real threats are out there, you may look at things a little bit differently. | ||
| No, I think that's exactly. | ||
| You've got to go humbly into the market, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think that they don't have a nuclear industry in Australia. | ||
| We just talked about that in many ways. | ||
| But there's bilateral support from the government for a nuclear-powered submarine, and they make sure that they say it's not nuclear-armed. | ||
| It's a nuclear-powered submarine. | ||
| They clarify that all the time. | ||
| And we see a lot of good support for that. | ||
| I also spoke at both the Australian Nuclear Association on the East Coast and the Perth U.S. Asia Center on the West Coast over the last year. | ||
| And it's against the law right now to produce commercial electrical nuclear power. | ||
| So it's kind of a bizarre situation. | ||
| But that's also changing. | ||
| More and more, they're starting to recognize they can't get where they want to be in terms of sustainable green carbon neutral without commercial nuclear power. | ||
| So, there's not a sea change, but there's definitely a groundswell that's starting that they might actually be more accepting of commercial nuclear power in the not too distant future. | ||
| So, overall, because of the threats that Michael says, that Mike says they're living in a tough neighborhood, they recognize that in order to get where they have to start change, and that's important to them. | ||
| So, I think it's well accepted so far. | ||
| We need to make sure that when we're all over there, when the government's there, that we're all working safely and we continue the impeccable naval reactor safety records that we have today, because a single incident would actually set everybody back a long way. | ||
| Yeah, no, I obviously think all of that is right on the money. | ||
| I do find that they're very welcoming. | ||
| They have had some challenges with fits and starts on programs before, so there is a need to actually walk the walk and not just bring your glossy brochure. | ||
| But I really do think that if you keep in the back of your mind that your job in AUKUS, our job in AUKUS, is to facilitate the development of sovereign Australian capability. | ||
| It's not to move a bunch of Americans there, it's not to make all their products here and ship them down there for assembly. | ||
| It's to create a sovereign Australian capability that simply does not exist today. | ||
| If you keep that in mind and have that as your first principle, it facilitates focusing on the right way and the right thing. | ||
| All right, a couple more minutes here for questions. | ||
| Looks like we're done. | ||
| All right, we've worn you out. | ||
| All right, so if you have any other questions, especially late at night, if you would just please call Greg, he'll be our team scribe. | ||
| But thank you guys for listening. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| We'll be around if you have any other questions. | ||
| I will tell you: we are leaning on partners and friends and developer relationships here, obviously, as we look to work in that market in a new and different way. | ||
| There are several companies that we're teaming with, facilitating them entering a new market while we as a company work to enter a new market. | ||
| So, very much appreciate the collaboration. | ||
| Thank you, and enjoy the rest of the conference. | ||
| If the lab directors will make their way up to the front. | ||
| can't find all | ||
| the people who are in the All right, | ||
| if I could ask you to take your seats, please, and we'll get started with our next panel. | ||
| Before we do, and while you're making your way to your seats, I have a special shout-out here from our team. | ||
| One of our key managers from Savannah River, Kelly Kennedy, was just promoted to vice president today. | ||
| So, Kelly, congratulations. | ||
| All right, and I'm honored once again to be able to chair a panel of the three lab directors who probably have, if not the most difficult job, one of the most difficult jobs in DOE and in NSA. | ||
| And we're going to talk today about some of the challenges they face. | ||
| And this is, we've done this a few times before, but this is the last time that James is going to be here with us as he's announced his retirement. | ||
| We've tried for a year to talk him out of it, unsuccessfully so. | ||
| So, James, thank you for all you've done for Sandia and for the country. | ||
| Let's have a round of applause for James. | ||
| With that, we're going to make this a real panel and dispense with the podium. | ||
| So, what we'd like to do today is just talk about the same things that Teresa talked about earlier today, the key elements of success for NNSA in general, the National Security Enterprise, and of course, the labs. | ||
| And these three lab directors and their institutions have made great progress in the last year in a number of areas. | ||
| And what we're going to do today is talk about that and then talk about what comes next. | ||
| And just let me, by teeing that up, if you think about what they did, and again, you've heard this in the briefings this morning, met all the key mission milestones for the life extension programs and the RD programs, streamlining the way we do business, you know, | ||
| and all of them have had both this bottoms-up and top-down approach where they challenge their teams to give them innovative ideas, and then they heard both from all the new employees we have and all the existing employees those ideas and made them actionable and always using a risk-based approach to make sure we were applying the right requirements to each mission and project. | ||
| Third is streamlined decision-making. | ||
| You know, we all know we need that, and they've done a tremendous job in that. | ||
| And of course, it's the basic of just moving the decisions down to the lowest possible level to let things get done faster. | ||
| At the same time, maintaining the proper level of oversight and governance, which we all know is critical using digital tools and other things, but just having good metrics and good contractor assurance programs. | ||
| And then, of course, for all of the above, using digital tools to analyze this mountain of data that we generate to detect trends and inform the work that we do in real time so that we avoid the problems, not just find them and fix them, but avoid them before they can impact our mission and projects. | ||
| So, what we're going to do is talk about the same four that Teresa and DJ teed up today. | ||
| First, we're going to talk about innovation. | ||
| Then, we're going to talk about infrastructure. | ||
| Thirdly, we're going to talk about operations. | ||
| And then finally, what makes it all work is developing the workforce of the future, our people strategy. | ||
| So, let me start with innovation. | ||
| I mentioned before implementing digital tools and digital transformation as areas where you've made great progress. | ||
| Can you describe what you've achieved? | ||
| And I know in the past year you've used it to improve our design methods, improve our operations and our production capability, and of course in maintaining a strong science piece. | ||
| And then finally, if you could wrap into that, what do you need to take that next step? | ||
| What do you need from NNSA to be able to take the next step in that innovation? | ||
| So, Kim, do you want to start? | ||
| You picked the wrong chair. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| That was a big question. | ||
| And thank you for bringing us back together again. | ||
| We've spent a lot of this year talking about the digital transformation that we're trying to drive forward. | ||
| And I think it's going to impact our work in a number of ways. | ||
| But I'll start with the simplest part, which is simplest. | ||
| Conceptually simplest part, which is the backbone to connect the lab's plants and sites in a more seamless manner and ensure we have common electronic infrastructure that we can share information seamlessly between sites to really streamline how we go from design through engineering to production and make those cycles efficient and modern and provide what we're hoping will be a digital thread for the work that we do. | ||
| So that we'll have, you know, really good data and great. | ||
| tools to enable us to do stockpile modernization in new ways. | ||
| Within the laboratories, we're also using our new tools and capabilities. | ||
| You heard earlier that we just cited several new computers. | ||
| Tom will talk about what they're doing at Los Alamos, but we just cited El Capitan at Livermore. | ||
| So this is the NMSA's first exascale computer for national security. | ||
| We're number one, which is pretty exciting. | ||
| But the computing is now at a scale where we can do things that seemed inconceivable 10 years ago. | ||
| I mean, 3D modeling has become a routine tool of design. | ||
| We're linking together our engineering and physics design capabilities. | ||
| And this machine also has 44,000 GPUs in it. | ||
| So it's an amazing tool for things like AI. | ||
| So we're really starting to bring that ethos into our science and design communities to speed the pace of learning and really be able to think very differently about how we do all elements of our work on the stockpile. | ||
| So I think I'll stop there and pass over to colleagues. | ||
| I'll just pick up right where Kim left off, actually. | ||
| You know, if you look at what went into making El Capitan possible, and by the way, all three labs are going to be able to use that resource, so we're kind of basking in the reflected glory. | ||
| I think there are of order a dozen key technologies that went into enabling that tremendous computational resource that were developed as part of the Exascale Computing Project that are actually baked into all the big investments that are being made by the hyperscalers to train their models. | ||
| So it doesn't get a lot of attention, but that Exascale program actually was the building blocks of what is a transformational technological revolution that's underway right now. | ||
| And so when you read about OpenAI announcing Stargate and XAI putting 100,000 GPUs, working to a million GPUs in Memphis, under the hood is technology that came out of our decades of pursuit of ever faster computers. | ||
| And one of the nice byproducts of that is machines like El Capitan or the Venato supercomputer that we deployed at Los Alamos in the spring not only are wonderful for doing the multi-physics simulation that are critical to our ability to assure the effectiveness and the safety and the reliability of our nuclear stockpile, they're also going to be great for artificial intelligence because they have this kind of hybrid architecture. | ||
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And I think one of the things that we're really excited about is the possibility of adding that to our toolkit, not to replace the traditional modeling and simulations that we have, but to accelerate it. | |
| In fact, it'll be an important training database for AI and also to take advantage of the tremendous resource we have in terms of experimental data. | ||
| And that's something where the three labs are really working very closely together. | ||
| You know, we're hopeful that we can make an announcement of that before too long, but that's going to enable us to go faster. | ||
| And that's important because we are going to be asked to go faster. | ||
| We are being asked to go faster. | ||
| You know, the Strategic Posture Commission captured that with the necessary but not sufficient. | ||
| And we are very, very busy right now with things like infrastructure, a topic to come up. | ||
| And the only way we're going to have the capacity to go faster is to use some of the tools that actually we've been working so hard to enable over the last few decades. | ||
| Well, Kim and Tom covered a lot of the mods and pieces of the digital transformation, but there's some other areas here that are where I'll give you the positive pieces and then the challenges. | ||
| So in the W93 program, it'll be born digital. | ||
| All the integrated product teams have bought into basically using digital thread as their way of doing design through manufacturing. | ||
| And in some cases, the 87-1 has the IPTs doing digital thread. | ||
| But this isn't without its challenges because there's eight labs, plants, and sites that have to come together and agree on a common set of tools. | ||
| And I would just tell you, culturally, that's a challenge just at Sandia by itself. | ||
| And the mechanical tools or the electrical design tools and coming with the ones that we are going to provide, only a certain version of it for our engineers. | ||
| And then things as simply as staying up to date, which is something as simple as our word processing tools, that they're all at the same version level. | ||
| There's a lot of challenges in this. | ||
| And I believe tomorrow, Laura McGill and Jamie Wolfe will be on a panel talking about this so you can ask them more detailed questions. | ||
| But the bottom line is we're making progress in these areas, but there are a lot of challenges. | ||
| Can I ask you then to address under innovation a term that I think Jim McConnell uses and may have been coined by the past administrator, technology insertion, because you've got such strong, tremendous technology base in all of the labs and you develop these technologies and I know one thing that I've heard you all speak about is how long it takes us for a lot a lot of good reasons and some not so good reasons to deploy them. | ||
| What innovations, what progress have you made in the last year in technology insertion? | ||
| Because as you say, when you can deploy those technologies sooner, it can work them into the mission to go faster and better and more efficiently. | ||
| So Kim, do you want to start again with technology insertion? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I think this is an area where we have actually made a lot of progress. | ||
| And as James mentioned with the digital transformation, changing the kinds of technologies we use and the way we use technology is equal parts technical and cultural. | ||
| It's not as simple as saying, I have a great new idea or a great new tool or a great new technology, let's just roll with it. | ||
| There's a high degree of confidence we have to build in a new technology or a new manufacturing approach. | ||
| And there are many legacy processes and procedures built around the way we do things today. | ||
| So that cultural piece can't be ignored. | ||
| And I think we have really built a strong partnership across the labs, plants, and sites that's allowing us to gain speed in inserting new technologies. | ||
| So for us, we put a big emphasis on new manufacturing technologies. | ||
| And what's interesting to me is that you usually think about designing technology and then building things. | ||
| So manufacturing is a tool to enable you to do things. | ||
| The capabilities we have now with advanced manufacturing tools like additive manufacturing mean it changes the way you think about design because you can make things that are very different from what you can conceive about with old tools. | ||
| So we're sort of seeing the whole process become much more iterative as we learn the capabilities and the power of these new tools and things like on-machine part inspection and control and design optimization tools that allow us to really iterate through many, many variations of a new part. | ||
| So in our modernization programs that we're pursuing now, so we're the design agent for 80-4 life extension program and 87-1 mod. | ||
| We're inserting new technologies because we have this capability now to change the way we've thought about these designs to make these warheads more manufacturable, more sustainable, easier to maintain through the life of that system. | ||
| Yeah, I think we've gone through, I'm a condensed matter physicist, so I'll say we've gone through a phase transition. | ||
| You know, there was a long period of time where really built into the way we were thinking about things was change as little as possible. | ||
| We have designs that have their origins in the era of testing, and anything that we do to introduce a change in how we manufacture can introduce some sort of uncertainty that might cause us to question that basis. | ||
| And I think we're over that now. | ||
| We're over it for a couple of reasons. | ||
| First off, because of things like the modeling and simulation tools that we're talking about before, we have a much better ability to understand the consequences of a change in material or a change in the manufacturing approach and actually convince ourselves that it's okay. | ||
| I think the other thing is that, and James Owen mentioned this in a session this morning, it's not just a question of can we design things that are easy to manufacture, it's what do the new manufacturing technologies enable in terms of design possibilities that simply could not be accomplished any other way. | ||
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And the fact that actually with a lot of the additive manufacturing and digital design, complexity is much less frightening than it used to be. | |
| You can actually make things that are very, very complex in a relatively straightforward way. | ||
| And that actually gives the designers some flexibility in terms of how they approach solving a problem that they did not have in the past. | ||
| And we're no longer bound by that. | ||
| And I think we now have enough confidence in our ability to understand those changes that we can take advantage of it. | ||
| And also take advantage of the fact that it may require a smaller footprint. | ||
| It may produce less waste material in the form of spoils. | ||
| And the materials we deal with, you'd rather not deal with large quantities of unused material. | ||
| And all of these are things or benefits that can help us stay within a kind of bounded cost envelope. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm pretty excited right now because last week we had a successful AD-4 flight test with the Air Force. | ||
| And there's new technology in there. | ||
| Unfortunately, you can't go in the specifics, but between Lawrence Livermore's technology that they've inserted and Sandia's, this really is an amazing advancement in how we think about these systems. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff coming through through the kind of the laboratory scale that's coming through that's going to really change the way, at least at Sandia, we think about our safety themes for nuclear weapon systems. | ||
| So I'm really excited about that coming through. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So the next topic, we're going to move on to number two, and that's infrastructure. | ||
| And Kim, you can relax because I'm going to start with James this time. | ||
| Okay, we're going to start on the other end. | ||
| So in infrastructure, we know that some of our infrastructure was built 75 or 80 years ago and needs to be upgraded. | ||
| And the enterprise blueprint that you all talked about and you all contributed to is a great description of the must-have infrastructure. | ||
| And I like the way the past administrator said it's not a wish list. | ||
| This is absolutely essential to the mission to support over the next 25 years. | ||
| So with that, what are the key things you need at your lab to effectively carry out the enterprise blueprint, including help in implementing those creative approaches that I know you're all working on on supply chain using commercial standards and broadening the supply base? | ||
| So James, you want to start with that? | ||
| Well, I can just say I'm very excited about Enterprise Blueprint and having negotiated with NNSA and other labs, plants, and sites the list of facilities that need to be recapitalized. | ||
| But I want to go in a little different direction to your question, John, because we've got to sustain a lot of facilities before the new ones come around. | ||
| And so that's going to be a really significant issue from a funding standpoint. | ||
| We have to continue to have facilities that make the electronics for the weapons. | ||
| We have to continue to have facilities that qualify parts for the weapons. | ||
| And if you look at the enterprise blueprint, some of those facilities, it's going to be five to ten years from now before we get new facilities. | ||
| And we put these facilities in a run-to-failure mode literally a decade ago. | ||
| That was a good decision at the time because it was, at that time, it looked like we would be recapitalizing these facilities today, but it's going to take longer. | ||
| And so we've got to sustain these facilities to continue to execute on the modernization programs. | ||
| And then there's other things that aren't in the enterprise blueprint that we also need, pay attention to, and that's just lab space and office space. | ||
| A lot of that needs to be recapitalized through the complex. | ||
| So there's a lot to be done here. | ||
| Overall, very excited about the enterprise blueprint because it lays out kind of a timeline for the facilities that we absolutely have to have. | ||
| But some of these facilities we absolutely have to have before they're recapitalized. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the important thing in my mind about the enterprise blueprint is it does look across the spectrum of types of infrastructure that are needed to support what we do. | ||
| It's easy to spend all of your time focusing on the really big ticket nuclear facilities because they do take a tremendous amount of dollars to get built. | ||
| They take a long time to get built. | ||
| They have very significant requirements in terms of safety and security that drives all that cost. | ||
| So you see a lot of focus on discussions on things like UPF, the plutonium infrastructure investments at Los Alamos and Savannah River. | ||
| But the enterprise roof print also talks about some of the infrastructure that we use to design, certify, and assess the stockpile. | ||
| Those are scientific tools, they're test capabilities that are absolutely important. | ||
| Actually, paradoxically, even though sometimes we take the shorthand to refer to these as our science facilities, if you want to know what's the shortest path between you know, infrastructure and impact on the on-alert deterrent, it's actually through those facilities because it's in resolving questions that may arise in the surveillance programs or whatever. | ||
| And to be honest, the pits that we're building at Los Alamos, as important as they are, they're not going to affect the on-alert deterrent until Sentinel is in the field. | ||
| So there are a lot of pretty urgent things in that scientific piece of the infrastructure that are every bit as important as the big facilities. | ||
| As James pointed out, one of the concerns is bridging. | ||
| So at Los Alamos, for example, we got approval of Critical Decision Zero, the mission need for a much needed modernization of the front end of our Lance accelerator, which is one of those tools that we use to resolve issues, be important for qualifying new high-explosives, for example. | ||
| But we've got to keep the facility running, too. | ||
| And in fact, this year we're curtailing operations because we don't have enough spare parts. | ||
| So while the lamp upgrade is tremendously important in ensuring the future of that facility, the more mundane things that are, you know, we call it maintenance and operations, it doesn't look quite as flashy as El Capitan, but it's extremely important for the ongoing health of our deterrent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I agree wholeheartedly with James and Tom. | ||
| One of the best parts of the enterprise blueprint effort was the time we spent as a community coming to consensus on what's in that report. | ||
| And so what you read there is a shared commitment to the success of all the sites. | ||
| And I think that is really an important place for us to be because the need is so large. | ||
| At my site, we have sort of three different categories of needs for infrastructure. | ||
| First and foremost is this recapitalization of some of our scientific infrastructure. | ||
| So we have the National Ignition Facility, our large laser facility, which is a very high-tech place, but it's been operating full-tilt for almost 15 years now. | ||
| And so there's a need for an investment in just sustainment of the facility. | ||
| And we just recently received Critical Decision Zero mission need to do an energy upgrade to the laser where we'll be able to increase the laser energy output from 2.2 megajoules to 2.6 megajoules and maybe higher, allowing us to push that facility and our ignition experiments into the more high-yield regimes, which are critically important for our support to the stockpile. | ||
| And we use that facility routinely to do things like material testing and exposures and to really study in depth the science of nuclear weapons. | ||
| So it really is an important day-to-day contributor to our support for the stockpile. | ||
| In the second category, I would put enabling infrastructure. | ||
| So we have a lot of needs on our site. | ||
| As an example, one of our most recent line items was a power and cooling upgrade to our computing facility so that we could site El Capitan. | ||
| So that kind of infrastructure, again, is not glamorous, but it's critically important to operating these big facilities and operating our sites in an efficient and sustainable way. | ||
| And then for us, for those of you who haven't visited Livermore, it's a small site, physically small. | ||
| We're one square mile and we have 9,000 employees, which that workforce has grown by more than 50% in the last 10 years. | ||
| We need office space, and we can't GPP our way out of this problem. | ||
| The average GPP scale building is just too small for a site where the footprint is so small. | ||
| So we've been working in close partnership with NNSA to get Critical Decision Zero for an investment in office space infrastructure so that we can build up a little bit and much more efficiently use our site and bring our weapons program teams closer together so that we can foster collaboration for the important work that we have to do going forward. | ||
| So it's been an interesting journey. | ||
| We've been working closely on our infrastructure plans with our partners at the production sites, also trying to build out production development capabilities that allow us to really study the science of production and help bring new capabilities for production of polymers, for production of explosives, and other key components to aid this process of modernizing in the production facilities. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| You know, we talked earlier today, and DJ did, and it's a great thing to celebrate 75 and 80 years at our facilities. | ||
| But the real celebrations we all want to have, and you're going to hear this in the plants and sites tomorrow, is where you and of course Roger and Eric and Rich and Kelly, when you guys commission those new facilities that you're building right now, that's going to be something to celebrate. | ||
| So DJ, put that down for your list of champagne toasts for the future, if you would, please. | ||
| Let's go to operations then. | ||
| As we expand operations to support the upgrades to our national security capabilities, what are your top issues that you need to address? | ||
| Because obviously, you know, we've been doing the research, we just talked about operation, or just talked about infrastructure, but as we move more into operations for pits and LEPs, what are the challenges you face? | ||
| How are you using digital tools to ensure the strong safety and security performance and the performance of those new facilities? | ||
| And then just overall, what keeps you up at night when you look at operations moving into that phase, which is exciting and it's absolutely essential. | ||
| But what are the things that keep you up at night to say these are really the things we've got to address first and foremost to make that successful? | ||
| Tom, do you want to start with that one? | ||
| Well, certainly our biggest challenge now that we've, in fact, at the event where we were celebrating receiving the diamond stamp, the first production unit W87-1 pit, it was pointed out that this is not a finish line, it's actually the starting line. | ||
| And we've got a lot of work ahead of us over the next couple years to build out the capability to get up to the 30 pits per year that Teresa mentioned in her remarks. | ||
| But we have to do that in an operating facility. | ||
| And that is a challenge because we want to continue producing pits, maintain the competency to produce the pits, train people to be proficient in doing that. | ||
| At the same time, we're ripping out obsolete hardware and bringing in new glove boxes. | ||
| And that's in a nuclear facility that has been operating for decades and doesn't necessarily have the best as-built drawings. | ||
| And occasionally when you open a valve, you find that there's something sitting inside there that's been around for a while. | ||
| And That's the quickest way to knock us off our pace in terms of the infrastructure build is actually an operational upset that would bring work to a halt because if it's not safe, we're not doing any work until we can remedy that situation. | ||
| So I think for us, the biggest operational challenge is actually the interleaving of the operations with the infrastructure work. | ||
| We don't have the luxury of a kind of greenfield location. | ||
| And there are other important missions in the PF4 facility in addition to pits, and they are ongoing as well. | ||
| There's important surveillance work that we have to do. | ||
| There's the heat sources for the CU-238 and the Ares mission, as well as RD. | ||
| So it's a kind of unique challenge, and it's one that keeps me and actually a large number of other people up at night. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| James, you want to go next? | ||
| Yeah, I think the things that keep me up at night are the maintenance of these facilities. | ||
| So I'll give you a couple examples. | ||
| At the Anglo Corps reactor, which is a critical facility for qualifying parts that go in nuclear weapons, we lost a safety rod. | ||
| It started to leak. | ||
| Fortunately, we saw it. | ||
| It wasn't going to be any issue with the safety of the reactor, but we had to replace that rod. | ||
| And there was only one spare. | ||
| So we're down to no safety rods. | ||
| Now we're going to build up some new ones with the support of NSA. | ||
| But that kept the reactor down for a year. | ||
| And that's kind of the things that happen when you're dealing with a nuclear facility. | ||
| When you find these things, it's typically at least a year. | ||
| And then with our MESA facility, a tool that's really critical to making these very special transistors for nuclear weapons systems also went down for three months. | ||
| Fortunately, we'd built up enough, I guess, capacity and reserves to effectively continue to feed Kansas City so we didn't lose anything on the life extension programs. | ||
| But if it happened at a different time, we would have. | ||
| So those are the kind of things that are both operational and producing product, but also have safety implications. | ||
| So we have been embarked on a multi-year effort to rethink how we do work, really to try to find a way to be much more efficient and move much more quickly to meet the demand signal that was mentioned earlier. | ||
| And so we've tried to go back to basics in this process. | ||
| You know, there's a few prime directives we have to follow. | ||
| You have to be safe, you have to be secure, we have to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollar, we have to be highly transparent to the government. | ||
| And so we've been working with our teams to try to find ways to meet those objectives and then remove barriers that don't materially add, don't necessarily make us materially more safe or secure, don't really help us execute these programs or manage the risks that are attendant with the kind of work we do, but really get us focused on delivering on our mission commitments. | ||
| And so this has been a great experience. | ||
| We have a lot of new workforce. | ||
| They have lots of ideas. | ||
| It's been a way to engage them and to really rethink how we do our operations in our facilities. | ||
| I think that's really important. | ||
| A companion piece to that has been modernizing all our business systems. | ||
| We had a lot of home-built business systems, many where the requirements were written by physicists. | ||
| Spoiler alert, they were all terrible. | ||
| Not because the people who built them weren't competent and capable people, but because we have this sort of Byzantine set of requirements for them that was highly optimized to 20 years ago. | ||
| So we've been working to bring in more commercial products and really have modern infrastructure to enable business and operations at the laboratory. | ||
| And then the last piece, we've been working with our colleagues at NNSA to really streamline our contract to understand where authorities can be delegated, where requirements in the contract can be streamlined, so that we can, again, focus on delivering at pace on our mission. | ||
| And that's been a really productive effort. | ||
| We've made a lot of great changes to our contract to simplify it and streamline it, make it more understandable and accessible. | ||
| And I look forward to continuing that work with our colleagues at NNSA. | ||
| All right, thank you. | ||
| And it is clear, isn't it? | ||
| I know you've worked hard on this, but getting as close alignment, and I think we're as close to alignment with our NNSA client, both on objectives and implementation. | ||
| I know it always takes longer than we'd like to take those steps, but as far as delegation, and we're all working on the same problem, and I think that's a tribute, again, to all of our NNSA counterparts out there, both in headquarters and the field. | ||
| So let's go to the last one then, and we will have a wrap-up at the end of all this, but people strategy. | ||
| As I said earlier, it's the attracting and retaining the workforce of the future that makes this all work. | ||
| So the market's changed over the past few years post-COVID, but I know it's still challenging in a lot of ways, different ways than it was four or five years ago with a lot of competition, particularly from other high-tech industries. | ||
| So what are your main initiatives to assure that we're developing the workforce of the future, both engineers, scientists, and of course a sufficient number of the high-quality craft workers? | ||
| And then what help do you need from NNSA? | ||
| They were very, very helpful in helping us balance out benefit and pay and things like that in the past. | ||
| What do you need as the next step in that to make sure that National Security Enterprise is the employer of choice for people? | ||
| Kim, do you want to start with that one? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, the most important thing that we have to offer our employees is the incredible mission that we support. | ||
| And so the number one thing that attracts people into our environment is the opportunity to do this incredible science and technology work in support of really critical national missions. | ||
| And so the national commitment to the work that we do, the clear guidance on the nuclear deterrent, the pace of work that's attendant really makes it an attractive environment to work on. | ||
| The work we've done with NNSA to really improve our salary and benefits package has been very helpful. | ||
| So our lab sits very proximate to the Silicon Valley and to a lot of very high-tech employers. | ||
| So there's always naturally a flow in and out of the laboratory due to that. | ||
| Cost of living is very high in our area. | ||
| But we've been able to make substantial progress. | ||
| So it changes the calculus for employees. | ||
| They want to stay and support the mission. | ||
| So we're not going to pay the way Google pays. | ||
| That's fine because we offer other things. | ||
| But we have to offer a fair compensation package to make things work. | ||
| And then the last piece is really focusing on the employee experience. | ||
| As I said, all these new employees really need to learn about us, about what we do and why it's important, about the kinds of missions we support and the kinds of opportunities they have to build a career in our environment. | ||
| So we put a huge effort on really teaching people about the mission and being much more purposeful in how we talk about our work and engage with all of these new employees so that from early in their career, they really feel a part of the work that we do and they really understand this bigger picture of what we're trying to accomplish in the nuclear security enterprise. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tom? | ||
| Our focus has been shifting away from the rapid growth that we experienced and the addition of new staff to more retention and development of the staff that we have. | ||
| Our peak hiring year was 2023. | ||
| We hired about 2,500 new staff. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| But the numbers have been coming down. | ||
| This year, depending on what happens with the budget, it'll be more like 1,200. | ||
| And our normal turnover is about 800 to 900. | ||
| So we're not quite at steady state, but we're pretty, we're getting there. | ||
| The hiring is tapering. | ||
| So we brought in a lot of new people, net growth of about 5,000 over the last five years or so. | ||
| They're enthusiastic, they're smart, they have skills that are going to be very valuable to our mission. | ||
| And what we don't want to have happen is just as they're getting to a point of proficiency, which actually takes a couple of years at least in our business, that they go off somewhere else. | ||
| And as was mentioned, I think we've made progress in terms of our compensation and benefits, and that was really critical a couple of years ago, in particular, when there was a lot of turnover across the economy. | ||
| People were experiencing inflation and hopping jobs to try and counteract that. | ||
| So we're not in a bad spot there. | ||
| I think where we need to be focusing, though, is maybe not so much the kind of monetary and benefit side of the equation, but more the job satisfaction. | ||
| Now, as Kim said, our mission is a big source of job satisfaction. | ||
| People want to do something that matters. | ||
| So we've got that one. | ||
| I think where we still have work to do is some of our, although we talked a little bit about infrastructure and a lot of the infrastructure investments are focused on kind of what you might call the hard infrastructure, the scientific facilities and the nuclear facilities, production and so forth. | ||
| We have a lot of people at Los Alamos who are actually working in pretty crappy conditions and doubled and tripled in offices and buildings where the rodents send me rude emails because it's so decrepit. | ||
| And, you know, obviously you've got to have the production infrastructure, you've got to have the scientific infrastructure, but we also need to give people decent spaces in which to do their jobs that are sort of a 21st-century work environment. | ||
| I think the other thing where we can do better is some of the things that Kim talked about in terms of streamlining how we do our work can have a huge influence on how satisfied people are. | ||
| No one wants to spend hours a day doing things that they feel like are not adding any value to this mission that's so important. | ||
| And it's a tremendous source of frustration for staff when they see their time getting burned away doing things that aren't meaningfully advancing the mission. | ||
| And although I think we've made a lot of progress on that front, I think there's a whole lot more that we could do. | ||
| You know, the ways we do things largely built up during a timeframe when there was not the kind of geopolitical urgency driving delivery that we have right now. | ||
| And it was okay for things to have long timelines because it was a slowly evolving geopolitical environment. | ||
| So we need to go faster to respond to the moment. | ||
| But I believe that in figuring out ways to go faster, removing low-value edit work will have a huge positive impact on our ability to retain employees. | ||
| They join our institutions to get a job done, and if they feel like they can get that job done, it's going to be hard to pry them loose. | ||
| But if they feel like they're running into dead ends and they're always getting, you know, no, send me another rock, then they won't stick around. | ||
| And then we'll have to start that recruiting and training and proficiency process all over again. | ||
| And it takes time and it costs money. | ||
| Well, this is actually a really good news story. | ||
| I think three years ago I told you about double-digit attrition at the laboratory is basically three years in and you were out. | ||
| We had more than 50%, I think 60% of our workforce was less than five years. | ||
| Instead, just doesn't, that kind of model just does not work for a national lab because about the time they're getting proficient in their skills, they're leaving. | ||
| And so we worked with NNSA. | ||
| We made a big bet at Sandiel and our employees. | ||
| We worked with NNSA to get our salaries aligned with what the market would provide. | ||
| Worked on benefits. | ||
| I'll talk about one here in just a minute. | ||
| Also back to the environment they work in. | ||
| We started what was called the Unleashed Excellence Initiative, which is trying to move some of these death by a thousand cuts that were happening and how difficult it was to get things done at the laboratory. | ||
| And I'm happy to say now that our attrition numbers are actually less than they were pre-COVID. | ||
| And in hot fields like which you would never believe that people with AI experience would be willing to even work for market conditions, what we can negotiate with NNSA, our attrition number there is actually less than 1%. | ||
| And because it's because of the mission, they get to work on machine learning and AI to actually help with nuclear deterrence. | ||
| We got things like we're creating bots that are design experts. | ||
| They're working on making everything from procurement to training more efficient for engineers and scientists. | ||
| And the one thing that kind of blew us away that NNSA allowed us to negotiate our benefits was two floating holidays. | ||
| And I thought, well, that's great. | ||
| I always like to have a couple extra days off. | ||
| But it turned out that was a huge deal to our employees because they got to take those days off. | ||
| Maybe it was their birthday. | ||
| Maybe, because we don't, at Sandia, a lot of the holidays we group together to give people off during the Christmas break. | ||
| And things like Martin Luther King Day and just various things like that they got to take off was the most popular thing we did with regard to benefits in a long time. | ||
| So the numbers are looking really good. | ||
| The mission is as exciting as ever. | ||
| A lot of new tools coming into play in how we do our work. | ||
| So it's an exciting place and we're not having trouble keeping people, at least at this point in time. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Good response. | ||
| And you know, Tom, you raised a good point. | ||
| And we're all faced with up to half of our workforce has been here less than five years. | ||
| And that idea of bringing someone in that says, this procedure doesn't add to safety and security and quality. | ||
| Why am I doing it? | ||
| It doesn't even apply to my project. | ||
| And I think that idea that you all have endorsed the past several years of getting it down to risk-based. | ||
| What are the risks of this either operation or this R ⁇ D? | ||
| And then what requirements apply so that people buy in? | ||
| Because not only will they not follow the requirement, but they'll find someplace else to work where they don't have to do these nonsensical things when they come to work. | ||
| But I'd say you've all seen, and I think we have through FCOG with the folks at headquarters, we've had the dialogue with Todd LaPointe and John DuPuy and some of the other folks to talk about that. | ||
| How do we apply them? | ||
| How do we apply the right parts of the DOE orders or commercial standards wherever we can, like OSHA Plus. | ||
| So I think that's a journey that we've gone on. | ||
| And I think if the progress that you've made in that, and congratulations, I think is something that probably we're just scratching the surface of getting down to where we've got the right standards for each mission and project. | ||
| I think it's important to remember. | ||
| We've done a lot of work with NNSA to streamline requirements coming from DOE and NNSA, but we've also been very introspective and looked inside our own institutions. | ||
| I would say eight times out of ten, when someone tells you, oh, we have to do this because there's a DOE order, ask them what order it is, because there isn't one. | ||
| We have the same problem inside our institutions where people are earnestly trying to reduce a little bit of risk or manage something in the right way. | ||
| And so we are taking this message very seriously and trying to clean our own house as well. | ||
| The other thing I've seen that you've done, and this is not unique to national security, but it's also true in commercial nuclear. | ||
| Somebody comes to work every day and they've got 110 things that are important, or 110 orders they've got to meet or requirements. | ||
| And working with them to understand what the top four or five of the high-risk items that they absolutely must take care of first and foremost is something you've done a good job. | ||
| And again, kudos on doing that. | ||
| I think as we streamline that, that's going to energize people. | ||
| We're going to get more work done safer and we're going to keep these people around because they sure are bright. | ||
| These young kids we're hiring and are really our future. | ||
| All right, so in closing, transitions are a good thing, an opportunity always for us, because the new administrator, the new secretary, the new Congress is going to ask all of you, okay, this is an important mission. | ||
| I'm bought in, I support it. | ||
| What do you need from me? | ||
| So for the last of the topics, what things do you need to ensure the long-term success and accelerate the national security mission? | ||
| Tom, can we start with you? | ||
| Well, to be honest, the biggest thing is just the recognition and the articulation of the fact that it's important. | ||
| You know, certainly with a new team coming in, we'll be looking to them to articulate what their priorities are, as is always the case with the transition. | ||
| I'm sure there will be changes. | ||
| We don't yet know what they are. | ||
| But if we have a clear articulation that, yes, this matters, yes, I'm willing to lean in to enable you to be successful. | ||
| There will be a question of resources. | ||
| The blueprint is a great thing, but it also comes with a price tag. | ||
| And that is going to be a heavy lift. | ||
| And so we'll be looking to see the actions Congress takes to support it or not and the action the administration takes. | ||
| But I think if I look at the broader international landscape, it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where someone says, well, you know what, this whole deterrence thing probably isn't so important. | ||
| After all, really everything's breaking our way on the international scene, and I'm so glad that all these other actors are being cooperative and not seeking to under a mine us. | ||
| Maybe that will happen, but I think it's unlikely. | ||
| James, to you. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with everything Tom said. | ||
| The funding is a very heavy lift and it's absolutely essential if we're going to get our facilities back into the shape they need to be to support the modernization programs and also provide an environment that our employees want to work in. | ||
| But we also made a lot of progress on what's called the Unleash EMDI. | ||
| Helping out here, guys. | ||
| Unleashing ENDIS. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So enhanced mission delivery initiative. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We still got a ways to go. | ||
| I would suggest that we've got contingency in the 80-4 program because of a lot of hard work, but also trying to get the model right with regard to reviewing and reporting. | ||
| But we've got work to go. | ||
| We've shown with a couple demonstrators, I can't go into details here, that we can go incredibly fast when we get this right between the federal oversight, the project management, and the labs, plants, and sites execution. | ||
| So I would just say we need to keep on that path. | ||
| Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. | ||
| We've built a good platform, and we're starting to see the momentum building in the system. | ||
| People are starting to believe that when we say we will clear barriers and obstacles to allow you to go faster, that we really mean that. | ||
| And they're beginning to embrace that and really work in different ways across the laboratories, across the enterprise. | ||
| So I'm hopeful we'll be able to use that platform and continue that process to really lean in and accelerate. | ||
| I think we do have examples of areas where changes in how we operate can make a big difference. | ||
| You mentioned OSHA. | ||
| So using OSHA standards for commercial-like construction is a very sensible thing to do. | ||
| It lowers costs, it opens the contractor pool more broadly. | ||
| Having that more broadly adopted, I think there are several things like that where we have ideas for streamlining the regulatory environment in ways that will really enable mission delivery in a much more expeditious manner while still ensuring we do this work in the safe and secure manner and responsible manner that we have to in our business. | ||
| So I think there is a big opportunity there. | ||
| I guess I'll put in one last plug for what I think is a real opportunity. | ||
| We've been exploring different ways across our mission space to work with the private sector. | ||
| And I think the opportunity for us to learn how to build those kinds of partnerships, public-private partnerships in different areas of our missions is another place where I'd like to see us lean forward, think differently about risk, and really embrace the opportunity that we have when we bring those capabilities together. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| Thank you all. | ||
| And we do have about 10 minutes for questions. | ||
| So I have microphones on both sides of the room. | ||
| Anyone have a question? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Here comes your pit course. | ||
| I'm having a challenge looking into the lights. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Hi, Greg Miller, Los Alamos Study Group again. | ||
| Kim, you have a new mission in your superblock. | ||
| It will have a new security profile. | ||
| And there was just an announcement in the Federal Register about environmental impact statement analysis for that. | ||
| Can you tell us why that's not being done in PF4 at Los Alamos? | ||
| So we're doing a supplemental site-wide environmental, a supplement to our site-wide environmental impact statement, which we just completed, to change the site posture to enable us to change the way we manage the material we already have on site. | ||
| So the intent is not to increase the amount of material we have on site, but it's very, because our material limits are so low, it's very difficult to do operations in the superblock because you have to move, every time you try to do a new operation, you have to move other material out. | ||
| So this is really a way to streamline operations. | ||
| We lowered the categorization of the superblock. | ||
| We de-inventoried the facility. | ||
| I think that was the right decision for the nation. | ||
| Do very small-scale work making targets for JASPR gas gun experiments and for our NIF experiments as examples that we're not changing the kind of work that we're doing. | ||
| So it really is a material management shift that will make the facility much more efficient and cost-effective to operate. | ||
| Thank you, Brenda. | ||
| Back here. | ||
| Yes, my name is Brenda Dillard, former Brenda Hunter. | ||
| I am president of a university, so I work with over 100 universities across the country. | ||
| I also work with MS Technology, NQA company out of Oak Ridge. | ||
| And we are in the digital transformation. | ||
| And Tom, we were at your site last week and happy to know that you guys, how far you're going along. | ||
| But my question to you guys, either one can answer, is how do we, from an NSA as well as all the production facilities and lab, how do we get this right in setting up the Ultra Tech, making sure that the security measures are in place, because it's not just, you know, bringing indoors next generation, but it's all of that. | ||
| And how do those systems work with some of our legacy systems that we have at some of our production facilities? | ||
| How do we make all that happen? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I think you should ask. | ||
| I think you should ask Laura tomorrow. | ||
| I mean, I would just say that this isn't her first rodeo at doing this. | ||
| But I think she's the best one to answer it. | ||
| Other questions? | ||
| see one in the back. | ||
| Hi, Shelly Mesh with Inside Defense. | ||
| I wanted to ask about, you're talking a lot about spare parts and needing maintenance and sustainment. | ||
| Your funding comes from Congress. | ||
| Those are typically not the most high-profile budget items. | ||
| How are you making sure that you're going to get the funding you need for those spares or maintenance and sustainment operations at your facilities? | ||
| So, you know, partly by just saying over and over again, we really need this. | ||
| And we've certainly been articulating those needs to NNSA. | ||
| I think that message has been received. | ||
| You know, to be honest, part of the reason we're in a bit of a pickle now is there were many years where the funds were not fully spent, and that does create a healthy degree of skepticism. | ||
| You know, do you really need the money when there's money been left on the table? | ||
| I would say we crossed that threshold several years ago. | ||
| You know, as we were ramping up, we kind of hit our pace and we began executing, and then all of a sudden that's when we found we've sort of hit the wall. | ||
| You know, it's just a fact of life that it's easier to articulate the case for a shiny new thing that's going to give you a qualitatively new capability. | ||
| It's hard to get people excited to say, you know, in order to do the things I did last year, next year, I'm going to need some more money because, you know, the klystrons are breaking and we don't have any spares or whatever it may be. | ||
| But, you know, that's just a story we have to keep telling. | ||
| And as I said, the thing that for me, I think, makes a pretty compelling argument is the fact that these facilities that we're relying on that we're now having to extend longer because it's going to take longer to get their replacements, they are in service of our on-alert deterrent every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, we all do the annual assessment letter, and I look at the facilities that are required to do the analysis that supports that. | |
| It has a very direct effect in terms of our on-alert deterrent. | ||
| And I think if we just keep explaining that to anyone who will listen, then hopefully we'll make the case. | ||
| Yeah, adding on to Tom, I learned in year two in this job that the only thing anyone reads that I write is the annual assessment letter. | ||
| And so I took this year the risk of moving all my facility issues to page two. | ||
| And I think a lot of people read it because we're getting a lot of questions about how we're going to keep Meso alive. | ||
| So I think it's working. | ||
| I think the last piece, I agree wholeheartedly with Tom. | ||
| We have to keep explaining to people why this is necessary. | ||
| And part of that is really showing what's in those buckets of money. | ||
| You know, when we talk about maintaining these facilities, what does that mean? | ||
| You know, the number of subsystems in a facility like the National Ignition Facility is incredible. | ||
| So it's easy to just see this big number and say, well, if I give you a little bit less, is that really okay? | ||
| But when you go through subsystem by subsystem by subsystem, it becomes clear where the shortfalls are. | ||
| And I think that transparency really helps people understand how seriously we take these budget exercises. | ||
| All right, we're at the end of our time, and I realize that we are standing between you and the cocktail party. | ||
| But let me wrap this up by just thanking the panelists for being here with us today. | ||
| Let's give them a round of applause. | ||
| And then before they get away, really thank them for the most important thing, and that's doing this very, very difficult job and what they do each and every day to protect our national securities. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| It's an honor. | ||
| Two things. | ||
| I'm going to invite you to join our friends from Love Necker in the reception next door. | ||
| And tomorrow morning, we start up at 8:30. | ||
| So be here around 8 because we will start at 8:30. | ||
| Have a great evening. | ||
| We'll see you then. | ||
| NC-SPAN is live in Doral, Florida, just waiting for President Trump to address House Republicans at their annual policy retreat. | ||
| When his remarks begin, we'll bring you live coverage. | ||
| And while we wait, we'll take a look at some of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Paul Levin joins us from the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| He's their social, cultural, and constitutional studies director. | ||
| He's also the author of the recent book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation. | ||
| And could, again, Mr. Levin, thanks for joining us. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me, and thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| This idea from the book, as far as the Constitution bringing things together, we've had you all have to talk about it before, but how does that parallel to the days we're seeing now under a new president when it comes to unity in the United States? | ||
| Yeah, you know, the argument of the book really is that the Constitution brings us together by helping us fight properly, by helping us disagree in ways that are constructive, and that it assumes that there will always be deep divisions, but establishes procedures and institutions that are set up to let Americans disagree in ways that lead toward negotiation, toward bargaining, toward compromise. | ||
| I think that is what our institutions can do for us, and especially in a time when we're intensely, deeply divided, the kind of 50-50 moment that we've lived in now in the United States in our national politics for the last generation means that we have to let our institutions function. | ||
| That's going to be hard to see in the first week of a new administration where everything we hear is what they want to do, but what they want to do and what is actually going to happen is going to be mediated by these institutions. | ||
| The difference between what the president wants and what he gets is a function of what he can get through Congress, of what he can persuade the courts of, of what the public thinks about what he's up to. | ||
| All of these things are there to help us broaden coalitions, to help us deal with each other, to force us to confront the reality of disagreement, which is the basic underlying fact of our democracy. | ||
| His main avenue right now, executive order, he has a Republican-controlled Congress. | ||
| How does that help or hinder him? | ||
| Well, look, every new president since Bill Clinton, so for 30 years now, has come in with his party controlling both houses of Congress. | ||
| And that hasn't meant that they've just been able to do whatever they want. | ||
| It's a challenge. | ||
| The first week of a new administration, you know, this is one week. | ||
| There are, what, 208 weeks in a presidential term. | ||
| The first week is defined by the president because what's in the news is what he wants to do and what he's starting to say. | ||
| Very soon, the president has to confront the reality of the world. | ||
| And he doesn't simply control that reality. | ||
| And very often our presidents are really assessed and tested by how they respond to events they don't control. | ||
| So what we learn in this first week is what he's trying to achieve. | ||
| And I think it does show us that President Trump has a distinctly assertive executive approach to this term. | ||
| There are things he wants to do and he's going to be very aggressive about doing them on his own. | ||
| But the system nonetheless constrains the president in trying to do those kinds of things. | ||
| The orders we've seen, a lot of them are about telling his executive officials to start a process, to begin to do something. | ||
| And the question of what really comes of it is very much an open question. | ||
| Every president seems like he's on top of the world and getting everything he wants in the first week, but it doesn't last. | ||
| He said in his inaugural address, and I'll quote, my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier. | ||
| What does he face on that front? | ||
| Well, obviously we're a divided nation. | ||
| And so I think a lot of our recent presidents have started out by saying they want unity. | ||
| I think if you look at his inaugural address, the way in which he describes unity is actually very similar to how a lot of our recent presidents have. | ||
| You look at former President Biden's inaugural or at Trump's previous one or at President Obama. | ||
| They talk about unity in terms of not disagreeing. | ||
| They say if we all agree with each other, there's nothing we can't do. | ||
| But that's not actually what unity means in the life of a free society. | ||
| What unity means is not so much like as acting together. | ||
| The challenge for a president, the challenge for our national politics, is how do we act together on national problems when we don't think alike. | ||
| And the answer to that involves negotiation, involves bargaining, involves working through the system. | ||
| And the test of any president is what he can get accomplished in that way. | ||
| Not only how does he use his power himself to do what our system lets him do on his own, because ultimately that's actually much more constrained than we often imagine. | ||
| And what presidents learn is they need other people to agree with them in order to get anything accomplished. | ||
| The challenge of whether this president, as any president, can be a unifier is whether he can get other people to come along. | ||
| Do you think there's a better sense of him doing that this time around, say the first time around when he was president? | ||
| I think President Trump seems to have a better sense of what the role of the president is than he did at the beginning of the last term. | ||
| That's natural for a president who's already served for four years. | ||
| I think he's much more inclined to be active in dealing with Congress than he was last time. | ||
| He said that he wants to meet every Republican member of the House in the first month. | ||
| I think he should meet every Democrat, too. | ||
| Our presidents too often assume they can only get support from their own party. | ||
| But I actually think if the president reached out to some Democrats, you can easily imagine Democratic votes for certain versions of a tax bill or some of his immigration bills, as we've seen in this first week. | ||
| But he's intent on getting to know members more than he was last time. | ||
| He's much more involved in setting the strategy for Republicans in Congress, thinking about, you know, how many reconciliation bills, what do we do first, what do we do second. | ||
| He was much more passive about that last time than this time. | ||
| And I think that's in part because he thinks he sees how important it is for that to work out, for his agenda to get anywhere. | ||
| Whether it'll succeed is another question. | ||
| Presidents who involve themselves in how Congress does its work don't always end up getting what they want. | ||
| But I think he does have a different approach, a different strategy than at the beginning of this first time around. | ||
| Yuval Levin from American Enterprise Institute joins us for this discussion. | ||
| If you want to ask some questions, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you want to text us, questions, or comments, 202-748-8003, a recent piece that folks can find online. | ||
| Trump Redux Begins. | ||
| You write in it that him coming back now is a refusal to pay attention to some things, not only from the former President Joe Biden, from former President Trump in his first term. | ||
| Yeah, look, there's a way that really you look at the politics of the 21st century in America, and in a sense, the public over and over has said no thank you to the person in power and has wanted change. | ||
| We've had very, very close, narrow elections now for a long time. | ||
| What really stands out about this moment in American politics is that we've had no majority party, no clear majority party for almost 30 years. | ||
| That is very unusual in the scope of American history. | ||
| All of our elections have been close. | ||
| Every newly elected president has started out thinking, oh, I won. | ||
| I get to do what I want now. | ||
| I'm going to push hard. | ||
| But in fact, every one of them has won very narrowly. | ||
| And that's true of Donald Trump in this second time, too. | ||
| He won less narrowly than the first time, but he got 49.8% of the vote. | ||
| That's a 50-50 election. | ||
| And each time when a new president has pushed hard at the outset, the public has reacted poorly because what they've said is, we don't like the last guy more than we love what you're offering. | ||
| That's what's happened here, too. | ||
| And I think the danger of overreading the mandate is a danger that every 21st century president has run and that Donald Trump is clearly running. | ||
| He's behaving as though he won a massive landslide election when he won a narrow election, a 21st century election. | ||
| And rather than start out by broadening his coalition, he seems to be starting out by spending political capital gained from the election. | ||
| And, you know, we'll see. | ||
| But that has not worked out for his predecessors. | ||
| It didn't work out for him in the first term. | ||
| What's the danger of a president spending that gain early on? | ||
| The danger is losing public support quickly and the public saying, no, no, no, we don't like this either. | ||
| This is not what we were saying. | ||
| The fact is neither of our parties is quite connected with what voters are looking for. | ||
| They've faced this challenge for a generation now. | ||
| And each time they've been elected because the other party was unpopular. | ||
| And that's a hard mandate to read, to just say, well, I'm here because the other guy didn't meet the public's expectations. | ||
| You want to say, I'm here because I made promises. | ||
| The public wanted it. | ||
| And now we're going to do it. | ||
| It's very hard for presidents to get their heads around the fact that they won because the incumbent was unpopular. | ||
| They then take actions that make themselves unpopular. | ||
| And as we've seen with President Trump, the public is willing to turn against him and throw him out, even when they elect him. | ||
| I think he needs to be very cognizant of that and think about how to build broader support before he takes aggressive action. | ||
| But like our other 21st century presidents, it's going to be a challenge for him. | ||
| Could immigration or one of those other topics be, because we see Democrats now, some Democrats expressing support for some of these immigration proposals, is that an avenue he can start building that support? | ||
| Or are there other avenues that he can take? | ||
| It's possible, but he has to think about where there is broad public support on immigration. | ||
| I think there is broad public support for controlling the inflow at the border. | ||
| I think there's much less public support for mass deportation of people who are here. | ||
| And that distinction is an important line to draw. | ||
| So there are ways, I think, that he could use immigration to broaden his support, but there are also ways in which it could become a huge political problem for him if he acts too aggressively. | ||
| Again, the lessons of the first term are there for him. | ||
| The way in which they moved early on with travel bans and other things soured the public pretty quickly on President Trump's immigration views. | ||
| He does run that risk, but he does have some opportunities here as well, of course. | ||
| Yuval Levin of American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| The book is American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. | ||
| This is Dorothy in Baltimore, Democrats line. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I wanted to ask him, because he seemed to be very knowledgeable as far as what he's talking about, his Constitution and everything. | ||
| I want him to answer me this question. | ||
| Why does the press not talk more about the things that help or hurt us when presidents, Congress, or the Senate does what they do? | ||
| The thing I think we're missing is this. | ||
| We talk about, you say what the president wanted to do and what Congress and all that, and that's good. | ||
| But the things that people were talking about was hurting them wasn't just immigration. | ||
| Now, Trump has went against the Constitution. | ||
| He files the Inspector General. | ||
| Now, that is against it because it's a law. | ||
| He halted the DOJ's civil rights division, which people just keep saying that's minorities. | ||
| That is not all minorities. | ||
| That's just people with disabilities. | ||
| It could be with lawsuits, you know, that have been discriminated against. | ||
| It could be for women, white, black, or whatever. | ||
| It's not just for people of color. | ||
| Let me put it like that. | ||
| And people keep saying that, but that's a major place where you would go if some, even if the police department, if they did something that wasn't right to a citizen, that's where you would go. | ||
| You would contact your federal government if your police department wasn't handling it right. | ||
| He halted all of that. | ||
| People don't know that hurts citizens. | ||
| They're not thinking very well when the press keep talking about what the president wants, what the Congress want. | ||
| What does, you all should name each one of those things that he do that hurt us and be truthful about it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Dorothy, thank you for the question. | ||
| We'll let our guests respond. | ||
| Yeah, you raise a number of important points. | ||
| I would say a few things. | ||
| First of all, one of the ways in which thinking about politics in this first week of a new administration is a challenge is that there hasn't yet been much of a response to the president's actions within the system, and especially from the courts. | ||
| The federal courts act in the past tense. | ||
| They review actions after they happen. | ||
| And the question is, which of these early actions are going to pass muster in the courts and which are not? | ||
| I think there's some that are going to run into challenges very quickly. | ||
| The notion that the 14th Amendment doesn't require birthright citizenship, I think it's going to get tested all the way up to the Supreme Court, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| What you describe here also falls into some of these categories. | ||
| To fire the inspectors general, for example, is a violation of federal law. | ||
| A relatively recent federal law that was passed in 2022 after Trump's first term says that the president can fire them but has to give Congress 30 days' notice. | ||
| We didn't do that here, and there's going to be a lawsuit almost inevitably, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| I think there will be some pushback from the courts. | ||
| There may ultimately be some pushback from Congress, maybe from the states, to various things that the president does. | ||
| And that is how our system works. | ||
| Our system exists in a kind of tension so that different interests, different pressures, different groups can exercise the power they have in the system. | ||
| And where we end up is where they land when all of those pressures are added together. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| This is not the last word, it's the first word. | ||
| The other thing I'd say, though, is part of what you say is that politicians need to focus on what the public is asking for and not only what they want. | ||
| And one of the challenges of operating as a political official in a 50-50 era is that it is difficult to know what the public wants. | ||
| There's not a strong, broad majority behind any party's agenda or platform at this point. | ||
| Again and again, we've had 50-50 elections, and that genuinely does make it difficult for policymakers to know exactly where the public is pushing them. | ||
| I think gradually they're coming to some understandings about public concerns about disorder, public concerns about a lack of agency and control, whether that's at the border, whether that's in foreign policy, whether that's in criminal law in the United States. | ||
| Both parties are coming to recognize that that's a public priority, for example. | ||
| But when elections are so close, and when the other factor we've seen in this century is control goes back and forth. | ||
| We've had more swings back and forth of control of Congress in the last 25 years than in any quarter century period in our history. | ||
| We've just had the third presidential election in a row where the party in the White House has shifted. | ||
| That's only happened one other time in American history at the end of the 19th century. | ||
| So this is a time when politicians find it genuinely difficult to know what voters are asking for. | ||
| From Pensacola, Republican line, we'll hear from Pat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pat, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I want to respond to the previous caller from Maryland. | ||
| She was talking about the Constitution and Trump halting some civil rights issue cases or whatever. | ||
| But my question for her, and this is what people on the right see, where was the civil rights division of DOJ when these students at Columbia and Georgetown were blocking Jewish students from being able to go to their classes? | ||
| We heard nothing from the DOJ about that. |