Dr. Kimberly Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, speaks at The Common Good, American Spirit Awards at The Plaza on November 21, 2024 in New York City. Budil told lawmakers Feb. 12 that the Trump administration's spending freeze has had several impacts on her lab's operations. Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
National Labs have seen mixed impacts from Trump spending freeze
During a House hearing, four directors of different U.S. national laboratories offered insight into how federal funding interruptions have shaped their work.
Leaders of four of U.S. national laboratories testified before a House committee on Wednesday about the future of research amid the Trump administration’s recent changes to federal funding and grants.
Speaking before the lower chamber’s Subcommittee on Energy were John Wagner, director at Idaho National Laboratory; Thom Mason, director at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Paul Kearns, director of Argonne National Laboratory; and Kimberly Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The 17 national laboratories operating within the U.S. are overseen by and funded through the U.S. Department of Energy, primarily through reviewing research proposals for funding opportunity announcements. Two bills passed during the Biden administration — the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — allocated additional funding for national lab work. Both bills and their funding provisions have been caught in the crossfire of President Donald Trump’s freeze of federal spending that has halted some national lab projects.
The impact of that freeze has been diverse for the four labs.
For Wagner at Idaho, the lab did not see major impact following “some time to implement” the funding award changes. At Los Alamos, Mason said that, excluding other agencies, his lab also saw “limited” impacts, with $200,000 of current funding and additional pending funding that could be in jeopardy.
Kearns at Argonne, however, noted the impacts for his lab were “more severe.”
“About $37 million in research activities have been suspended or put on hold,” he testified. “That represents the work of some 140 staff –– not all our staff are fully funded by the activity. So it equates to about 40 [full time employees].”
Budil noted that for Lawrence Livermore, the interruptions in federal funding resulted in one project being fully stopped.
“We had one project funded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act supporting grid resiliency activities. So this is a $7 million project where the funds were unallocated on January 28,” she said.
That $7 million was intended to go towards a special lab at Lawrence Livermore, Skyfall, a cyber-physical testbed to visualize and simulate cyberattacks and operation failures of U.S. electrical grids.
“This is a really important partnership for us, working with utilities and private sector companies so that they can understand, in a real world environment, how their different types of technology they're introducing into the grid will operate in that system,” Budil said. “So I think this is critically important work.”
Skyfall features private sector and utilities companies’ participation and also functions as an education resource for students interested in careers in cybersecurity and cyber resiliency.
Budil also commented that another Lawrence Livermore program with the State Department focusing on cooperative threat reduction was paused following funding program reviews by the Trump administration.
“This is about a $1 million effort as part of a program through Brookhaven National Labs’ Nonproliferation and National Security Department to do cooperative threat reduction work, where we have a long legacy doing things like capacity building, international support for things like nuclear forensics and understanding how to manage interdicted nuclear materials,” Budil said. “As far as I know, to date, it's paused. We don't know if it will be restarted at a later time.”
Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., said she hopes to restore funding for Lawrence Livermore’s projects in a “bipartisan way.”
Whether or not the Trump administration will reactivate funding to entities like the national labs is unclear. One of the pillars of Trump’s campaign was ensuring U.S. energy production dominance and security, a major research area for almost all of the national labs.
Budil said much of the research conducted at Lawrence Livermore is focused on multiple near-term energy technologies and said her lab is at the forefront of scaling fusion energy to be commercially viable.
“In the near term, our researchers have been working hard to manage carbon in our environment,” she said. “So how to make fossil fuel burning technologies cleaner, how to capture and store carbon, how to utilize oil and gas infrastructure after it's been expended.”
All four witnesses confirmed that they have not had any contact with Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Mason stated that the labs are required to comply with Energy if needed to submit internal information to DOGE.
“If contract direction was given and all the necessary requirements were met in terms of security and so forth, then we would certainly comply with that direction,” Mason said.