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View from the InsideThen and Now with Martha Krebsby Nona Shepard
ES News: Martha, you've led the Office of Science for six yearslonger than any previous directorand you've served three Energy Secretaries. That's quite an accomplishment. When you first came, you said you had three criteria for what interests you in a job: you wanted to do something that was serving a larger purpose than yourself; you wanted to learn a lot; and you wanted to offer something. As you reflect back, has this job satisfied those criteria? Krebs: Absolutely. More than I would have known. When I was thinking about that in 1993, the "larger purpose" was related to the programs of the Office of Science and what I knew about them. The connections between those fields of science and the goals of the Department were that "larger purpose." But I came to realize that there are connections between those intellectual purposes, the public policy purposes, and the people who carry them out. It has been a wonderful experience coming to know and work with some of the most impressive and nicest people in science, both here at DOE and in the active scientific community. I've certainly learned a lot; I knew I would, and I have. I had something to offer and I've grown, even more than I expected.
ES News: What was it that you had to offer? Krebs: I certainly had experience in Congress advocating Office of Science's programs to Members and Congressional staffsa key element of this job. I felt I had an insight into what that was going to take. I also knew from having just come from a lab [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] what the laboratories require in order to deliver the programs that the Office of Science invests in. So I had that perspective as well. What I knew I would learn was the perspective of living inside a Cabinet agency and being Assistant Secretary in that kind of organization. ES News: What's it like to be an Assistant Secretary in a Cabinet-level agency? Krebs: Essentially, the assistant secretaries who direct programs are the line management of the federal government. In large measure, the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretary depend on Assistant Secretaries to make things happen, and to make sure that they know when the Department is going to get credit for good things and not be surprised by problems. ES News: I suppose you don't always know when that's going to happen. Krebs: But it's your job to know. Part of the challenge is to make sure your networks are working so you know what's going on at the labs, at the universities, and in the scientific communities. I think we've been fortunate that we've had a lot of good news. We've had some difficult issues in terms of rebuilding the high-energy physics community in the wake of terminating the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and cutting the fusion program. But even though those were difficult things, we accomplished them without a lot of bad news. And, in fact, in the wake of the SSC, we negotiated the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) agreement, built the B-factory and the Fermi Main Injector on time and on budget, and our contributions to the LHC are proceeding on time and on budget. Those are the kind of successes you want. ES News: In the beginning, you also said that your first priorities were strategic planning and quality management. Are they still high on your priority list? Krebs: That was in 1993, and those priorities were Secretary O'Leary's in response to the President and Vice-President's initiative on Reinventing Government. The quality management exercises involved rethinking the work processes inside the Office of Science. It helped us build our information architecture, which became a model for the activities the Department is carrying out now. That focus on quality brought us Hammer Awards for our participation with other parts of DOE for the Environmental Management Science Program and the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative; and, a couple of years ago, we won a DOE Energy Quality Award that was based on the Baldridge criteria. So, paying attention to how we manage our activities was important to me at the beginning. It became very important in the middle of my term as we saw reductions in our work force and budgets for headquarters activity. We will always have to look at what we do and strive for improvement. We ask our labs and universities to do that and we have to do that ourselves. As for strategic planning, it's very important to me generally. In 1995-96, we participated in the Department's strategic planning exercise, and we did our own strategic planning. But what we have just finished is a much more intensive and crosscutting exercisenot bound by our organization and budget structure. ES News: People are praising you for changing the taxonomy in the new plan. It seems to have been a different exercise with very few organizational boxes, which was evidently a conscious effort. Please tell us why this strategic plan is so different? Krebs: Having worked in Congress, and having worked at a laboratory where the laboratory's activities spanned more than just basic science, I was aware of the importance of being able to articulate the connection and the value of basic research to larger national purposes. The Office of Science is organized to communicate to the scientific communityhigh-energy physics and nuclear physics, basic energy sciences, material sciences, chemistry, energy biosciences, engineering, etc. Our budgets reflect those organizations. So when we describe our activities and budgets, they are much more tailored to telling the scientific community where we are. Part of what I wanted to do in this recent strategic planning exercise was to make connections. It was important to me to show people who are not inside the Office of Science and not in the scientific community, but among our sponsors in Congress and the Administration, that the Office of Science has made contributions to the public purposes that the DOE was created for. It needed to be said in a way that was fundamentally different from how we talk about ourselves within the scientific community. ES News: That's what our strategic plans did in the past? Krebs: That's right, and I believe we will continue to do that. I'm not proposing to change our organization; but it is also true that we live in the DOE, and the DOE has an energy mission, an environmental mission, and a national security mission. So, clearly, there are lots of opportunities for us to interact and to contribute jointly, both to science and to DOE's missions. ES News: Could you explain how you accomplished the change? Krebs: The Department was conducting an exercise called "portfolio analysis." It was a crosscutting approach for describing the energy technology portfolio by the Department's R&D Council. As vice-chairman of the Council and working closely with the Under Secretary, who was Chairman, I was very aware of the activities going on throughout the Department. I realized that here was an opportunity to take a top-down view, and asked myself: What is the interface between us and the sponsors of our work, the people who represent the public and who basically provide the funding? It became clear that the Office of Science could roadmap at the highest level by tracking the investments we were making into the categories of the energy technology portfolio. It was an effort at the very beginning to frame our goals in a way that wasn't bound by our organization and our budget structure. For example, when the Council chose the goal of "Fueling the Future" and looked at an objective area to provide clean electric power systems, it would involve Basic Energy Sciences, Fusion, and also Biological and Environmental Research because of their investments in microbial systems. So at the very highest level, we had a goal and an objective that involved three of our programs. But then we had to go down more deeply into our program so that the scientists would see where their piece of the organization actually contributed to these higher level functions. ES News: Is that the second volumethe Science Portfolio part of the Plan? Krebs: Right. So the second volume makes those connections in much greater detailthe identification of these core research areas. In fact, the portfolio made us divide up the programs at the lower level. That was a bottoms-up exercise. Trying to bring these two exercises together in the middle was one of the more challenging parts of the process. The portfolio process, because we were reaching for something that was going to connect to our budget, had to be really consistent with our budget. It required us to have lots more detailed information, and yet somehow we had to aggregate that detail so that it flowed in a natural way up to the higher level. For a planner, it's a very interesting kind of exercise, but it doesn't make for a very good speech. (laughs) ES News: What does the plan say about the future for research in the Office of Science? Krebs: It tells us where we arebut it also points out where we're goingareas like carbon sequestration, simulation, and complex structures. The exercises built expectations and started people thinking in these directions. Of course, we didn't wait until the Plan was finished. While we were doing it, we started asking questions of our advisory committees and writing our requests for proposals in a different way. ES News: It must have been exciting for you. Krebs: It was very satisfyingvery satisfying. For me, one of the most satisfying things in the process of getting these high level connections was the way that we arrived at them. I didn't sit down with the planning organization or with the Associate Directors (ADs) and decide how we would do this. I held workshops and involved people below the AD-level; people working at the laboratories, and from other parts of the Department (from the Energy Technology programs, the Environment, and also from Defense Programs). I asked them to talk together about, "How do we make these connections to the larger purposes?" and "How do we express them in a way that would make a connection to the people who believe that science makes a difference, but who need to see how?" Another satisfaction was the fact that this became a way to educate younger scientists who are still at the bench about the true breadth of the investment that the Office of Science makes. For example, there was a young woman, a high-energy physicist, who came up to me at one of these meetings and said, "This has been amazing because I never knew how much biology the Office of Science does. I never knew that the Office of Science played such an important role in the human genome program." That awareness is something we need to spread much more broadly among the scientists and university professors who receive this funding. We only had a few hundred people involved during the workshops. We need to get this word out. As scientists, we might not be inclined to do this because the connections might seem a little fuzzy. Lots of scientists have a very hard time saying, "We're going to deliver such and such on a certain date." We are comfortable delivering facilities, but the actual research results that might make a difference in people's lives are harder for us because we know we can't always deliver science on a timetable. We don't even want to convey what the impacts might be, and this was an exercise in getting past that. ES News: You do a lot of traveling and speaking for this purpose, don't you? Krebs: Yes, the traveling has been constant. (laughs) ES News: One of your messages has been that DOE is a science agency. Is the message the same for the all the different audiences you speak to; some scientists and some not? Krebs: I think it has been pretty consistent. Trying to get that message outthat we are a science agency, an R&D agencyand what that means and why it matters is something that I talk about to everyone. Of course, when I'm talking within the scientific community, I try to convey that we need their help and support. The funding for the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is not enough to sustain the vitality of the scientific effort in this country. When I speak to Rotary Clubs or groups in our laboratories' communities, I probably speak more broadly so they will understand not just that the laboratory in their community is an important part of our R&D effort, but that the whole federal investment in R&D is important. This can encourage them to speak to their local representatives in a more informed way. And I also try to bring it down to a level of understanding so they can talk with their families. ES News: When you told your senior staff you were leaving, you said, "This is the best job I've ever had." Krebs: Yes, that's true; and my goal is to find a job that will be as good, although I know it's going to be different. I think it will be a challenge to find one that has everything that this job has had. ES News: In what ways has it been the best? Krebs: It's been the best job so far for many reasons: it built on what I had to offer; it challenged me; I learned a lot; I met great people; it had an intellectual scope that was just absorbing; and, it had a financial and managerial scope that is very hard to get on the private side. What I'm looking for next is a job where I will still have the intellectual scope. I think it's going to be hard to reproduce the managerial and financial scope, but if I can have the intellectual scope, that's what is fundamentally important. ES News: You've articulated the richness of what you've done while serving this Office, and you leave behind a new vision in the Strategic Plan and Portfolio. But what do you consider your legacy? Krebs: First of all, we didn't stop anything that was coming alongthe Advanced Photon Source, the Advanced Light Source, the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliderall of those got done. And we started things like the Main Injector in the B-factory, the Large Hadron Collider, the Joint Genome Institute. Next month I'm going to go out to the Combustion Research Facility upgradethank goodness, it has been a long time comingand we're going to have that done. We've got an ongoing challenge with the Spallation Neutron Source. Those are some of the facilities that I will always be proud to have been part of.
And then there are other things that are not so concrete, such as the re-craftingunder very difficult circumstances, both human and programmaticof the fusion program from a technology driven program to a science driven program. Pressing the laboratories to work together has been an underlying goal of what I've been trying to do, and we've actually made it happen. Our budget isn't growing as much as they would like or I would like. Everybody can't have everything, so we've got to work together. The laboratories are intrinsically teaming organizations, and to bring that teaming approach outside the boundaries of each laboratory into the system is something that we've begun. It's not finished, but it has begun. And we have some real results for it because the B-factory is a team effort, the LHC is a team effort, the Joint Genome Institute is a team effort. The atmospheric radiation measurements program is a team effort beyond laboratories, including universities. It wasn't always easy, but it was very satisfying. And so these are things of which I'm very, very proud. But these are not things that any one person does alone. ES News: In conclusion, what would you like to say about science? Krebs: Well, I have just read the Harry Potter books, and they are wonderful books about magic. I've been interested in science fiction and fantasy since graduate school, but I'm always very aware of the apparent conflict between magic and science. Yet, I think that is what gets us into science in the first placethat sense of amazement that we can explain the world in which we live and we can influence what happens in it. The reason why I think science replaces magic as a way of interpreting the world we live in is because science is both amazing and more dependable in influencing the world than magic is. There is still a sort of magic that underlies the sense of amazement about the world and how things happen. I think that's what sustains all of us who make commitments to these kinds of jobs, whether they are here in Washington or out in the laboratories and universities. As I go, that's what I want to remember, because there are many things at any given time that discourage usthat look like they are going to interfere with the magic or wonder. We're always going to be faced with changes, whether it's the contractors that are running our laboratories or the people here in Washington. But the commitment inside the Office of Science is to keep the science going. I have great confidence in the people in the Office of Science, the Associate Directors and everybody else that jointly feels this sense of commitment; not only to science but to the institutions that do it. That's what's really important. ES News: We'll miss you, Martha; and wish you success in the future. The Strategic Plan and Science Portfolio are available online from the Office of Science website.
Mrs. Silillian Anderson U.S. Department of Energy Office of Planning and Analysis (SC-5) 1000 Independence Ave. S.E. Washington, D.C. 20585 Reference:
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