An interesting observation ob8eleven. For almost two decades I spent months on projects wondering if anything useful would survive from the millions of dollars being spent for our equipment, time, and well educated personnel? Department of Energy is the re-named Atomic Energy Agency, which had a defense related justification. I worked on everything from sickle cell anemia to searching for neutrinos to building giant telescopes. All are fascinating for a few, but not justified for Constitutionally support by a federal agency. I, like most at “National Laboratories”, worked on projects which depended upon the political lobbies deployed to keep the funding coming, even when the defense roll had passed to a very few laboratories, and which could have been performed, more efficiently, and often was, by private firms.
The question of the value and roll of the National Laboratories including NASA, is one which Donald Trump might choose to address, much to the chagrin of benefactors of the DOE swamps doing junk science with political goals. Our junk-science-czar-in-chief, John Holdren, who never did any science for twenty years at Berkeley and was elevated to the Teresa Kerry Chair at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and then to Presidential Science Advisor to work the political-activist-in-chief. I saw many fine scientists forsake any effort to get funding for other than the current NSF fad funded because our science funding is controlled by politics and cronyism. Now it’s “climate change” since Holdren and his cronies knew that the warming scam could only survive if warming, which has disappeared for about 15 years, when the data are examined by those whose careers don’t depend upon perpetrating the scam. So they changed the theme to “Global Climate Change”, which is convenient since it is always present.