Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Philadelphia Inquirer
January 6, 2007
By Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President Bush has chosen a replacement for the man ousted as head of the government's nuclear-weapons program after reports of embarrassing security breakdowns.
Bush selected Thomas P. D'Agostino, who currently serves as deputy administrator of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, to succeed Linton Brooks in the top job there on an acting basis.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Thursday that Brooks would resign within the month. The agency maintains the nuclear-weapons stockpile and oversees the U.S. weapons-research lab.
"I have decided it is time for new leadership at the NNSA," Bodman said.
Brooks, a former ambassador and arms-control negotiator, said he accepted the decision, one he understood was "based on the principle of accountability that should govern all public service. This is not a decision that I would have preferred."
Brooks was reprimanded in June for failing to report to Bodman the theft of computer files at an NNSA facility in Albuquerque, N.M., that contained Social Security numbers and other data for 1,500 workers.
Then in October, hundreds of pages of classified weapons-related documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico were found during a drug raid in the home of a woman who had worked at the lab.
That security breakdown was especially troubling, a department inspector general's report said, because it came after tens of millions of dollars had been spent to upgrade cyber-security at Los Alamos. A new management group also had been put in charge only a few months earlier - also a fallout over the repeated security problems.
The New Mexico lab is one of three major research labs that are part of the nuclear-weapons complex under the NNSA.
January 6, 2007
By Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President Bush has chosen a replacement for the man ousted as head of the government's nuclear-weapons program after reports of embarrassing security breakdowns.
Bush selected Thomas P. D'Agostino, who currently serves as deputy administrator of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, to succeed Linton Brooks in the top job there on an acting basis.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Thursday that Brooks would resign within the month. The agency maintains the nuclear-weapons stockpile and oversees the U.S. weapons-research lab.
"I have decided it is time for new leadership at the NNSA," Bodman said.
Brooks, a former ambassador and arms-control negotiator, said he accepted the decision, one he understood was "based on the principle of accountability that should govern all public service. This is not a decision that I would have preferred."
Brooks was reprimanded in June for failing to report to Bodman the theft of computer files at an NNSA facility in Albuquerque, N.M., that contained Social Security numbers and other data for 1,500 workers.
Then in October, hundreds of pages of classified weapons-related documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico were found during a drug raid in the home of a woman who had worked at the lab.
That security breakdown was especially troubling, a department inspector general's report said, because it came after tens of millions of dollars had been spent to upgrade cyber-security at Los Alamos. A new management group also had been put in charge only a few months earlier - also a fallout over the repeated security problems.
The New Mexico lab is one of three major research labs that are part of the nuclear-weapons complex under the NNSA.