Last year, Congress created the “Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories,” and in Washington it didn’t take long for a new acronym, “CRENEL,” to be born.

The good news is that the commission's charter is to address the size, mission and alignment of the existing Department of Energy laboratories. The bad news is that DOE immediately missed the first statutory deadline: members of the commission were announced on May 20 of this year, while the legislation said the appointments were to take place no later than January 1. There’s nowhere to go from here but up.

First, some background. The DOE’s mission includes things beyond what most people think of when they hear the word “energy.” This includes the management of the DOE laboratories and technology centers. According to the DOE website, those labs are the center of a “federal research system, providing the Nation with strategic scientific and technological capabilities.” (Interestingly, nowhere does DOE publicly narrow down the topics the labs are supposed to cover.)

But a huge part of the DOE budget (almost $12 billion) goes to what is called the National Nuclear Security Administration, which has widely divergent responsibilities, including maintaining the nuclear stockpile, nonproliferation programs, and building the reactors that power the nuclear Navy. And the laboratories direct a lot of their, well, energy at research related to nuclear weapons. This is a throwback to the “Manhattan Project” pursued in the 1940s as the U.S. raced to develop the first nuclear bombs.

Any commission working on the “effectiveness” of the laboratories will certainly spend a large portion of its time considering the nuclear missions of the labs. And this is an area ripe for efficiencies.

The commission held its first public meeting in the middle of July. Opening the session, Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz noted that he sees the commission as providing a strategic view of how the labs and the DOE work together to advance the missions of five issues: nuclear security, energy, core science enterprise, remediation and major parts of the science and technology enterprise. He asked the commissioners to think strategically about what DOE needs to accomplish.

Congressional committee staff also spoke to commissioners about their view of what Congress was trying to accomplish when establishing the commission in the DOE spending bill for the current fiscal year. Among the comments of those staff people were some of the major issues that I believe must be addressed to ensure a wise use of the taxpayers’ dollar:

    DOE labs have had the same structure for 50 years. There are now 17 DOE laboratories. If the commission can’t agree on recommendations for consolidations of facilities or management efficiencies, Congress needs to know what alternatives were considered.

•     Revisit what the labs do and articulate why that still needs or does not need to be done.
•     Think big and worry less about the minutiae.
•     Think about long-term efficiencies.
•     The DOE mission has changed over time. The labs have served us well, but will they still be competitive for the next 50 years as the nuclear stockpile continues to shrink?

Closures and consolidations of one or more of the labs is a difficult thing to accomplish. This was underscored by a 2003 attempt by the Bush administration to close Idaho National Laboratory (founded in 1949) and move that work to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (founded in 1943). This consolidation never happened, largely for political reasons.

In 2013, the DOE inspector general told Congress that DOE should start a Department of Defense base closing-type process for the labs. Washington observers have learned from just that process that any suggestion of closing a federal facility leads directly to the establishment of local task forces and the hiring of lobbyists to stop any such thing from happening.

But what if we could actually look at this process without the “help” of lobbyists? What if the commissioners could take an unbiased look at whether the current system, which began with the establishment of what is now called National Energy Technology Laboratory in Oregon in 1910, is ready for an overhaul?

Because a system cobbled together from a start more than 100 years ago (at a time before the first moving assembly line roared to life and when the life expectancy of an American man was slightly more than 48 years) can certainly do with a top to bottom review. Taxpayers are demanding greater efficiencies in government management and spending. The commissioners shouldn’t squander this opportunity.