Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is officially jettisoning plans for its salary reduction/closure day program, which had been planned to deal with a massive budget shortfall. Lab Director Parney Albright said in a Monday memo to lab employees that the lab had addressed a $100 million shortfall by cutting costs through reductions to procurement, travel and overtime, reprogramming actions, and supplemental labor, as well as through a Self-Select Voluntary Separation Program (SSVSP) that led to buyouts for 399 career lab employees earlier this month. “Because of these actions and the follow-through commitment of the senior management team, I am announcing the cancellation of the Lab’s salary reduction/closure day program,” Albright said in the memo. “However, it is clear we cannot return to past spending practices. We must continue to manage this gap through actions” that already contributed to addressing the shortfall.
Albright also said in the memo that the lab would make a $40 million planned payment to the lab’s TCP-1 pension plan, and confirmed that employees in the plan would see their contributions increase from 5 percent to 7 percent. “We believe these combined efforts will ensure our pension plan remains strong,” he said. He also said that the lab would assess the workforce impacts of the SSVSP “in the coming weeks and months,” and signaled that current employees would have to shoulder a heavier burden. “Because external hiring will be restricted for the next 12 months to a ceiling established under the SSVSP, there will be challenges in redeploying staff to responsibly fill gaps created by the SSVSP,” he said. “It is important that we have an open dialogue with our sponsors to adjust expectations resulting from lower budgets and staffing levels.”
