Cog wrote:Below is a link to all the questions and some commentary by the author about the DOE. I had never heard of orphan departments within agencies. Those departments answer to basically no one and take on a life of their own. Such things are going to get eliminated forthwith.
Here is one of the questions. They are getting ready to get rid of a bunch of non-career types. They also have questions to determine how many employees they are flying around to climate change conferences, that turn into elaborate vacations courtesy of the taxpayer.
17 Can you provide a list of all Schedule C appointees, all non-career SES employees, and all Presidential appointees requiring Senate confirmation? Can you include their current position and how long they have served at the Department?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/10/ ... y-reality/
shortonoil wrote:Copying government data to a safe location is not a bad idea. We are presently sending copies of the EIA Table 11.1 World Primary Energy Production by Source 1970-2004, and Table 11.5 World Crude Oil Production 1960-2009 to researchers in Europe via FedEx. They require the hard copies as proof. We copy all data that we accumulated to hard paper copies. The reason that we are having to do this is not because the EIA is somehow "scrubbing" data. They just simply lost it!
Now, you have to realize that we are dealing with the government! There is really no reason to attribute things like lost data to actions of a Hitler,or Stalin like conspiracy. They are intrinsically just "screw ups". CTRL-X, OOPS!
It is kind of a miracle that the nation's foot soldiers have shoe laces!
DOE Budget: The President’s Budget provides a total of $32.5 billion, $30.2 billion in discretionary funding and $2.3 billion in new mandatory funding in FY 2017 to support the Department of Energy in the areas of nuclear security, clean energy, environmental cleanup, climate change response, science and innovation. This includes:
Increasing investments for clean energy research and development to $5.9 billion in discretionary funds supporting Mission Innovation - the landmark commitment to accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation announced at the start of the Paris climate negotiations. The U.S. is seeking to double clean energy R&D funding in five years and the Department’s investment is about 76 percent of the $7.7 billion government-wide FY 2017 contribution toward this pledge.
Investing nearly $1.5 billion in mandatory funding in FY 2017 for clean energy technology development and deployment; $1.3 billion for advanced clean transportation ($11.3 billion over ten years) and $150 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) ($1.85 billion over five years).
Providing nearly $5.7 billion to support fundamental research in high energy, nuclear, and plasma physics; materials and chemistry; biological systems and earth system components; and mathematics—as well as crosscutting high-performance computation and simulation and basic research that underpins advances in clean energy.
Continuing to invest in our nuclear security with $12.9 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration to maintain a safe, reliable and effective stockpile without testing, modernize the nuclear security infrastructure, reduce the threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, and provide a 21st century capability for the nuclear Navy. (part of the $5.8 Trillion spent on nuclear weapons)
Investing $6.1 billion to protect human health and the environment by cleaning up the Department’s legacy of nuclear waste and contamination.
The Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons
Does it matter—in military, political, or economic terms—how much the United States has spent, and continues to spend, to develop and sustain its nuclear arsenal? Many observers would say no. The Cold War is long over, the United States won without having to use its nuclear weapons, they argue, so whatever the cost was, it was "worth it." But for those interested in accountability and reexamining history in light of new evidence, what the United States spent on nuclear weapons along with the justifications for that spending can shed light on the pace and scale of the U.S. effort and offer important lessons for the United States and for other countries that have or seek to have nuclear weapons. This issue brief, based on the 1998 book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, examines how and why key decisions were made, what factors influenced those decisions, and whether alternatives were considered.[1] In so doing, it helps explain the process by which an arsenal consisting of just two primitive weapons in 1945 eventually grew to more than 32,000 highly sophisticated ones, what this process cost, and how the costs and consequences of the program were understood by policymakers at the time.
What Did the United States Spend?
From 1940-1996, the United States spent a minimum of $5.5 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.[2] The lack of data for some programs and the difficulty of segregating costs for programs that had both nuclear and conventional roles mean that in all likelihood the actual figure is higher. This figure does not include $320 billion in estimated future-year costs for storing and disposing of more than five decades' worth of accumulated toxic and radioactive wastes and $20 billion for dismantling nuclear weapons systems and disposing of surplus nuclear materials. When those amounts are factored in, the total incurred costs of the U.S. nuclear weapons program exceed $5.8 trillion.[3]
Of the $5.8 trillion, just seven percent ($409 billion) was spent on developing, testing, and building the actual bombs and warheads. To make those weapons usable by deploying them aboard aircraft, missiles, submarines, and a variety of other delivery systems consumed 56 percent of the total ($3.2 trillion). Another $831 billion (14 percent) was spent on command, control, communications, and intelligence systems dedicated to nuclear weapons. The United States also spent $937 billion (16 percent) on various means of defending against nuclear attack, principally air defense, missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, and civil defense.
The amount spent through 1996—$5.5 trillion—was 29 percent of all military spending from 1940 through 1996 ($18.7 trillion). This figure is significantly larger than any previous official or unofficial estimate of nuclear weapons expenditures, exceeding all other categories of government spending except non-nuclear national defense ($13.2 trillion) and social security ($7.9 trillion). This amounted to almost 11 percent of all government expenditures through 1996 ($51.6 trillion). During this period, the United States spent on average nearly $98 billion a year developing and maintaining its nuclear arsenal.
Cid_Yama wrote:America Erwache!
"The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Cid_Yama wrote:This is 1933 all over again. Except the US are now the Nazis.
Ever wonder what you would have done if you had lived in 1930's Germany as an intellectual. No need to wonder anymore. You are there.
So what WILL you do.
They are compiling names for God's sake. What does it take, people?
America Erwache!
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Cog wrote:We president now.
Arbeit macht frei
Cog wrote:To be quite honest, no one is getting put on a train or sent to a gas chamber, or any of the other things...
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