In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has quietly begun a new competition for the contract to run the United States’s sole dedicated particle physics laboratory. Announced in January, the rebid comes 1 year after Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which is managed in part by the University of Chicago (UChicago), failed an annual DOE performance review and 9 months after it named a new director. DOE would not comment, but observers say its frustrations include cost increases and delays in a gargantuan new neutrino experiment.

“I don’t think it’s surprising at all given the department’s evaluation of [Fermilab’s] performance,” says James Decker, a physicist and consultant with Decker, Garman, Sullivan & Associates, LLC, who served as principal deputy director of DOE’s Office of Science from 1973 to 2007. Although Fermilab passed its 2022 performance evaluation, the one for fiscal year 2021 was “one of the most scathing I have seen,” Decker says.

DOE hires other parties to run its 17 national labs on 5-year contracts that can be renewed annually for another 15 years or more. Only rarely does DOE seek a new contractor because of performance problems. Since 2007, UChicago has run Fermilab with the Universities Research Association (URA), a consortium of research universities, in a partnership called the Fermi Research Alliance (FRA). The university also runs Argonne National Laboratory.

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DOE has already solicited letters of interest and will issue a request for formal proposals this summer. It intends to award the new contract by the end of the next fiscal year, 30 September 2024, and transfer control of the lab, which employs 2100 staff and has an annual budget of $614 million, on 1 January 2025. UChicago hopes to win the contract again, says Paul Alivisatos, president of the university, who is also chair of FRA’s board of directors and a former director of DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We absolutely will be bidding to continue.”

In 2021, DOE gave Fermilab’s performance a B, whereas a B+ is needed to pass. In five of eight main subcategories, the lab earned failing marks, including a C on science and technology program management and a B- in business systems. In particular, DOE reviewers lamented Fermilab’s poor management of the largest project the 56-year-old laboratory has ever undertaken: “The laboratory’s biggest initiative is struggling.”

Physicists are preparing to shoot a beam of elusive particles called neutrinos from the lab in Batavia, Illinois, to a gigantic underground detector 1300 kilometers away in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. The experiment—known as the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)—aims to be the definitive test of neutrino properties and could help explain why the infant universe generated more matter than antimatter. In 2015, DOE estimated the project would cost $1.5 billion and start to generate data in 2025. By late 2021, the cost estimate had more than doubled to $3.1 billion and the schedule had slipped 4 years.

Scientists say Fermilab has had trouble overseeing construction work at the mine. “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” says a former Fermilab physicist who requested anonymity because he works at another DOE lab. “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awful lot of money off of us.”

The problems reveal a fundamental weakness of both FRA and URA, says Marvin Marshak, a neutrino physicist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. They are ad hoc corporations devised to manage national labs, so they lack the resources of an industrial company, he says. “They’re shells,” Marshak says. “They don’t have enough people and they have no assets.”

FRA officials acknowledge that Fermilab was not adequately prepared to run a huge construction project. In 2019, the lab was managing about $150 million annually dedicated to big projects, says Juan de Pablo, vice president for national labs at UChicago and a member of the FRA board. Now, that number approaches $700 million, he says. “There were all sorts of things that the lab did not have the capacity, the size, the scale to be able to take on so quickly.”

However, Fermilab may not deserve all the blame, says a theoretical physicist who requested anonymity to protect relations with DOE. For example, he says, after the lab finally hammered out an excavation contract with Thyssen Mining, months passed before DOE approved it. “I’m not sure whether it’s really the lab that has a problem, or if it’s DOE that has a problem and is blaming the lab.”

The contracts are in place and excavation in South Dakota is 60% complete, De Pablo says, so the costs are now under better control. Still, DOE’s budget request for fiscal year 2024, released last week, now estimates that LBNF/DUNE will cost $3.3 billion.

Many physicists say the lab also has problems beyond the neutrino experiment. Fermilab often lags in disbursing funding to collaborators at universities, multiple sources say. Even gaining entry to the lab site has become an ordeal as it tries to tighten security, physicists say. The lab requires occasional users to apply for site access 4 weeks in advance and repeat security training for each visit, the theorist says.

Opinions vary on how Fermilab wound up in turmoil. The former Fermilab physicist says the lab’s previous director, Nigel Lockyer, dismissed many longtime managers and replaced them with poorly suited newcomers. “I could see things falling apart, but I wasn’t empowered to help,” the physicist says. Others say the exploding demands of LBNF/DUNE forced Lockyer to slash other smaller projects, which alienated the physicists who worked on them. “Nigel was in a terrible position,” says a physicist who collaborates on a different Fermilab experiment. “And he didn’t have a knack of presenting these difficult decisions as being in everybody’s best interest.” Lockyer did not respond to a request for comment.

The task of righting the ship now lies with Lia Merminga, who became the lab’s director in April 2022. Merminga recently led development of a $978 million proton accelerator under construction at Fermilab. The lab’s 2022 performance review commends her “for demonstrating a good understanding of [DOE’s] concerns.” But if the Fermilab contract changes hands, Merminga could lose the post. “I have every confidence in Lia,” says the physicist who collaborates at Fermilab. “I just don’t know whether she’ll have the time.”

How many parties will bid on the contract remains unclear. Managing the lab requires very specific technical expertise but pays $5 million per year, at most. “I don’t think that there are too many organizations that could really compete for this contract,” Decker says. If just UChicago or URA bid on the new contract, they’ll need a new partner, multiple observers say, perhaps one with expertise in huge construction projects. DOE is sure to insist that something changes.