[mturmon]

This is a really well-informed comment and I wanted to say something else in support of it.

A Caltech scientist who had worked with DOE and NASA labs made an offhand comment about the kind of work that those labs are suited to do that stuck with me - he said they should be trying to solve problems that are "national lab hard" - kind of a play on NP-hard.

What he meant is that these environments are suited to solving complex cross-discipline engineering/science problems ("make the right measurements to understand the climate system", or "find the processes and materials to make air travel safer", or "put a huge infrared telescope in space").

These are not problems that are suited to a university research structure. They don't get solved with $300K/year grants, small collections of discipline-focused PIs, and transient grad students.