Bush Picks New Head of Nuclear Agency

WASHINGTON -- The White House said Friday that President Bush has chosen a replacement for the man ousted as head of the government's nuclear weapons program in the wake of reports of embarrassing security breakdowns.

Bush selected Thomas P. D'Agostino, who currently serves as deputy administrator of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, to succeed Linton Brooks in the top job there on an acting basis.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman had said Thursday that Brooks would resign within the month. The agency maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile and oversees the nation's weapons research laboratories.

"I have decided it is time for new leadership at the NNSA," Bodman said.

Brooks, a former ambassador and arms control negotiator, said he accepted the decision, one he understood was "based on the principle of accountability that should govern all public service. This is not a decision that I would have preferred."

Brooks was reprimanded in June for failing to report to Bodman the theft of computer files at an NNSA facility in Albuquerque, N.M., that contained Social Security numbers and other data for 1,500 workers.

Then in October hundreds of pages of classified weapons-related documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico were found during a drug raid in the home of a woman who had worked at the lab.

That security breakdown was especially troubling, a department inspector general's report said, because it came after tens of millions of dollars had been spent to upgrade cyber-security at Los Alamos. A new management group also had been put in charge only a few months earlier _ also a fallout over the repeated security problems.

The New Mexico laboratory is one of three major research labs that are part of the nuclear weapons complex under the NNSA. The agency was created after the security flap involving Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee in the late 1990s in hopes that a single agency within DOE might provide more control over security.

Meanwhile, lab spokesman Steve Sandoval said Friday the installation in New Mexico plans to implement an expanded substance abuse policy that includes random drug tests of employees and pre-employment drug screening for lab workers and contractors.

All lab policies, including current substance abuse guidelines, have been under review since last year, before Los Alamos National Security LLC took over the lab's management in June from the University of California, which ran the lab for the DOE for decades, he said.

Michael Anastasio, the lab's director, notified employees about the new policy last month "to let people know this was coming and take it seriously," Sandoval said.