Federally funded research and development centers

rolls? If you're in the loop.

If you're in the loop, it's the FFRDC.

Exactly.

No, you still struggle.

it to roll off.

I need

to know more about the FFRDC.

The average age is about 52 to 56, depending on the center.

And just to be clear, Air Force Research Lab, that's not just another lab on the street corner.

That's an FFRDC, if I remember correctly, or not?

It's a federal, it's a government lab.

Okay.

There are contractors like Aerospace that support in an FFRDC way.

What does

that mean, please? FFRDC? Stay with

us, Chuck.

So there's a lot of great R&D that's done at the labs, NSW and DevCom and China Lake.

Where do you see kind of the split between what industry should be doing when it comes to R&D, what government should be doing, where they're complementary, where they're perhaps competing? Kind of zooming out from energetics, there has been a tension that I would say goes back to kind of at least the 90s of FFRDCs and labs sometimes competing with industry and that dynamic can come up and you know ships and software And I think it's it's being worked through today.

I'm wondering what that looks like like on the Energetic side and then yeah, so you know solo how you guys think about that as well more broadly So I want to start

Yeah, happy to.

We can act as neutral advisors, unbiased, and that's something that the organization valued that we could provide this assessment and that that could be something they could trust based on both our experience and our role as an advisor to the government.

It's a really nice backbone of deep acquisition program office experience, deep experience in the sustainment organizations, and the privileged position that we sit in as an FFRDC, as a trusted advisor to the government.

Absolutely, yeah.

So then you had all of that coming in.

So, for example, CNA has a contract with the Navy and the Marine Corps, whereas Rand doesn't have that.

Some of the other FFRDCs focus a lot more on like the STEM side.

So that's like MITRE focuses a lot more on STEM.

So they all have like different types of contracts, but these all fall under the federally funded research and development center.

We're seeing the value of that.

We're also seeing value in organizations like the AI Accelerator that's working with MIT and one of our federally funded research and development corporations, FFRDCs, and Lincoln Lab.

I've worked with APL, Johns Hopkins, and we've got aerospace at LA Air Force Base that I work with.

And so we have a lot of these FFRCs and UARCs that are also helping bridge that gap.

Burleson now believes past administrations did not pass full knowledge of these programs to the next one, so over time, no one at the top was in charge.

In his view, the work moved down to federally funded research and development centers, known as FFRDCs, which split it up and then sent pieces to contractors like Lockheed and Northrup.

That means a contractor could receive material and never be told that it came from a crashed vehicle.

Someone higher up once knew, and the people doing the work may not, and here we're referring to the late Dick Cheney.

That there is, that certainly these programs could have escaped congressional oversight and could have run amuck, uh, that's a big problem and we also need to get that back under control.

There's legislation that has done this, and there's also legislation that we think, um, uh, that's, that's enacted and when read properly indicates that the FFRDCs that the congressman mentioned previously, these federally funded research and development centers, that actually they are now required by law, by statute, to provide, uh, any UAP, uh, any i- information related to, uh, programs that were funded that were related to UAP.

Um, and when the word says government funding and they're literally called federally funded research and development centers, we, uh, we think it's a strong argument that, uh, those FFRDCs need to come forward with what they have or else be, um, uh, be at odds with the law.

Well, back to this luring.

I mean, obviously none of the three of us have seen a craft, a cadaver, or a, a live pilot.

Uh, the president could snap his fingers right now and declassify, uh, w- literally whatever he wants, right? That is the power of the president.

So there's declassification authority.

There's other practical examples, like we would love to see, uh, the NDA, uh, removal expanded to, uh, all members of the intelligence community, including defense primes and the FFRDCs.