This article says it all: “A quiet milestone in the movement to privatize government services and activities was marked this week when America’s oldest and most well-known national laboratory, Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, was turned over to a new contractor.” The article further adds, “while it’s far too early to tell whether management at the lab will improve under the new arrangement, the fact that one of the nation’s most important national security facilities can be handed off to a private contractor (albeit, one that takes its marching orders from the Department of Energy) is a significance step forward in the privatization movement. If we can successfully contract out the job of building nuclear weapons and managing the nuclear stockpile, we can certainly contract out many far less critical government functions.”