Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Conrad Lautenbacher, who has led the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for almost seven years, will step down on 31 October.

“I am leaving essentially at the time of the election when all the work of this congress is over,” Lautenbacher says. “It’s the end of the administration. NOAA is a politically appointed position, and, as much as I don’t like the concept that I am a political appointee, it is time to go.”

The administrator has “been here for almost seven years, which is a lifetime for political appointees,” Anson Franklin, a NOAA spokesman, told Scientific American. He’d “made it clear for a year or so that he’d probably depart before the end of the administration and ended up staying on,” Franklin says.

“I am in love with this job. One thing leads to another, and at NOAA, compared to my Navy experience, you can see projects through from the start and see them finished. You can them as a gleam in people’s eyes and can see them come to conclusion. That is what made it worth staying, to see that follow through,” Lautenbacher says.

During his time at NOAA’s helm, the retired Navy vice admiral guided the US effort to create the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, an international network that links Earth-monitoring systems. That project started as a “gleam” at the beginning of Lautenbacher’s tenure and has now actualized into a global collaboration among 75 countries and 50 intergovernmental organizations. The goal is to understand and provide to decision makers information about climate, water and natural disaster cycles, he says.

Lautenbacher also advocated that the US develop a stronger tsunami warning system in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans after the devastating 2004 tsunami. The final two of the agency’s 39 additional tsunami-detection buoys were installed in March, NOAA reported.

In reflecting on his NOAA tenure, Lautenbacher says he wouldn’t have done anything differently. “I only wish I were three or four people. I wish I had a herd of elephants’ stamina to work 48 hours a day instead of 16 hours a day,” as more might have gotten done, he says. But Lautenbacher “understands how things work,” with coordinating the needs of scientists with congressional appropriations, so he is not sure much could have been different—not even how NOAA handled the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environment Satellite System (NPOESS), the next-generation group of environmental satellites.

In 2006, a Congressional report criticized NOAA for project budget overruns and delays. That led Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN), who chairs the House Science Committee, to call on Lautenbacher to resign at that time, reports the AAAS’s ScienceNOW Web site.

NPOESS was “not a program I was very happy with when I was working at the Pentagon” prior to coming to NOAA, Lautenbacher says. But, it was forced on the agency by a past administration, so NOAA had to do its best to keep the program moving forward, he explains.

As for the 2006 report, “I believe that it did not look at the entire picture very well and missed the guts of what was going in the program,” Lautenbacher adds.

Dealing with NPOESS, which the administrator says is doing much better, will be left for Lautenbacher’s successor. This person should be “passionately interested in environmental issues we face today,” scientifically qualified, and, most important, experienced in large organization management, Lautenbacher says. He would not name names of who he thought was a suitable candidate. NOAA’s deputy administrator William Brennan will head the agency until a successor is appointed.

Lautenbacher plans to head to the suburbs of Atlanta to be closer to his two grandchildren. And, though he will be leaving government service, he is by no means retiring, but plans to stay active in teaching, advocating and managing, he says.