When geophysicist Marcia McNutt took over as director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 2009 as part of the new Obama administration’s “dream team” of scientist-administrators, her first priority was to reorganize the agency to respond to real-world problems. But USGS scientists, many of whom had been with the agency for decades, were known for their resistance to change, so McNutt devised a remarkable strategy. She could not fire department heads, but she could assign them to a regional office outside their beloved Menlo Park, California, and the post she offered was her home town, Minneapolis, Minnesota. One by one, McNutt recalls, department heads retired or quit, leaving her free to set a new direction.

“We were living in geologic time, so Marcia took some getting used to,” says Bill Werkheiser, now deputy director at USGS in Reston, Virginia, who was McNutt’s associate director at the time. “She made decisions very quickly … we knew we had to change, and she made it happen. But she was always clear, you knew where you stood, and she was fiercely loyal to us.”

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McNutt wasn’t alone in recognizing the need to overhaul the structure of USGS. “USGS was full of ivory tower types each in his or her own silo—the seismic folks, geology folks, public health folks,” says her then-boss David Hayes, who was deputy secretary of the interior under both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama and is now on the faculty of Stanford Law School. “When Marcia arrived the agency was not, to my view, living up to its potential to provide the science needed to help undergird smart decision-making. She reorganized it to align with today’s science challenges—climate change, land use—and she did it in a remarkable way, with a sense of openness and respect.”

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Soon after her arrival she was tapped to lead the Flow Rate Technical Group charged with gauging the volume of oil erupting from BP’s well, a highly contentious issue. BP put the number first at 1000 and then at 5000 barrels a day. The group’s estimate, based on bits of high-definition video footage Congress had forced BP to share, was far higher: as much as 60,000 barrels a day. “Others—in government, academia, the press—were shooting from the hip,” McNutt says. “But we had the data.” Pushing through the bluster of what she called BP’s “cowboy, get it done and go home” attitude, McNutt announced the technical team’s findings to the world. “Marcia was pragmatic, she understood what needed to be done to bring the stakeholders together,” Hayes says. “And she showed a surprising willingness to let it rip—she wrote some emails she shouldn’t have, believe me.”

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