Outside of the problems with the project itself, criticism of NIF has been focused on its role in the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program (SSP). This program is an umbrella effort to study the long-term storage of the nuclear stockpile, and a variety of groups have been highly critical of the effort, dismissing it as a program of "scientific welfare" that has little to do with science and much to do with keeping a nuclear industry alive. The Federation of American Scientists noted that "Some claim that the experiments were politically essential; only with the promise of huge, expensive projects would the laboratory management publicly endorse a testing moratorium." NIF is singled out as a particularly weak portion of the SSP, with questions about its capability to generate information that is actually useful to the project.