Jefferson Lab contributes to the Department of Energy mission to develop and operate major cutting-edge scientific user facilities. Jefferson Lab's CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility) is a unique tool for exploring the transition between the regime where strongly interacting (nuclear) matter can be understood as bound states of protons and neutrons, and the regime where the underlying fundamental quark-and-gluon structure of matter is evident. The nature of this transition is at the frontier of the authors understanding of matter. Experiments proposed by 834 scientists from 146 institutions in 21 countries await beam time in the three halls. The authors user-customers have been delighted with the quality of the data they are obtaining. Driven by their expressed need for energies higher than the 4 GeV design energy and on the outstanding performance of their novel superconducting accelerator, the laboratory currently delivers beams at 5.5 GeV and expects to deliver energies approaching 6 GeV for experiments in the near future. Building on the success of Jefferson Lab and continuing to deliver value for the nation's investment is the focus of Jefferson Lab's near-term plans. The highest priority for the facility is to execute its approved experimental program to elucidate the quark …