One day ago, the unthinkable happened: Congress abandoned all signs of reason and passed an omnibus spending bill that gutted science in this nation. Much is clear, and much is not.
What’s clear are the facts. The Office of Science was appropriated $4.05 billion, and then asked to apply a 0.91 rescission to that number, bringing the actual allotment down to $3.69 billion. In last year’s budget, the Office of Science was appropriated $3.8 billion – meaning that this year, science actually got a 3% CUT over last year. At a time when industry and academia was crying for a growing envelope for the physical sciences as a means to save U.S. innovation, the Congress ignored them all and went with a reduction in DOE, NSF, and NIST – the major supporters of physical science research.
In DOE, U.S. participation in ITER, an international experimental fusion reactor, was zeroed. NOVA, a neutrino program at Fermilab and a driving project into the future of that laboratory, was zeroed out. ILC research was cut by 3/4, from a proposed $60 million just a month ago to $15 million now. If you do the math, you realize that since the first quarter of FY08 is now over, and $15 million represents one quarter’s worth of spending when you plan originally for $60 million, ILC has no more money for the rest of the year.
It’s a disaster. In fact, Leon Lederman of Fermilab, who received the nobel prize for his discovery of the muon neutrino, who discovered the existence of a third generation of quark, and who has worked tirelessly for decades to reach out to the public about science, has been quoted as saying, ” I’ve been around this lab since it was all farmland, and I can’t remember a crisis of this severity.”
What is unclear is what happens now. Clearly, this community needs to shout loudly at the Congress for two reasons. The first is to realize that they have not only just endangered the nation’s scientific enterprise, but also the careers of hundreds of young physicists rising up through the education pipeline. They have likely just created a large community of jobless, highly skilled workers – just what this country DOESN’T need right now. The second is simply so that they know that we are real people, who are real loud, and real pissed.
Apart from the question of a response from the community, the damage to the field is still being evaluated. While the targeted programs are clearly in trouble, zeroing them has implications for staffing levels at all national laboratories who support those people. In addition, since the U.S. is now no longer involved in several large programs, many physicists just found themselves with no research programme. Other programs cannot absorb those people; where will they go? And of course, the biggest question of all: since money will need to be moved around, who gets to run less, or maybe even gets shut down completely, just to keep the lights on everywhere?
