I’m surprised that this isn’t getting more attention. The US Congress’s budget for FY2008 got passed this week and it was devastating for the physical sciences. I’ve listed some examples below, and I’d be interested to know what others think of these cuts. Are they a necessary evil or should they have been avoided? Is/should physics be considered less important than the other sciences when cuts need to be made? I think the Coffee House would be the most appropriate place for this to go, but it doesn't matter that much to me.
For example, in plasma physics, despite US claims to support clean alternate energy research, we just completely ended our funding for the ITER project, which has a realistic chance to pave the way to fusion power plants in several decades.
Out in CA, Livermore Lab, which does a variety of physics research including defense work, was already facing hundreds of layoffs as a result of a budget shortfall from an enforced change in contractors by the Republicans. Some hairbrained idea about how it would be more efficient if we had competative bidding and allowed a private company to run it instead of a university. But the lab is now going to have to lay off many more as a result of these budget cuts by the Democrats.
And in the most fundamental area of experimental science research, particle physics, the situation just became desperate. Fermilab, the US lab devoted exclusively to particle/accelerator research is suddenly facing the worst budgetary disaster of its history. The Tevatron, the experiment which employs most of the people out there and the world’s current most powerful collider, will probably have to shut down for more than a month to conserve money just as it’s entering the final and most productive two years of its operation. Worse, US R&D on the proposed International Linear Collider has been slashed so hard that it will have to immediately halt because all the money has already been spent (apparently in this country we have to spend money before we know if it exists). And this all happened on the heels of Great Britain pulling out of the project. These cuts will probably cost Fermilab and the US their chance of hosting the collider if it is ever built. At the same time the neutrino oscillation experiment NOvA, one of the primary backup projects that Fermilab was banking on to keeps its doors open long term, has also had its funding completely cut.
To put this all in context, at least in my own little world as a student working out at Fermilab, we were told by the Bush administration to expect a significant increase in funding this year (I think ~6%). When the Democrats took over that number became obsolete, but I think no one expected these kinds of cuts, especially given how high the quality of the science has been recently. And it all happened in the blink of an eye: the new budget was announced Monday, and it had passed through Congress on Tuesday, giving the public no chance at all for comments.
A couple of references:
Some general
info on the cuts
The Fermilab
situation
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