Despite some recent support for U.S. high-energy physics (HEP), the future of this important research activity is far from secure. In late-May, the U.S. Senate passed a $100 million supplemental funding bill for the Dept. of Energy’s Office of Science, which included $45 million for HEP, mostly at the DOE’s Fermilab National Accelerator Facility in Batavia, Ill. An additional $150 million was also passed for NSF research, part of which would be allocated to Fermilab. These funds would offset some of the $52 million in FY2008 Fermilab funding cuts that were made at the end of the budget process. Illinois Senators Durbin and Obama supported the supplemental spending.
The HEP spending was attached to a $169 billion war-funding bill with an additional $47 billion for domestic funding. The bills are now in the House before going to the White House.
In late-May, an anonymous donation of $5 million was made to the Univ. of Chicago (the operator of Fermilab and Argonne National Lab) for use in HEP work. Both of these actions will help, but not prevent the layoffs of about 140 Fermilab staffers that were already planned with the FY2008 funding cut. These cuts were required because funding was originally secured at the start of the fiscal year, but then retracted when the spending bills were finalized three months into the fiscal year.
The DOE also recently shuttered the over-budget National Compact Stellerator Experiment at Princeton, one of four magnetic confinement fusion reactors in the U.S. Earlier this year, it also begged off on its 2008 $149 million commitment to support ITER, the $12 billion international fusion machine scheduled to be built in Cadarache, France.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (which was supported by researchers at both Argonne and Fermilab) is now just weeks away from its startup. The EU’s continuing support of CERN and the LHC, in an admittedly very conservative but decidedly continuing manner, might be the example that the U.S. should take to ensure the survival of a strong HEP infrastructure within the U.S. With our current on-again, off-again support process we are likely to lose our valued scientists and then the tremendous facilities they work in. A good place to start would be to make a dedicated effort to secure the International Linear Collider for which Congress also cut $14 million in FY2008 funding.
