Budget Cuts Will Mean Layoffs at Fermilab


Budget Cuts Will Mean Layoffs at Fermilab
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/science/22fermi.html?ex=1356152400&en=
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By KENNETH CHANG
Published: December 22, 2007
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the nation?s premier center
for plumbing the mysteries of the universe in the tiniest bits of
matter, is planning to lay off more than 10 percent of its employees in
the coming months, the result of impending budget cuts mandated by the
spending bill passed by Congress this week.

Fermilab?s collaboration in an international project to design and build
the International Linear Collider, which would slam together electrons
and their anti-particles ? positrons ? at ever-higher energies, will
slow to a halt. A Fermilab experiment called NOvA to look for an
asymmetry in the laws governing evanescent particles known as neutrinos
will be placed in limbo with hopes that it can be revived next year by
new financing.

Outside of Fermilab, the spending bill also eliminated the United
States? planned contribution of $160 million to ITER, a test fusion
reactor that is intended to lead to commercial energy production by
emulating the process that powers the Sun.

Fermilab, in the western suburbs of Chicago, had expected its budget to
rise to $372 million from $342 million. Instead it will fall to $320
million. Officials said they were caught unaware by the cuts, and
because they affect the 2008 fiscal year that started nearly three
months ago, the officials said they had to take action quickly.

?I have never been handed a problem more difficult than this one,?
Piermaria Oddone, Fermilab?s director, told his employees at a meeting
on Thursday, where he announced that probably 200 layoffs out of a work
force of 1,940 people would be necessary.

Remaining employees will effectively have their pay cut. Beginning in
February, they will have to take off two unpaid days a month.

Some scientists attributed Fermilab?s woes to Congress?s reviving its
practice of earmarks that direct agencies to finance projects that would
probably not receive money otherwise. In a statement, the American
Physical Society said it ?notes with some dismay that had Congress
applied the same discipline to earmarking as it did last year, the
damage to the science and technology enterprise could have been
avoided.?

President Bush is expected to sign the spending bill into law.

In the budget proposed by Mr. Bush in February as well as the versions
passed later by the Senate and the House, the Office of Science at the
Energy Department was slated for a healthy budget increase of more than
18 percent, part of a promise to double financing for research for the
physical sciences over the next decade.

But to meet bottom-line spending targets demanded by Mr. Bush, Congress
rolled back the planned increases for the Energy Department and other
science agencies. Fermilab?s budget fell, because the spending bill
specifically dictates large cuts to the International Linear Collider
and the NOvA projects.

Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of Fermilab, said the laboratory had
expected to receive $47 million for the collider project, employing
about 170 scientists, engineers and technicians. With the final spending
bill, that amount was reduced to $15 million. ?The money is kind of
already spent,? Dr. Kim said.

About $36 million had been allocated for NOvA with about 80 Fermilab
people working on that project.
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