U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), stood on the podium in the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory auditorium in Batavia, Ill., Tuesday and said, "Fermi Lab is back." The cheers from the audience of researchers, engineers and other lab employees reflected the relief in the national scientific community over the supplemental appropriations bill passed last week by Congress and signed by President Bush on Monday. The bill, with its $338 million in non-military domestic science funding, will stop layoffs and keep some programs going at the national labs, although it doesn't come close to restoring the science money that was cut from the fiscal year 2008 appropriations late last year in a budget showdown between Congress and the administration.
"This is quite a day for the laboratory," Fermi director Pier Oddone told his employees. "We are celebrating the lifting of the very heavy yoke we have labored under the last six months."
The new money for FermiLab comes from $62.5 million the supplemental bill appropriated for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which runs the federal national science laboratories. FermiLab will get about $20 million to keep 80 employees who were scheduled to be laid off. Another $9.5 million will go to NOvA neutrino experiment.
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in Menlo Park, California, laid off 125 employees after the December budget cuts. SLAC will get $3.5 million from the new money, but it wasn't clear how that would be used.
A DOE spokesman said Thursday that about $15.5 million of the $62.5 million will keep in operation the U.S. portion of the International Thermonuclear Fusion Reactor (ITER). The December omnibus bill killed all of the $160 million the U.S. was supposed to contribute to ITER this year. While the $15.5 million obviously doesn't come close to making up that amount, it does allow the core ITER staff to stay together at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The supplemental bill also provides $62.5 million for the National Science Foundation, $62.5 million for NASA, and $150 million for the National Institutes of Health.
The attached package of reports from the American Institute of Physics bulletin of science policy news by veteran AIP federal policy expert Richard Jones provides details on how the supplemental bill worked its way through Congress.
Jim Dawson, editor, Inside Science News Service
jdawson@aip.org
1.Success: President Signs Bill Providing Additional Science Funding -- http://www.aip.org/fyi/2008/072.html
2.Getting Closer: House Approves Additional Science Funding -- http://www.aip.org/fyi/2008/068.html
