The U.S. Senate passed its version of a budget bill late last night, complete with all the deep cuts for high-energy physics and other scientific projects we wrote about yesterday. A few issues remain – the House hasn't yet added Iraq war funding – but the science issues are unlikely to change before final passage.
A few other media outlets are picking up on the effects on Fermilab, the United States' premier particle accelerator. According to the facility's director Pier Oddone, the lab may have to shut down for a month under the current funding plan, which he says (according to the Chicago Tribune, here) would create the biggest funding crisis in the lab's 40-year history.
Politicians – or at least those who are mentioning the science cutbacks – are blaming the war. Sen. Dick Durbin, who represents Fermilab's home state of Illinois, is quoted in the Tribune:
It's unclear what this means for the future of the International Linear
Collider, which is seeing its planned US funding quartered under the budget bill. Oddone has said in interviews that this budget makes it very unlikely that the project will wind up on American soil.
That would be a deep blow to the U.S. particle physics community, which has long been in the forefront of high-energy physics experimentation.
But seeing the project die on the vine altogether would be an even deeper blow. Here's hoping ILC development will continue, despite the diminishing funds
for the project here and in Britain.
Senate passes budget bill with Iraq money [Reuters]
Lab fiscal 'disaster' feared [Chicago Tribune]
A Budget Too Small [Science]
(Image: The central tracking chamber of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment. Credit: Fermilab)
