A federal supplemental appropriations bill signed into law to fund the Iraq war in late June included enough extra money for the Department of Energy to avert the layoff of 90 Fermilab employees and keep alive a neutrino experiment there. But the extra money was a fraction of the $300 million science lobbyists had been pushing for to restore to DOE’s physics program.
Jeffrey Kupfer, DOE acting deputy secretary, told Fermilab employees that the department had allocated 60% of the $62.5 million it received in supplemental appropriations to shore up programs at Fermilab and at nearby Argonne National Laboratory, where a $7.5 million infusion is staving off staff reductions at the Advanced Photon Source. In January Fermilab announced it would have to shed 200 jobs (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 61 7 2008 24 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2963003 July 2008, page 24 ). By June, 60 staff members had left or...