DOE science chief laments budget cuts

The budget sequestration that took effect on 1 March is impacting a broad range of the Department of Energy’s basic science programs, and comes just as other nations are seriously challenging US leadership in science, according to William Brinkman , director of DOE’s Office of Science. Sequestration has forced the cancellation of research grants for next-generation supercomputers, delayed research funding to universities, and put on hold the research projects of as many as 60 computer science graduate students.

The sequestration will significantly delay upgrade of the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS II) at SLAC, and will slow the construction and substantially increase the cost of the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Brinkman told a subpanel of the House Committee on Appropriations on 5 March. The LCLS II was to enter the construction phase in 2013, but the stopgap funding measure under which the government has been operating since the beginning of the fiscal year in October does not allow for new starts, Brinkman explained.

All told, the sequestration slices $215 million off the $4.9 billion Office of Science budget, Brinkman said. It will curtail running time at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and terminate planned experiments with polarized protons. Fermilab and Jefferson Lab must also reduce their experimental time, and a slowdown in procurements will delay the 12 GeV Upgrade Project on Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility.

With more than 25 000 scientists making use of facilities funded by the Office of Science, the reductions will impact both university and private sector research, Brinkman said, adding that the extent of that harm is difficult to quantify.

The reductions to DOE’s basic science activities come just as international competition for leadership in science is intensifying, Brinkman warned. In particular, US leadership in high-performance computing is threatened by the European Union, China, and Japan, all of which have set goals to be the first to achieve exascale-level computing—a 1000-fold improvement in current computing capabilities. US leadership in light sources is being challenged as well: a total of four free electron laser user facilities comparable to the now one-of-a-kind LCLS are under construction in Europe and South Korea. Delay of the LCLS II project “could blunt our competitive edge in this area,” he said.

A likely reduction in the US contribution to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would jeopardize DOE’s ability to deliver on schedule the components it is building for the multilateral fusion research facility in France.

In the biological and environmental research area, projects in low-dose radiation, biofuel feedstock, and carbon cycle research will be slowed. Three funding opportunity announcements, which could have supported 25 grants, are being cancelled.