At a time of looming recession, soaring federal budget deficits and a wave of home foreclosures, probably the last group we need to feel sorry for (on economic grounds) is high-energy physicists. But think again.

Last August President Bush signed, with great fanfare, the “America Competes Act”. Among other provisions, the law “supported” (a key word we will return to) doubling federal support for basic research in the physical sciences, and made bold promises about improving math and science education so the U.S. could hold its own against the growing sci/tech juggernaut from Chins and India. That was then.

The actual federal budget (the omnibus spending bill, HR 2764) adopted in the waning days of 2007 has put high-energy physics, the most basic of the sciences, into “a death spiral,” as physicist Robert Park of the University of Maryland puts it in his newsletter (first item). Basic research at the National Science Foundation will fall some $300 million short of what President Bush proposed last February, and by even more compared to what Congress approved in the fall before budget-cutting took hold. The National Institute of Standards and Technology will fall $59 million below what Bush and Congress had agreed to. Although Congress and Bush "supported" science, things like wars had a greater priority.

I’m not asking you to cry for a shortfall in government spending on science, even though basic research has repeatedly been shown to be the most powerful engine of economic growth. (Of course corporate America engages in R&D, but it doesn’t take the risks on cutting-edge research that scientists in academe and at government labs do.) The point is that loads of young people who were naïve enough to heed their nation’s call to choose a career in science are being hung out to dry. As Park notes, “Fermilab faces major layoffs, the neutrino oscillation experiment . . . expected to be the lab’s principle activity after the Tevatron shuts down, is terminated.  Three quarters of the funding for the International Linear Collider is cut. . . . DOE will pull the plug on the PEP-II collider at SLAC on March 1, seven months ahead of schedule, resulting in the layoff of 125 employees. To keep the Tevatron at Fermilab going in the search for the Higgs, all employees will take 2 or 3 days a month of unpaid leave.”

Young people who choose a career in basic physics have more than enough brainpower and drive to excel as lawyers, investment bankers or hedge fundies. (Indeed, some of the leading lights in all three are refugees from math and physics; chief among them, James Simons of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies Corp.)

They instead enlisted in the search for the Higgs boson or string theory in part because they loved it—again, we don’t need to shed tears for these guys—but also because they believed the propaganda about America’s need for scientists, mathematicians and engineers. If the country decides that we really don’t care that much about science, then can government and corporate leaders at least stop calling on the nation’s best and brightest to become scientists?