Congress to the rescue for Fermi jobs

What the U.S. Congress taketh, it can giveth back.

The Senate passed a wartime supplemental appropriations bill late Thursday that is expected to be signed by President George Bush next week and save nearly 100 jobs at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Because of funding cuts in the 2008 federal budget, Fermi had scheduled 90 involuntary layoffs to begin next week, said spokeswoman Judy Jackson. Another 70 scientists and other personnel were allowed to volunteer for layoffs but had to state by today if they wanted to rescind the decision.

Now, neither the voluntary nor involuntary layoffs will be required, Jackson said.

"Not only do we avoid layoffs, but we can pick up projects that came to a screeching halt when we heard about the (2008) budget in December," Jackson said.

The 2008 fiscal budget fell $52 million short of Fermilab's budget, so the agency made plans to cut as many as 200 positions.

Among other things, it stopped construction of the NOvA project, which would send a high-intensity neutrino beam to a detector in northern Minnesota to test theories of matter and antimatter.

The bill, passed this week by a 62-6 margin in the Senate, provides the Department of Energy's Office of Science $62.5 million, much of that going to Batavia-based Fermilab and Lemont-based Argonne National Laboratory.

Jackson said she expects "a substantial fraction" of the funding will go to Fermilab, but no exact amounts have been determined.

Restoring the funding on Capitol Hill had been a priority of the Illinois delegation, including U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin; Rep. Bill Foster, a Geneva Democrat; and Rep. Judy Biggert, a Hinsdale Republican.