Waiting for our budget
Cindy Conger, chief financial officer and head of the Finance Section, wrote this week's column.
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| Cindy Conger |
In about six weeks we will say goodbye to Fiscal Year 2010 and say hello to FY2011. Ideally, Congress will have passed all appropriations bills by Oct. 1, but that rarely happens. As in years past, we are expecting a continuing resolution that funds our laboratory at previous-year levels until Congress passes the energy and water appropriation, which funds the Department of Energy, and the president signs it.
The president's budget request, unveiled on the first Monday in February each year, is the beginning of the public portion of the federal funding process. The Congressional appropriations committees then deliberate upon the PBR and often modify its numbers on the way to the final appropriations bills.
The PBR is public information and is the result of budget recommendations made by the federal agencies, the Office of Management & Budget and the president. In this view of the PBR, one can see the budget request for all federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, by major program, including the DOE Office of Science.
So where is Fermilab's information? For that, you need two documents from the FY2011 DOE budget request to Congress. Volume 4 - Science, listed on the DOE website under detailed budget justifications, contains a section on the Office of High Energy Physics and gives information about what the president and the agency have planned for our primary funding office. The laboratory tables, under the section labeled "summary budget documents", have the specific requests for each laboratory and site, by DOE program office, including the summary request for Fermilab.
The numbers in those documents are this year's starting point; Congress now must agree on the final numbers and pass the energy and water appropriation before our laboratory gets its funding. Let's hope Congress moves expeditiously on our funding bill.
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