Last week, the NOvA collaboration held a vibrant meeting at Fermilab. The construction of NOvA is going well: Production and assembly rates are encouraging, leading us to believe that we will be able to complete the detector on budget and on schedule. This goal is important for the laboratory since we need to establish excellence in project management given the number of projects that are ahead of us. If we continue on track, NOvA will be the third project in a row that we have completed on budget and on schedule.

This was not the situation last fall when the contingency did not appear adequate to finish the job. The laboratory took many steps to up our game, control contingency and complete ongoing work well within expected cost parameters.

Before I talk about the laboratory budget, I want to express sympathy on behalf of our lab for the victims of yesterday's bombings and their families. Our thoughts are with them.

The President's Budget Request for FY2014 was unveiled last week. This is the first step in the annual federal budget cycle and gives us a good idea of what we can expect for next year's budget. The request contains essentially flat funding for our base scientific program, with a much-needed one-time allocation of funds for improvements to our utility systems. We have a momentous year ahead with the restart of our accelerator complex and the development and construction of many new projects. This budget, while constrained, allows us to make steady progress and improve the foundation for our future.

Perennial awareness is crucial to maintaining a safe environment. All of us can contribute to this state of mind. I try to do this in several ways, including writing about safety periodically in this column. Today I am pleased to be able to bring you good news on the safety front. The rate of recordable accidents has dropped by a factor of two from this point last year. Even more importantly, the rate of injuries that required either time away from work or restricted work is the lowest ever. If we maintain the same performance for the second part of the year, we will have a record low number of DARTS and TRCs for the year. Kudos to all of you for your efforts to keep yourselves and your colleagues safe. Keep up the fine performance!

Last week went by like a flash with two important reviews taking place at the laboratory. The first was a one-of-a-kind review organized by Fermilab on how we manage projects—those both under way and in the planning stages—and what we can do to improve our practices in the very complex environment in which we operate. For this review, we were fortunate to have participating some outstanding folks who are very successful managers of large projects within the DOE system. They brought a wealth of experience and provided valuable advice on where we should focus, which will help us to deliver projects successfully.

Last Thursday Congress passed the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, which funds the federal government for the rest of this fiscal year. For the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which funds Fermilab, the act essentially allocates the same budget as the 2012 fiscal year. Once sequestration is applied, the Office of Science will receive approximately 5 percent less than it did last year.

What does that mean for Fermilab? The Office of High Energy Physics has given us an estimate of our final budget for this fiscal year—approximately $368 million, 9 percent lower than last year. The reason we get a larger-than-average cut relative to the continuing resolution is that, under the President's budget request for FY13, we had already been cut to an expected $375 million.

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which advises the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, met in Maryland last week. The panel's two days of discussion covered many important topics, including the draft European Strategy and the report from the Facilities Subpanel charged by HEPAP to classify large high-energy physics facilities proposed to be built or upgraded over the next 10 years.

The European Strategy identifies long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments as one of the four high-priority global programs. The draft strategy encourages European scientists to explore collaborating with experiments in the United States and Japan. We hope that European groups' strong interest in liquid-argon time projection chamber technology will lead them to work with LBNE.

We are in the process of re-establishing a competitive world-class scientific program after the closure of the Tevatron. This means building several projects at once while at the same time operating the largest accelerator complex in the United States and carrying out physics research across all three frontiers of particle physics. We completed our recent projects MINERvA and DECam on schedule and under budget. Also, we are committed to finishing NOvA on schedule and on budget.

While we ultimately achieve the desired outcomes, we do so with much unnecessary drama, alarming us and more importantly our funders along the way, as happened recently with the NOvA construction.

The International Committee on Future Accelerators that I chair met at the TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver, Canada on February 21st and 22nd. ICFA meets twice a year, with the directors of all the world’s principal accelerator laboratories joining for the winter meeting. This particular meeting was very well attended because it marked a special occasion: the official joining of the International Linear Collider and Compact Linear Collider efforts into the new Linear Collider Board. All senior leaders in the new Linear Collider organization have been appointed and will guide continuing work on the two projects over the next few years.

The ICFA meeting also celebrated another major linear collider milestone: the completion of the technical design report (TDR) for the ILC.

Sequestration has been all over the news in recent weeks. Automatic cuts to federal government spending will take effect on Friday if Congress does not take action before then. The cuts have the potential to do much harm across all sectors of our society, from fire protection to air traffic control and from preschools to scientific research.

Like many of you, I am very concerned about the effect these cuts will have on our laboratory. I wish that I were able to detail exactly what will happen at Fermilab; however, as the federal government is operating under a temporary budget that expires on March 27, it is not clear to what budget the cuts will be applied. That leaves a situation so murky that no one is able to say for certain what our lab's budget will be for the rest of this year.

Last week, the FRA Board of Directors met at Fermilab. The FRA Board is the highest authority in FRA and is responsible for delivering on Fermilab's contract with DOE. It appoints the laboratory director and oversees the laboratory in its operations, strategic planning and the relations with its many stakeholders. Board committees delve deeper into their respective areas of expertise, including ES&H, audit, administration and finance, compensation, physics and science planning. The board also convenes additional external review committees that focus on specific areas, including the lab's scientific programs and the implementation of our contractor assurance system.

The meetings of the board are always interesting and useful. Last week's meeting included discussions of two important and timely issues.

Last week our Accelerator Advisory Committee conducted a three-day review of Fermilab's accelerator program. The committee recognized the tremendous progress we have made since last year's review and provided valuable feedback on our future projects. We are fortunate to have an outstanding committee that brings together the expertise of many laboratories and universities to provide input on our extensive program. Below is a brief survey of many of the projects currently under way.

The Advanced Superconducting Test Accelerator (ASTA) is a proposed accelerator R&D facility that will be important for the development of future high-energy and high-intensity machines. ASTA's SRF linac and small associated ring would put to immediate use the considerable investment made in ILC components and SRF development at Fermilab.

Last week the first draft of the updated European Strategy for Particle Physics was made public. This document, which remains a draft until reviewed and approved by the CERN Council in May, guides our European colleagues in their exploration and development of the field of particle physics. It is an update of the very first European strategy, originally developed in 2006.

The update process, led by the European Strategy Group, has been long and inclusive. The group includes representatives of all of the CERN member countries and participation from countries with other types of formal agreements to CERN—including the United States—and the rest of the international particle physics community. Over the past year and a half, the group has solicited many discussion papers. It also held a community workshop that brought together 500 physicists to seek input and discuss the many issues and opportunities ahead for particle physics. U.S. and Fermilab physicists contributed to both efforts. A Preparatory Group worked hard to summarize the current state of our field and future opportunities in its briefing book, used by the Strategy Group to draft the updated strategy.

The annual meeting of the Council of Presidents of the Universities Research Association took place last Wednesday in Washington, D.C. URA and the University of Chicago partner to form the Fermi Research Alliance, which operates our laboratory for the Department of Energy.

The annual meeting, which attracts top-level representatives from each of URA's 86 member universities, serves as a business meeting for the association and a forum for discussion of science policy and of the role of particle physics research in the United States. Invited speakers at the URA meeting included Office of Science Director Bill Brinkman, who spoke of his strong support for LBNE; our Congressional representative Randy Hultgren, who communicated his strong support for science research in the national agenda; Congressman Bill Foster, who represents the 11th Congressional district that includes Argonne National Laboratory and who demonstrated his command of particle physics; and NASA's John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate, who presented the vast NASA science program.

This week the European Strategy Group meets in Erice, Italy, to formulate an updated European strategy for particle physics. The last European strategy document was summarized in two pages back in 2006 and established the physics goals of the European program and the R&D necessary for future machines. Since then much has changed.

The LHC has come into its own with outstanding performance and a huge discovery under its belt. It is clearly the machine that will dominate the Energy Frontier for the next two decades. The discovery of what we expect to be the Higgs boson is a triumph for particle physics and gives us a totally new particle to study: the first fundamental particle without spin.

Leadership at the Intensity Frontier of particle physics doesn't just mean more particles for our experiments, it also means more projects for our laboratory. Because each individual Intensity Frontier experiment only tells part of the scientific story, a suite of experiments is needed to fully explore the landscape of new physics. For us to succeed as a laboratory in this new era we must become very good at managing and delivering projects on budget and on schedule. Any one project that does not deliver on its goals can affect adversely our ability to obtain additional projects.

We completed our last two projects, MINERvA and DECam, on budget and on schedule, fully meeting or exceeding their technical specifications. The much larger NOvA project is now nearing completion. From a technical standpoint, NOvA is progressing extremely well.

This year should be an exciting one for the laboratory and for particle physics. At Fermilab, we will have new data as our accelerators turn back on at higher power. NOvA will see its first particles, the Dark Energy Survey will begin and many of our new projects—IARC, LBNE and Muon g-2, among others—will take big steps forward over the next 12 months.

Of course, building and operating projects require funding, and the federal government continues to struggle with two major interrelated issues that affect us: sequestration and this year's federal budget. The new year brought a much-publicized agreement by Republicans and Democrats that avoided raising taxes on the vast majority of taxpayers but also simply postponed by two months the deadline for sequestration, which would result in cuts to current budgets.