True Lab Stories: Strangest Group Meeting Ever

This isn’t the usual story about lab mishaps, but I’m not quite sure what other category to put it in. It is a true story about my lab in grad school, though, so we’ll call it a True Lab Story.

The mid-90’s was not a great time to be working in a government lab, particularly NIST. I mean, it was better than being out on the street, but funding was kind of tight, and the “Contract With America” Republicans of ’94 were making noises about massive spending cuts, and threatening to eliminate the Department of Commerce altogether (mostly because they hated Ron Brown, the first Secretary of Commerce under Clinton…).

Everybody knows that the budget squabbles between the President and Congress shut the government down completely for a few weeks in late 1995 and early 1996. Less well known is that fact that in one of those years, we actually had a recission– they cut NIST’s budget in the middle of the fiscal year, so we effectively had to give money back. The Physics Laboratory brass were terrific people, and did their best to shield the research groups from the worst of the funding cuts, but it was a rough time, and we had a lot of meetings about belt-tightening and spending restraint.

(We still had a better budget than many academic groups, but money was tighter than usual.)

Then, in 1997, my boss won a share of the Nobel Prize, which led to the two strangest group meetings I’ve ever experienced, described below the fold…

In addition to some cold, hard cash, the Nobel Prize carries a lot of prestige, not only for the individual laureates, but also for the institution at which they work. When Bill won the Prize, that was a huge boost for NIST, and a lot of thigns opened up.

One of the immediate changes was the addition of a large sum of money to the base operating budget of the group– Bill joked once that winning the Nobel had allowed him to realize his dream: “stable funding.” Of course, because the Federal government runs on an offset calendar, there were only a few months left in the fiscal year when the money was found , so they offered to give the group some fraction of the permanent increase that year.

Knowing that you always need to aim high when asking for government funding, they asked for something like a million dollars. And got it right away (should’ve asked for more…). Of course, the second rule of government funding is that when you get money, you need to spend it all, or you’ll get less next time, which led to the strangest meeting ever: The permanent staff called the entire group together– post-docs, visitors, lowly grad students– and said “Look, we’ve just been given a million dollars, and we have three months to spend it. We’re not sure how we’re going to do that, so if there’s anything expensive you’ve had your eye on, buy it now.”

The second strangest meeting ever was about a month later, when they called us all together a second time, and said “OK, we’re in the red. Stop buying stuff.”

The lesson here is simple: never dare an experimental physicist to spend money.

(I was reminded of this last week when I wrote about poker-playing theorists, and I’ll probably use this as a jumping-off place to talk about the amount of money involved in even small-scale physics research. That will wait until tomorrow, though.)