FY2009 Budget Roll-Out
Steve Kahn
PPA Director
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Purpose of Meeting
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Persis established a tradition of holding “budget roll-out” meetings to mark
the official start of the budget planning process for the coming fiscal year.
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I have maintained that tradition, because it gives us a chance to have an
open discussion of the opportunities and challenges we face as we try to
tailor our programs to our funding constraints.
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This particular meeting will give you a chance to meet and interact with the
new head of our PPA budget planning office, Rafael Alva, who joined us
earlier this month.
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This meeting is occurring later in the year than it has in the past. This is
partly due to the uncertainty at DOE in establishing our budget, and partly
due to our desire to wait until Rafael arrived, so that he could get fully
engaged in the process.
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Charlotte and Rafael will show you the statistics slides. I will dispense with
that and move directly to comments on the programs and the budget.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Milestones for Major Programs
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PEP-II/BaBar
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As you know, we had to terminate the B-factory operations early in April of this year, due to
the severe budget hit that came out of the omnibus bill. Nevertheless, the program ran
flawlessly, with higher than expected luminosity for the 3+ months of running.
The physics analysis efforts have also been extremely impressive, leading to the very quick
discovery of the B, among other results.
FY09 and FY10 will be devoted to the “intense analysis phase”. We are fully committed to
enabling this activity in support of the planned analyses. Beyond FY10, there has been
discussion of an archival analysis phase, but the details still need to be worked out.
BaBar D&D has begun in earnest and will become a significant activity in FY09.
FGST
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Launch finally occurred in June, leading to a very successful LEO phase of the program.
The LAT is performing flawlessly.
ISOC has also been extremely impressive, maintaining and exceeding its planned turnaround rates for turning telemetry bits into science.
Support of operations and science on FGST will remain the highest priority for the particle
astrophysics program at SLAC.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Milestones for Major Programs (Cont’d)
* ILC
– As you know, the ILC program was officially terminated in FY08, but has been
reinstated in FY09 under the rubric of “accelerator r&d”.
– SLAC remains committed to its participation in this program under the guidance
of the GDE.
– The future of the ILC, however, remains very uncertain, and I suspect there may
be some redirection of accelerator r&d efforts generally, coming from OHEP. We
will have to monitor this situation carefully.
* ATLAS
– We are trying to grow the ATLAS effort to become the major program in
accelerator-based particle physics at SLAC. Significant growth is planned for
Phase 1 commissioning and analysis, participation in the ATLAS upgrade efforts,
and expansion of ATLAS computing at SLAC.
– However, DOE OHEP has not given us blanket approval to redirect personnel
onto this program. We need to justify our expansion in the context of overall
planning for US ATLAS and the ATLAS consortium as a whole.
– We submitted a “white paper” detailing our proposed future ATLAS efforts at the
end of September. Discussions with DOE and US ATLAS have been ongoing.
This situation is still in flux and it is unclear how it will play out.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Milestones for Major Programs (Cont’d)
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LSST
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EXO
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LSST is still in an R&D phase. It was strongly endorsed by P5, so our expectation is that
DOE OHEP will support this program if and when NSF moves ahead as the lead agency.
However, the process has been stalled to some degree by the “decadal survey process” in
astronomy and astrophysics, which has only just started. NSF has indicated that they cannot
seek formal approval for LSST until and unless it is given high priority by the new decadal
survey committee (chaired by RB).
Nevertheless, we are on track for Preliminary Design Review in mid to late Spring 2009. The
Conceptual Design Review, held in Sept 2007, was very successful.
EXO-200 will be delivered to WIPP in January.
The experiment is transitioning into operations.
Planning is underway for expansion into “full EXO”, presumably in connection with DUSEL,
but the timescale for this opportunity is still very uncertain.
High Gradient Program
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The collaboration is still functioning well with strong ties to Europe and Japan.
We have been looking to expand this program significantly to include the development of
new sources of high power X-band rf.
The goal is to develop a credible, potentially lower cost alternative to the ILC technology for a
TeV-scale collider. P5 was supportive, and there is receptiveness at DOE, but the future of
this program is still unclear.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Milestones for Major Programs (Cont’d)
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JDEM
– The JDEM program was recently significantly revamped. There will no longer be
a “competition” between competing concepts. A “science coordinating group”
has been formed to flesh out the requirements for a single concept, and then
NASA will develop that concept.
– DOE will participate through a commitment to design, build, and deliver a specific
component of that payload, scoped roughly at the level of $200M. DOE has
established a project office at LBNL to oversee this activity.
– It is still likely that SLAC will have a major role in electronics for the the DOE
contributed subsystem. Other technical roles remain to be worked out.
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FACET
– A specific proposal for FACET has been developed over the past year, and has
been reviewed by DOE in competition with the BELLA proposal from LBNL.
– The emphasis has been steered to the development of the beam-driven plasma
wakefield concept, leading to its applications toward a TeV-scale e+e- collider.
– We are still awaiting the official outcome of that review. If positive, construction
could start in FY09, although that will require additional funding.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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FY09 Budget Guidance
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The news is actually not bad. Our budget guidance is at the level of $87.2M, which,
given that we no longer need to cover linac operations, can support most of our
planned ongoing programs.
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We also have some significant carry over funding from FY08, much of it coming from
the supplemental bill, which was passed later in the fiscal year.
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On the other hand, the lab’s over head rate has increased from 42% to 45%
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This will decrease the spendable/direct funding.
However, there are significant challenges:
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The Lab is transitioning from a “stewardship model”, to one more closely approaching “full
cost accounting”. This means that many centralized services will no longer be subsidized by
the linac ops budget. The impact on PPA is still to be determined, but it is likely that our
basic operating costs will increase.
We are still in CR through March. It is very unclear how that will play out (more on next
slide).
DOE OHEP has changed its way of doing business, and has moved to a “program-based”
funding approach, as opposed to an “institution-based” funding approach. This means we
have less flexibility to move money between B&R codes. We still do not have agreement
with OHEP in the allocation of our FY09 between these codes.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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CR Uncertainties
* The official CR goes through March.
– At this point, we have only received 5/12 of our funding in our contract .
* However, given the change of administration, it is very likely that it
will be extended, perhaps for the entire year.
* On paper, an extended CR doesn’t really hurt us badly, because our
budget was dropping from FY08 anyway. However, it could cause
havoc for the rest of DOE-OS, and for OHEP, specifically. If that
occurs, it is very likely we will see further readjustment, with a cut in
our budget to help address shortfalls elsewhere.
* We are especially vulnerable, because our program is not strongly
“anchored” by running experiments. It is much easier to cut R&D
programs than operating programs.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Bottom Line
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We need to be very cautious how we structure our expenses over the next few
months, until we get a better idea of how the budget will evolve.
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The explicit guidance is to spend at 5/12 of the allocated IFP. I want to throttle us
down below that rate while we are in CR, to protect against possible disaster
scenarios emerging later.
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This means we will take a very conservative approach toward discretionary
expenses: travel, M&S, new hires, visitors, etc.
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We will look at all aspects of HEP-funded work at SLAC in making tough decisions. A
reasonable fraction of our funding still goes outside the directorate. We will evaluate
the effectiveness and priority of those efforts as well.
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As much as possible, we will try to engage the department heads in helping us to
optimize the program. In tough times, it is important that we all try to understand the
programmatic needs of all of our programs. It is fine to submit “wish lists”, but you
should recognize the funding constraints we are under in considering your real needs.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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Funding Priorities
* Despite our desire to get some new programs going, our priorities
will have to remain similar to what they were last year - operations,
projects, R&D:
– BaBar Intense Analysis and BaBar D&D.
– FGST. Highest priority is for operations, but exploiting the science
opportunity is clearly important.
– ATLAS. We want and need to make ATLAS work, as a key element of
our future program.
– Accelerator R&D. This will become better defined in the coming year,
but electron accelerator r&d is the key core competency at SLAC and
must be maintained.
– LSST, EXO, JDEM, FACET. These are the future initiatives in various
stages of development. We have invested heavily in them already.
– New(er) initatives. There are a lot of ideas out there (some good). We
do not want to stifle creativity. We will do what we can within the
confines of our budget constraints. The newly inaugurated LDRD
program provides a vehicle for supporting fledgling efforts of this kind.
PPA Budget Roll-Out Meeting
October 22, 2008
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