APS News

June 2013 (Volume 22, Number 6)

Meetings Impacted as Travel Cuts Take Effect

By Michael Lucibella

Scientific conferences have started to feel the effects of efforts by the US federal government to curtail spending on travel. Scientists have widely criticized the move to limit their ability to travel, and some conferences have been especially severely affected.

“I don’t believe the administration understands what a science meeting really is,” said Stephen Mackwell, an adjunct professor at Rice University and director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. “It’s not a boondoggle, it’s the life blood of the scientific community.”

Conferences have been hit with a double whammy over the last 12 months. In May of last year, the federal government adopted new travel restrictions for its employees following the General Services Administration scandal (see the report in the August/September 2012 APS News, available online). Following that, “sequestration” took effect on March 1 of this year, taking another slice out of scientists’ travel budgets.

Different federal agencies have adopted different travel review policies. In the Department of Energy, if DOE scientists collectively request spending of more than $100,000 on travel to one meeting, the deputy secretary has to sign off on it. If they request  more than $500,000, the secretary has to sign off. In the Department of Defense, travel needs to be authorized by the relevant branch’s Chief of Staff.

The travel restrictions have had different effects on different meetings. Astronomy-related conferences have been particularly hard hit. The Eighth International Conference on Mars, scheduled for July at Caltech, was postponed for a year. For this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, only a hundred of the usual 170 civil servants were authorized to attend, resulting in the cancellation of several events featuring high-ranking officials from NASA headquarters.

“They decided not to come so their slots could be filled by the scientists who needed to come to the meeting,” said Mackwell, who organized the conference. “This is a community that is powered by conversations and discussions… So much of what goes on at these science meetings is not what goes on during the sessions.”

This year’s meeting of the APS Topical Group on Shock Compression of Condensed Matter, scheduled for early July in Seattle, looks like it will be affected because of the large number of national laboratory scientists who usually attend. David Moore, a researcher at Los Alamos and organizer of the meeting, said that the Department of Energy authorized only just over half of scientists who submitted requests.

“Even if the DOE agrees with the latest submittal…the impact of cutting from 227 to 155 isn’t devastating for the conference, but it does hurt,” Moore said. “At the moment, my information is that none of the 30 DOD attendees who wanted to come to the meeting will get to go.”

Moore added that the Shock meeting will still likely reach the minimum number needed to break even because it is being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the International Association for the Advancement of High Pressure Science and Technology, which takes place in the United States only once every 20 years. However, as many as one third to one half of the session chairs may have to be reassigned.

Organizers of this year’s APS March Meeting in Baltimore and April Meeting in Denver said they didn’t see any obvious drop in attendance resulting from these restrictions. The March Meeting was down about 600 people from last year, but the most likely explanation is that the 2012 meeting in Boston was unusually well attended.

Last fall’s Division of Nuclear Physics meeting in Newport Beach, California was one of the first held after the imposition of the new travel restrictions, and before the onset of sequestration.

“We didn’t get approval for lab scientists to travel to that meeting until two weeks before the meeting,” said Robert McKeown, a researcher at Jefferson Lab and organizer of the conference. “I think the system at DOE is working much better now.”

He added that he didn’t think there would be a big change in this year’s attendance rates for his meeting. Speaking more broadly, he said that who is going to the meetings can be as important as how many.

“The largest effect that I worry about is on young people whose careers are dependent on showing their work at conferences and networking and meeting people,” McKeown said. “Certainly the people at the beginning of their careers will be the most affected.”

McKeown said also that approval delays meant that scientists would miss out cheaper airfare and early registration, ultimately costing the departments more money.

“There has been some study of that and people have established that there are extra costs with the new procedures in place,” McKeown said.

In an interview published in the May issue of APS News, the outgoing Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, William Brinkman, said he didn’t think the restrictions were saving the department money.

“I think we’re spending more on the bureaucracy than the savings we might accumulate from restricting conference attendance,” Brinkman said.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the federal agencies have saved about $2 billion in total over the last two fiscal years.

The Department of Energy declined to comment.

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Staff Science Writer: Michael Lucibella

June 2013 (Volume 22, Number 6)

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Articles in this Issue
APS Award Recipient Runs Boston Marathon; Finishes Shortly Before Tragedy Strikes
APS Members Are Asked to Comment On Updated Education Statement
Dark Matter Comes and Goes at April Meeting
Physicists Ready to Add Their BRAIN Power
Meetings Impacted as Travel Cuts Take Effect
Chip-scale Accelerators Verge on Breakthrough
Supernova Data Hide in Ancient Bacterial Remains
Still Time to Vote in APS Society-wide Election
Letters to the Editor
The Back Page
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Washington Dispatch
International News
APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists
Education Corner