There used to be a time when experimental particle physics in the United States had its heyday. The conclusion of the Manhattan Project and the Second World War saw an explosion in government funding for scientific research. Permanent national laboratories arose at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Argonne, Berkeley, and Brookhaven. The past years had seen an impressive catalog of Nobel Prize-winning discoveries done in the United States relating to highenergy physics.

Yet that dominance is slowly shifting elsewhere to other places, one of which is Europe. This potential "brain-drain" out of the U.S. has more to do with the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will be the most powerful accelerator in the world. All across the board, many areas of scientific research have been experiencing budget cuts. As reported by the R&D Budget and Policy Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), the future looks grim. As of November 16, 2005, Congress was still wrangling over a budget for the National Institutes of Health. The plan that was on the table would lead to a decline in the number of Research Project Grants for the second year in a row. And though the National Science Foundation (NSF) is receiving a budget increase of 2 percent from 2005, when inflation, among other issues, is taken into account, the NSF is left with less real money than it had in 2004. Finally, the funding for R&D in the Department of Energy for 2006 falls flat.

All of this taken into combination only worsens the outlook of high-energy physics in the United States. Just recently, the NSF canceled the last remaining particle physics project at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP) experiments. If the current trend continues, American physics students may soon be left with no access to a particle physics laboratory in the United States. In 2008, the B factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center will be closed, with the focus there shifting to the production of x-ray beams. And the famed Tevatron at Fermilab is due to shutdown in 2010. No further projects are scheduled.

With the intensifying hunt for the detection of "supersymmetric" particles and the Higgs boson, it seems that laboratories in the United States will be left out of the loop. Already, many physicists currently working with the Tevatron are planning to work at the LHC. Like the field of Information Technology (IT), particle physics is looking to be outsourced. Officials at the Department of Energy say that they're out of money, making it unlikely that the United States will be the host for the next planned major particle physics laboratory after the LHC, the International Linear Collider (ILC). Unless supersymmetry or the Higgs is discovered at Fermilab and public support increases, the era of active experimental high-energy physics research may be coming to an end in the United States.