CERN's budget has not really had a budget cut or a need to justify its budget. Nor does it have extra money flowing, mind you. It's also really cheap for member states all things considered, I think as a french citizen I "pay" 5 euros per year or something like that for CERN ?
I’m just being glib. As an American I admire the EU’s commitment towards funding scientific endeavors. I still lament that our government abandoned the Superconducting Supercollider in the early 90’s to save money… right around the time our economy was about to boom.
The SSC was an utterly failed project, and would have had difficulty finding the things that the LHC has found, partially because it had really bad Luminosity of the beam.
The program was famously badly run, with talented physicists utterly refusing to work with the administrators to keep a ballooning budget under control, and was an example of utterly failed project management. It used a magnet design that had numerous problems, including really severe project management oversights, like deciding to update the magnet design, and accidentally forgetting to update a significant portion of the magnets.
Killing the SSC was the correct call. It was going to cost over $12 billion just to build. The LHC eventually cost about $5 billion, and had much more success in the world of project management.
It's a lot easier to get science funding when you can demonstrate that you can manage a several billion dollar project, and don't fuck up basic things like accounting.
If I'm being entirely fair here, we're not exactly super good at funding research compared to the growing cost of pensions and healthcare in France, but for some reason I don't know - but am very glad of - neither CERN nor ESA has even been a subject matter politically money wise, not even to defend their funding, it's just a "duh".
If they can keep up this gold generation every year, you'll only need to pay 4.999999997 euros! (assuming all the proceeds specifically go towards your contribution)
