[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9796-9797]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 RECOGNIZING 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF FERMI NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY

  (Mr. FOSTER asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Fermi National 
Accelerator Laboratory, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last 
week.
  Built on the prairies of Illinois, under the leadership of its first 
director, Robert Wilson, this national lab performs cutting-edge 
research in physics to help us understand the fundamental properties of 
matter. It is also where I spent most of my career as a high energy 
particle physicist before I ran for Congress.
  The discoveries made in Fermilab's first 50 years will remain in the 
science textbooks forever. Experiments at Fermilab discovered three of 
the fundamental components of matter: the bottom quark, the neutrino 
tau, and the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter.

[[Page 9797]]

  Unfortunately, the Republican budget proposal of the Trump 
administration threatens the legacy of Fermilab and national labs and 
scientific facilities throughout the country.
  Mr. Speaker, scientific research is not like highway building that 
can turn on and off in any given fiscal year. Scientific teams and 
facilities that take generations to build can be wiped out in a single 
budget cycle by having their funding cut.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I call upon you and your colleagues to show us a 
budget that will maintain our country's leadership in science and 
technology, because destroying our scientific facilities is no way to 
make America great again.

                          ____________________